Coyote's Kiss E-Book

Christa Faust

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 387

Beschreibung

A truck full of illegal Mexican immigrants slaughtered with supernatural force is found by the side of a road. Trying to find answers, Sam and Dean are plunged into the dangerous world that exists along the Mexican border. They encounter a tattooed, pistol-packing bandita on a motorcycle who seems be everywhere they go before they get there. Xochi Cazadora draws them into a whole new world of monsters... A Supernatural novel that reveals a previously unseen adventure for the Winchester brothers, from the hit TV series!

Leseprobe

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SUPERNATURAL

COYOTE’S KISS

CHRISTA FAUST

SUPERNATURAL created by Eric Kripke

TITAN BOOKS

Supernatural: Coyote’s Kiss

ISBN: 9780857685438

Published by

Titan Books

A division of

Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark St

London

SE1 0UP

First edition July 2011

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

SUPERNATURAL™ & © 2011 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. Cover imagery: Front cover image courtesy of Warner Bros.; Sun’s Stone © Romantsova Olga.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States.

HISTORIAN’S NOTE

This novel takes place during season six, between “Caged Heat” and “Appointment in Samara.”

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

ONE

Letty was almost positive that the beautiful woman hadn’t been part of their group when they left the Sonoran town of Altar, heading for the U.S. border. But as exhausted, dehydrated, and sleep deprived as she was, it was difficult to be sure.

Crammed into the first of several filthy, claustrophobic vans, nineteen-year-old Letty had felt self-conscious and anxious. She was one of only three females in a group composed primarily of rough, posturing men. A skinny, awkward girl that boys barely noticed back home in Tláhuac. But they noticed her now, and some of the men made crude comments about her, encouraging each other to pinch her meager breasts.

It had got worse after Marta, the only person who had been nice to her, had been bitten by a snake and had to be left behind. Marta tried to make Letty take her water, since she knew she was dying and didn’t want it to be wasted, but Letty couldn’t bring herself to leave the older woman with nothing. Now, in the unrelenting heat with the heartless sun burning her scalp and blurring her vision, Letty wished she’d taken the water after all. Maybe if she had, she wouldn’t be imagining things. Like the beautiful woman.

They’d made it over the border just before dawn and were hunkered down, waiting for nightfall. At which time another vehicle was supposed to pick them up and take them the rest of the way to the safe house in Phoenix. Their Coyote, a nickname given to border-crossing guides by the migrants they smuggled into the States, had left them. The spot where he told them to wait was nothing but a cluster of thorny brush and jagged rock. Barely enough shade to shelter a single person, let alone a large group. The Coyote himself had been picked up by another smuggler on an all-terrain vehicle (ATV), leaving behind a single two-liter bottle of warm, gritty water and dire warnings to stay hidden and listen for helicopters.

As morning became midday, the killing heat started picking them off one by one, like a lazy sniper. One of the young men who’d grabbed Letty’s breasts was now unconscious, slumped like a drunkard and barely breathing. He’d stopped sweating. A young woman whose name Letty had never learned was already dead. The flies had found her. The water was long gone.

But the beautiful woman didn’t seem phased by the heat at all. She sat in the sand with her legs crossed and the hood of her black sweatshirt up, shading her eyes. Her supple lips were not cracked and parched. Her smooth, pale skin was clean and untouched by sunburn. She didn’t have a backpack. She didn’t speak. She just watched the sun travel across the sky. No one seemed to notice her but Letty.

The unconscious man was dead by the time the promised vehicle arrived, a weary old cube truck with bald tires that did not look up to the task of navigating the rough, unpaved road. Two other men were barely alive and had to be dragged into the truck by their friends. Letty was so thirsty and so exhausted that she could barely stand, but she managed. She wasn’t about to give up now. The beautiful woman was close behind her as she staggered to the rear bumper of the truck and climbed inside. It smelled like urine and human misery. The Coyote pulled down the roll door and padlocked it with a heavy chain. The engine rumbled and coughed, filling the airless space with the stench of exhaust.

Letty sat on her backpack and concentrated on not throwing up. She couldn’t spare the water. That’s when she realized the beautiful woman was now sitting right beside her. The woman had pushed back her hood and her wild curly hair brushed Letty’s cheek, smelling like woodsmoke and copal.

“My name is Letty,” she whispered in Spanish to the beautiful woman, just to distract herself from the churning nausea.

It was too dark inside the truck to see the woman’s expression or if she was even listening at all. If she was, she didn’t reply.

“I’m going to Los Angeles to work in my cousin’s poultry shop,” Letty continued, nervous and talking too fast. “Plucking chickens. My brother thinks this is funny, because he calls me Chicken Neck. Ever since we were kids. Because I’m skinny, you know, like a chicken’s neck. He won’t think it’s so funny when he sees how much money I’ll be sending our grandmother. And soon, I’ll have enough money to bring her and my daughter to live with me. My daughter’s name is Marisol. She’s three.”

Even though it was too dark to see, Letty was suddenly certain that the woman was looking right at her, listening intently.

“Shut up,” one of the men hissed, digging an elbow into Letty’s ribs. “You sound just like a chicken.”

Letty shut up. Time passed. She could feel herself dozing, half dreaming of swimming naked through cool water.

Then Letty heard something that yanked her back into reality. Another engine. The crunch of tires. Another vehicle was approaching. There were a few short pulses of a siren and an incomprehensible foreign voice barked through a megaphone. A flash of desperate panic burned through the cramped and airless space and swiftly dissipated, leaving behind an apathetic kind of resignation. They were locked in. Nowhere to run. It was over. They were caught.

Letty was not proud of what she’d done to pay off the Coyote, and she knew in her heart that she could never put herself through that kind of hell again. This was her one and only chance to make it to the United States, to make a better life for her daughter. To make sure that Marisol would never have to do the kinds of things her mother had been forced to do. Now it was all falling apart. Her one chance, slipping through her fingers.

The truck slowed, then stopped. Without realizing she was doing it, Letty reached out and grasped the beautiful woman’s arm. At least that’s what she thought she had done. But what her fingers found didn’t feel anything like a woman’s skin. It felt first like the dirty, brittle hair clinging to a week-old roadkill dog and then more like the cold, chitinous plates of a scorpion’s tail. Then flesh again, human flesh burning with a fatal fever and squirming with movement like busy maggots wriggling just beneath the skin.

There was a strange sound. An unnatural growl so deep it was more felt than heard, rumbling beneath a wet crunching like fresh bones being cracked for marrow. Letty yanked her hand away, letting out a small, airless scream. Her head was spinning with vertigo, as if the beautiful woman were a deep hole and Letty were falling into her. Falling, or drowning. The smell of copal smoke sharpened in the airless space and that’s when the thing that used to be a beautiful woman leapt at Letty, not a hole anymore but real, all teeth and terrible, howling rage.

TWO

Supervisory Border Patrol Agent Marco Salazar watched the smuggler’s truck approaching through night vision binoculars. Behind the wheel was a luckless Coyote named Fernando “Ojon” Ruiz Hierra. Ojon got his nickname because of his large bulging eyes, but it had become a joke around the station that Ojon couldn’t see a 747 flying an inch from his nose. He was a loser, plain and simple, notorious for letting his charges die from dehydration before they even hit the border. But he was cheap, and there was no shortage of desperate migrants willing to take that risk in hopes of making it through to the land of opportunity. He’d been popped twice by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and skated by both times by claiming to be just another migrant in the group. All their evidence against him was circumstantial and none of the people he smuggled would testify that he was a hired guide because of his connections with a local drug cartel. The second time, they’d tried to hold him on re-entering the U.S. as a prior deportee, but strings had been pulled and they’d had no choice but to send him back to Mexico again, along with all the others. Salazar figured it was only a matter of time before his connections decided Ojon was more trouble than he was worth and put him out of their mutual misery.

But it was looking like that time might come sooner rather than later. Now that they’d caught Ojon behind the wheel of a truck full of migrants, the charges against him would finally stick and he’d end up getting shanked in prison instead of gunned down in the street. Of course, taking him out of the picture wouldn’t stop the endless flow of migrants, but maybe there’d be fewer senseless deaths in Salazar’s sector.

Salazar’s earpiece crackled, and then CJ’s voice cut through the static. Not saying anything special, just confirming the visual on the approaching truck and asking for permission to move in. But the sound of her voice made him flush hot, suddenly sweating under his body armor despite the cool desert night.

Border Patrol Agent Cara Jean Hogeland had only been on his team for three months. She was twenty-seven, thirteen years younger than Salazar. Hardly a beauty, she had a long, horsy face and frizzy red hair that stuck out every which way, but she was six feet tall with legs that could kill a man and eyes that let you know she had your number. Salazar had been married for nine years and had never been unfaithful. CJ had made short work of that.

It had been a terrible idea from the start. Terrible because it would break Rena’s heart if she ever found out and terrible because he was CJ’s superior officer. The threat of a sexual misconduct charge was serious business in a division that was still more than eighty percent male, but even knowing he could lose both his job and his family over this kind of indiscretion, he just couldn’t keep away from CJ. In cheap motels, in the back of his SUV, and one memorable occasion in the men’s room at the gun range. He thought about her nearly every waking minute of every day. He thought about her when he really ought to be thinking about not getting shot. He was thinking about her right now as he watched her and her partner, veteran agent Davis Keene, move their vehicle into position for the intercept.

He gave Keene and CJ the go ahead, then shouldered his rifle to cover them, watching their SUV through the infrared scope. Both times they had arrested Ojon, he had made the same crazy headlong sprint into the brush. Both times he tripped and fell on his face within 100 yards and was easily apprehended. Yet, Salazar was willing to bet he was going to do the exact same thing tonight. Like somehow, this time would be different. No chance of that.

Salazar checked his watch. He figured they’d have Ojon in custody and the thirsty migrants processed and ready to be deported well before 3 a.m. Which would give Salazar three full hours with CJ before he had to go home to his sleeping wife and children.

Keene pulled their SUV into the road, cutting the truck off while CJ hit the spotlight. The truck braked in a swirling cloud of dust and Keene’s voice boomed over the loudspeaker, telling Ojon to keep his hands where they could see them and not make any sudden moves. Of course, Ojon threw the driver’s side door wide open and took off into the scrub.

Salazar didn’t bother to shoot him. It was more entertaining to watch him run and fall. Keene took off at a comfortable pace after the fleeing Ojon. Salazar watched CJ’s white-hot, shimmering shape in his infrared scope as she threw her head back and laughed. He thought about the way she’d throw her head back just like that when she was on top of him. He wiped his sweaty hand on the leg of his uniform pants and then put his finger back on the trigger.

CJ made her way around to the back of the truck, checked the padlocked chain wound around the door latch, then took a sudden step back, hand on the butt of her side arm.

Salazar’s heartbeat surged, senses suddenly sharp and all thoughts of CJ’s anatomy washed away in a gush of adrenaline. Something was very wrong. He could feel it in his gut.

“Talk to me, CJ,” he said, instantly wishing he’d called her by her last name like every other officer on his team, but too concerned about her safety to worry about sounding overly familiar on an open frequency. “What the hell’s going on down there?”

“Sounds like...” CJ replied. “Like he’s got some kind of... zoo animal in there...” Salazar could hear a burst of terrified screams in the background. The truck was rocking on its axles. CJ drew her gun and took another step back. “Oh my God it’s...”

“Hold your position, Hogeland,” Salazar said, already half-running, half-sliding down the steep embankment toward the truck. “Keene, forget Ojon. We got a major situation here.”

“I just got him zipped,” Keene replied.

“Leave him!” Salazar said. “We’ll pick him up later.”

That was when the back of the truck burst open, roll-up door wrenched from its hinges and left dangling by the padlocked chain. Something leapt out and took CJ down, some kind of huge, lanky dog maybe, but whatever it was, it was inexplicably difficult to look at. Like its edges weren’t solid, but jittering and shifting with a seizure-like intensity. It gave off waves of rage like heat off a desert road at high noon.

Salazar tried to draw a bead on it, but focusing on its roiling shape was almost impossible and made the backs of his eyeballs ache. All he could see was CJ, laying there in the sand, head thrown back like it had been when she was laughing, when she was making love to him. Only now that sleek, muscular neck had been torn wide open, a fine crimson mist filling the air around what used to be her face as her body still tried to breathe through a ruptured windpipe. And then suddenly, that fierce, feral rage was focused on him.

He got off two shots before it was on him, tearing the rifle from his grip.

Ojon knelt in the sand, hands zip-tied behind his back. He couldn’t believe this was happening now, tonight. He had this blonde stripper in Phoenix who he was pretty sure would give it up the next time he saw her. He could tell she really liked him, not like all those other guys in the club. She obviously respected him, because of his reputation and connections to Las Maras. And even though she said she didn’t do that kind of thing, he knew she’d feel different when she saw the fat roll he collected from this latest crossing. Not to mention the nice clean eighth of coke he was planning to give her as a tip. La pinché Migra. They’d probably take that too.

Truth was, he was getting tired of these Coyote runs. It was way too hard, guiding all these stupid goats through the harsh desert. Sure, the pay was good and it got him laid by desperate women that were dying to get to the States, but he felt like it was high time he moved up in the organization. Something cushy, like sitting in a big office somewhere, telling people what to do over the phone while getting a chupada from his sexy secretary. He figured he’d talk to his cousin Beto about that as soon as he was processed and released.

When he heard shots, Ojon scrambled awkwardly to his feet and spun toward the truck. He couldn’t see what was happening from his angle, so he crept closer, peering through the brush and trying to get a glimpse of the action. When he did, he wished he hadn’t.

At first, he thought he was looking at a naked woman with wild black hair, facing away from him as one of the CBP officers drew down on her. If there had been a woman like that in the group, Ojon was sure he would have noticed. In fact, he definitely would have offered her his special discount. The officer was an older man, late forties with salt-and-pepper hair and a thick mustache. Ojon remembered him from one of his previous arrests, remembered that he was a real hardass. But he wasn’t acting like a hardass now. He was staring at the naked woman with wide eyes and a look first of horrified recognition and then stunned disbelief. The disbelief became terror as the thing that looked like a naked woman melted into something different. Something terrible.

Ojon turned and ran.

THREE

Dean Winchester eased the Impala up to eighty miles per hour. It was a knockout of a day. Sunny and perfect, like a vintage ad for America the Beautiful. Sky so blue it hurt. The red rock canyons of Sedona, Arizona had given way to windswept dunes as they headed west, toward the California border. He had a belly full of good greasy burgers from a Mom and Pop roadside stand a few miles back. Iron Maiden’s “Running Free” pumped through the speakers. His brother Sam rode shotgun, long legs bent at what had to be an uncomfortable angle and balancing his laptop on his knees, a scattering of clippings and photos spilling across his seat. The road seemed to stretch out forever. If Dean squinted, he could almost pretend things were the way they used to be. The way they were supposed to be.

Then the song ended and a new one came on. When Dean heard the opening riff of ACDC’s “Hell Ain’t a Bad Place to Be” he reached out and switched the music off.

Sam didn’t seem to notice or care that the music had stopped. He was utterly absorbed in whatever he was reading.

“Got something?” Dean asked.

“Maybe,” Sam replied.

Minutes and miles rolled by in silence, broken only by the shuffle of pages and the click of keystrokes. Dean could feel the cumulative weight of everything he’d been trying to forget crouching between them like a solid living thing. The elephant in the room. So much left unsaid. So much that had already been said and could never be taken back.

“So,” Dean finally said. “You gonna share with the rest of the class?”

“Border Patrol intercepted a truck full of illegals just south of Choulic,” Sam responded. “A routine stop. Only something went wrong and the officers involved never reported back at the station. When they sent a back-up unit out to the last known location, they found fifteen mutilated corpses, including the three officers. COD is listed as ‘wild animal attack.’”

“Fifteen corpses, at least three of which were heavily armed and probably wearing body armor? That’s some animal.”

“Our kinda animal,” Sam said, clicking through to another page. “Truck door was busted open from the inside. Says here there’s been some speculation that the smugglers involved may have been trying to import some type of large exotic mammal, like a tiger or a bear.”

“Great.” Dean rolled his eyes. “Not another damn werewolf.”

Sam shook his head. “It gets weirder.”

“Doesn’t it always?”

Sam showed one of the photos to Dean, who glanced sideways to look at it.

“Can a werewolf do something like this?” Sam said.

The photo showed an official Customs and Border Protection SUV. Well, half an SUV. A little less than half, to be precise. The front half was perfectly normal, undamaged. The back half had been removed with surgical precision, metal and plastic melted shiny smooth along the cut edges. As if someone had drawn a slightly curved line in the sand and everything on one side of the line had simply vanished, while the rest remained untouched. On the ground nearby was the uniformed body of a CBP officer. His Kevlar vest was torn to rags. So was he. And he didn’t have a head.

“Werewolves are stronger than any normal predator, but their claws can’t go through Kevlar like that.” Sam tapped the photo. “And what the hell happened to the SUV? It looks almost like some kind of large protective circle had been drawn and then everything inside the circle disappeared. Transported, maybe. But where?”

Dean glanced over at his kid brother. Sam was staring intently at the laptop screen once more. He’d caught the scent of something new and was intrigued. It was the closest thing to a human emotion that Dean had seen in his brother’s face since Sam had been brought back from Hell.

Maybe this was just what they needed. Something to take their minds off the big picture.

Dean could feel the old, familiar excitement building inside him. The thrill of the hunt. He looked away toward the raw, jagged mountains. Was he kidding himself to think that they could forget the past and the weight of a potentially bleak and hopeless future and lose themselves in an interesting job? Maybe so, but that wasn’t gonna stop him from trying. He needed a distraction too badly.

“Where the hell is Choulic anyway?” Dean asked, turning back to Sam.

The corner of Sam’s mouth twitched, just a little. Dean chose to interpret that as a smile.

FOUR

Choulic, Arizona turned out to be pretty much nowhere. A few trailers, and a ranch with three stoic horses watching the Impala from behind a crooked, endlessly repaired fence. A gas station straight out of the forties that sold beer and Jarritos soda from a Styrofoam cooler, along with weird “Indian Curios.” A billboard advertising a rattlesnake roundup that was supposedly “fun for the whole family.” That particular episode of wholesale reptile genocide had already happened more than four months ago.

If the town of Choulic itself was nowhere, the actual location where the truck and the bodies had been found was even further away from anywhere. The road, such as it was, was barely more than two hardened ruts in the stony ground. The amount of abrasive grit and yellow desert dust that was rapidly coating the Impala’s slick black skin was starting to give Dean heart palpitations. He silently promised her a carwash the second they got what they needed from this particular patch of nowhere.

Sam was out the passenger door even before Dean had come to a complete stop. Dean sat for a moment with his hand on the key in the ignition, just watching. Sam had the EMF meter out and was walking a careful grid across the area where the event had occurred. Dean killed the engine and got out himself. He already felt that there was something disturbing about the place.

The heat was all over him the second he left the air-conditioned comfort of the Impala. There was hot and then there was this. Within seconds, his T-shirt was soaked through with sweat. The sun was swiftly barbecuing the top of his head and forcing his eyes down to a tight squint even behind his dark sunglasses. Suddenly, the idea of wearing a cowboy hat made perfect sense. He tried to imagine what it would be like to cross this inhospitable desert on foot.

“How do people live out here?” Dean asked, stepping up next to Sam and pulling his damp shirt away from his sticky chest. “I’ve been here five minutes and I already feel like a 7-Eleven hotdog in a microwave.”

“Yeah,” Sam replied, smirking without looking up from the readout. “But it’s a dry heat.”

“Hell’s a dry heat, too,” Dean said. “It still sucks. Let me know if you pull anything. I’m gonna go get a cold beer and pour it down my pants.” He looked around uneasily.

“I got nothing,” Sam replied, shrugging. “The area’s clean. Whatever happened here, I don’t think it’s tied to this location and it didn’t leave behind any detectable fluctuations.”

If there had been any ordinary physical evidence, blood or tire tracks or anything like that, the stealthy, endlessly shifting sand had erased it. Nothing physical and nothing electromagnetic. No sulfur. No visible hexes. Nothing at all except for a strange feeling in the pit of Dean’s stomach. A sense of profound wrongness about what had happened there.

“Heads up,” Sam said.

Dean turned to face his brother. Sam gestured to the left with his chin.

“Looks like we got company,” he said.

There was a rocky ridge about twenty-five feet away from the road that Dean realized gave a perfect sniper’s view of the location where the attack had occurred. At the crest of the ridge was a figure in black astride a matte-black custom Suzuki Hayabusa motorcycle. The figure’s eyes were hidden behind the dark visor of a full-face helmet, but there was no doubt that the brothers were being watched.

For a handful of heartbeats, nothing happened. The three of them just regarded each other in silence. Then the Hayabusa’s engine turned over with a throaty roar, the bike spun 180 degrees in a spray of gravel and dust, and the mysterious figure was gone.

As the sound of the bike’s engine faded into the distance, Dean turned to Sam with a slight frown.

“Nice bike, the Hayabusa,” he said. “But pretty noisy.”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “So?”

“So,” Dean said. “Did you hear a motorcycle engine at any point since we got here?”

The desert around them was quiet and peaceful. The only sounds were the raspy, repetitive call of a small bird, the bone-dry rattle of wind through thorny brush, and the whisper of sand around their boots.

“Or how about on the drive out here?” Dean continued. “Hell, I don’t think we passed a single vehicle on the road since that crappy pick-up about ten miles back.”

Sam’s eyes went wide. He got it.

“Whoever that was,” Dean said. “They were already here. Waiting for us.”

The brothers didn’t discuss the appearance of the mysterious rider on the drive from Choulic to Bullhead City, but Dean found himself mulling over the incident, wondering. Could it have been an off-duty CBP officer who had taken a special interest in the case? If so, how did they know Sam and Dean would be there? Or did they? Was Dean reading too much into it? Could it be a simple coincidence that they both chose the same time on the same day to check out the location? But Dean didn’t think so. Coincidence was a concept that normal people used to explain away things they didn’t understand. Things Dean understood all too well.

Maybe it had been the perp, returning to the scene of the crime?

“Okay,” Dean said, pulling the Impala up to a modest but immaculately landscaped Spanish-style home on a residential street. “Tell me more about Officer Headless.”

“Davis James Keene,” Sam replied. “Age forty-seven. Hardcore evangelical Christian. Born and raised right here in Bullhead. Highway patrol officer for ten years before joining CBP. Wife Loretta doesn’t work outside the home. Four kids. All boys, all grown.”

“But the question is, what makes him different than the other two murdered Border Patrol agents?” Dean asked, killing the engine and pulling the keys from the ignition. “I mean all the corpses were in bad shape, but Keene’s body seems to have suffered way more damage than the other victims. Like whatever did this was particularly pissed at him.”

Too hot and sweaty—at least in Dean’s case—to face putting on their FBI suits, they had decided to go plain-clothed for this interview, figuring the grieving widow would have other things on her mind than to question their attire. Dean opened the glove compartment and pulled out a pair of fake FBI badges and handed one to Sam. Sam took the badge and shrugged.

“I guess that’s what we’re here to find out,” he said.

The woman who answered the door was surprisingly beautiful. From Sam’s description, Dean had been expecting some kind of sweet, chubby church-lady type. Loretta Keene looked more like a retired fashion model. Mile-high legs under a short sundress. Elegant cheekbones and big blue eyes that were just starting to crinkle at their corners. Thick blonde hair pulled back in a casual ponytail. Her feet were bare, toenails perfectly polished. She looked tired, like she’d been crying.

Dean showed her his badge.

“Mrs. Keene?”

The woman nodded, let out a resigned sigh. She stepped aside to let Dean and Sam enter without asking them who they were or what they wanted.

The interior of the house was just as immaculate as the exterior. Tasteful, but not too expensive. Simple brown-leather furniture and lots of well-groomed houseplants. Photos of four good-looking, athletic boys at various ages. A fresh lemony smell of recently applied furniture polish. The large windows were crystal clean. Not a speck of dust or a single item out of place.

But the thing that Dean found the most unusual about the room was what wasn’t there. Not one single religious object. No bibles. No crosses. No framed religious sayings. Nothing to indicate that they were in the home of an evangelical Christian.

“I’m Special Agent Crockett,” Dean told the woman. “This is Special Agent Tubbs.” Sam shot Dean a warning look, but Dean ignored him, face still deadpan serious. “We’re investigating the unusual circumstances surrounding your husband’s death.”

Loretta Keene picked up a small spray bottle and started misting the leaves of a large potted ficus, her back to Dean.

“It’s like he knew this was coming,” she said, almost too softly for them to hear.

“What makes you say that,” Sam asked, frowning slightly and taking a step closer to the widow.

She looked down at the spray bottle and shrugged.

“From the day Davis and I met, it was... We had this... this crazy kind of passion. That’s the only word I can think of to describe it. Passion. He was the love of my life. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other.” She blushed and turned back to the plant, spraying it again, even though it was already soaked. “All my girlfriends said that would change once our first baby was born, but it didn’t. Not then, anyway. Not until years later.”

Dean looked at Sam but didn’t say anything. They just waited for her to continue.

“This was fifteen years ago. Ritchie, our youngest, was seven. I remember because it was the day after his seventh birthday party. Everything was normal, the way it always was. Davis had just started working for the CBP. Nights, which was tough for me, because we really only saw each other for a short time each evening before he left. But we would always... Anyway, he left for work that night and...”

She finally turned to look at Dean. Her eyes were shimmering with unshed tears.

“I feel like that was the last time I saw my husband.” She put the spray bottle down on the windowsill beside the damp ficus. “I’d like a drink. Would you boys like a drink?”

“We’re not allowed to drink on the job, ma’am,” Sam replied before Dean could say yes.

“I’d like a drink,” she said again, to no one in particular, then drifted slowly out of the room.

“Crockett and Tubbs?” Sam said, leaning close to Dean and speaking fast and low. “Come on. Isn’t that a little too obvious? You oughta stick with your usual obscure rock and roll names.”

“Just trying to spice up our relationship,” Dean replied. “But listen, never mind that.” He tipped his chin toward the doorway though which Mrs. Keene had drifted. “Booze in the house. No visible religious stuff. All this sex talk. You sure about this born-again thing?”

Sam looked down at the file folder in his hand. Rifled through some papers.

“According to this, the Keenes have been active members of the Living Word Baptist Church for fifteen years.”

“Fifteen years,” Dean echoed.

Mrs. Keene returned with a heroic three-finger knock of straight Bourbon in a thick, square glass. She tossed back more than half the amber liquid and then drifted over to the glossy leather couch. She didn’t sit, just stood there.

“You were saying,” Dean prompted.

“Was I?” Mrs. Keene looked puzzled and slightly anxious, like she’d just woken up in an unfamiliar bed. She sat down after all.

“You were saying,” Sam reminded her. “That you felt like the last time you saw your husband was fifteen years ago.”

“Right,” she said. “The day after Ritchie’s seventh birthday party.” She downed the rest of her bourbon. “Davis went to work that night just like he always did, but when he came home, he was like a different person. Shut down inside. He never touched me again.”

She shook her head, shifting the empty glass from one hand to the other. Dean felt a terrible empathy for her, all alone in that clean, perfect house, as empty as her glass.

“I know something happened that night,” she continued. “But he would never talk about it. He made us all get baptized the next day. I went along with it because it was easier than trying to argue him out of it, but I never really believed. I haven’t been back to church since his funeral. Closed casket, of course, since they never found his head.” She was suddenly angry, bitter as frostbite. “I mean, what’s the point? So I can listen to a bunch of sanctimonious hypocrites tell me that what happened to Davis was God’s will?” She made a harsh, half-suffocated sound that was probably meant to be a laugh. “God’s will? I don’t want any part of a God that would let something like that happen to one of his followers.”

Lady, Dean thought, you don’t know the half of it.

FIVE

Border patrol officer Manuel Léon didn’t know what to make of his new partner. Charlie Himes was a decent guy, but very guarded. Didn’t joke around. Didn’t say a single word that wasn’t directly related to the job or responding to a specific request. He was the only black guy on the Tijuana River ATV team and he was also the oldest by a good ten years. Léon was the youngest. They were a Mutt and Jeff team, Himes tall and wiry and Léon short and stocky. Their CO called them Rocky and Bullwinkle. But despite their differences, they’d been working pretty well together for these past four days. Himes been showing Léon the ropes along the river, and although Léon might have preferred to partner with someone he could kid around with a little every now and then, Himes was a crack shot, had a black belt in Brazilian Jiujitsu, and held the highest arrest record in the unit. He was in better shape than most guys half his age. Léon could do worse.

Their designated section of the Tijuana River was barely what you’d call a river. It was more like sludgy trickle of toxic chemicals and raw sewage that ran along a wide cement channel littered with dead dogs, burning tires, and discarded needles. The stench was overwhelming, but that never stopped people from wading through the filth to try and make it to the American side. Himes claimed that you got used to the smell after a while. Léon wasn’t sure if he believed that. There weren’t enough showers in the world to wash the memory of that smell out of Léon’s head.

It was just after midnight when they spotted a trio of junkies squatting and huddled together on the American edge of the river. Male in an illegible death metal T-shirt and dirty jeans. Long, tangled hair and lurid red Kaposi’s sarcoma legions on his arms and face. Two females. One overweight and painfully young. Childish, pink-and-black T-shirt featuring a bad knock-off of Hello Kitty. Way too much bloated belly exposed between the hem of the shirt and the saggy waistband of her torn pink leggings. Faded pink hair, with a good six inches of black roots. Maybe sixteen, tops. Dead, hopeless eyes. If she was sharing needles, and who knew what else, with her male companion, she was probably already HIV-positive. Léon hoped she was just fat, and not pregnant. The second female wore a hooded sweatshirt, hood up and curly black hair spilling out from around its edges. Jeans and dusty hiking boots. What skin was visible was corpse pale in the harsh sodium lights. The first two were totally absorbed doing something furtive with their hands, probably prepping their heroin, but the second female sat stone still and seemed to be watching the border patrol agents. Léon couldn’t see her eyes under the hood, but she gave him the creeps.

“Paid diversion,” Himes said as they pulled their ATVs up on the lip of the channel.

“Paid?”

“Smugglers pay junkies to shoot up along the river,” Himes told him. “Divert our attention away from their operations.”

Himes lifted the visor of his helmet and raised a pair of compact binoculars to his eyes to get a closer look at the action. He watched the junkies for a silent minute, then handed the binocs over to Léon. Léon pushed up his own visor and scoped the trio for himself, adjusting the focus and zooming in on the male junkie’s hands.

Sure enough, he was dumping something from a tiny plastic envelope into a metal bottle cap. The chubby girl was pressed up against him, holding a disposable lighter and a syringe. She had sparkly glitter polish on her bitten nails, and a cheap ring shaped like a star.

“Should we try to apprehend them?” Léon asked.

“We can try,” Himes said. “But they’ll probably run back over to the Mexican side.”

“So, what?” Léon said. “We just watch them?”

Léon was zoomed in so tight that when something suddenly happened, it just looked like a fast shuffle and blur. He lowered the binocs, squinting at the three junkies. Now there were only two of them. They were both laying face down in the oily sewage, rivulets of crimson feeding out into the sluggish current. The chubby girl didn’t seem to have a head.

“What the...”

He turned to Himes and saw that the second female was standing right beside them, between the two ATVs. She was inexplicably nude. Impossible, but not any less possible than her running all the way up to the top of the steep concrete bank in the half a second it took Léon to lower his binocs. Her chin and chest were slick with gore. Her eyes did not reflect any light, just swallowed it all and gave nothing back. She was holding something, something that Léon’s baffled brain translated as a dirty red mop. But when he saw that the mop had streaks of pink, he realized what he was really looking at. It was a human spine with the head still attached, clotted pink hair brushing back and forth against the naked woman’s bare toes.

Léon looked at his partner. Crack-shot, bad ass Himes. Highest arrest record on the team. He didn’t draw his weapon. Didn’t take action. He was just staring at the woman with a drowsy kind of dread, like a suicide on a ledge, looking down. Like he knew what was coming. Like he deserved it.

When the girl dropped the spine and leapt on Himes like a hungry animal, Léon scrambled sideways off his ATV, thought processes utterly short-circuited by what he was seeing. It would have made sense to punch the gas and speed away, but he wasn’t thinking. Couldn’t think. All he could do was stumble backward, hands up and head shaking in endless, wordless denial. Because the woman was changing, form and substance flickering like a fire, bleeding off into the air around her as she tore into Himes with raptor claws and a thousand jagged teeth dripping glistening venom like rattlesnake fangs.

Léon tripped and fell on his ass as what used to be a woman threw back what used to be a head and screamed. That sound, that agonized, furious scream, was the single most terrible sound Léon had ever heard. Then something happened that was so strange, stranger even than all the other madness of the previous impossible moments, that Léon could feel his mind snap like a broken bone. In a way, it was almost a relief, not to have to try and make sense of anything anymore. Because there was no way to make sense of what he was seeing.

The sky around the woman’s head was unfolding. The earth was torn wide open like Himes’ corpse and things started to fall upward, twisting like trash caught in a high wind. There was a blinding flash and a burst of excruciating pain like a plane crash inside Léon’s head and then the woman was gone. So were the two ATVs and Himes’ body. So was the lower half of Léon’s body. Everything from the navel down was gone, neatly severed and bloodless for a surreal moment. Then, the blood came in a dizzy sickening rush, flowing down into the oily river and mingling with the blood of the dead junkies. Léon thought he heard the buzz of ATVs, backup on the way, but it didn’t matter. It was too late.

SIX

Dean stood at the single window of a motel room. He’d been looking out at the freshly washed Impala sitting in the mostly empty parking lot, but now let the scratchy plaid curtain drop. The room was identical to every room he’d ever stayed in, nearly invisible in its generic blandness. The only thing that stood out and reminded him that he was in Arizona rather than Nebraska or Montana or Vermont was a creepy painting of an anthropomorphic saguaro cactus wearing a cowboy hat and a mildly demented expression on its prickly green face. When they first checked in, he’d been tempted to take it down and stash it in the closet, but discovered that it was bolted to the wall. Like anyone in their right mind would want to steal that atrocity.

Sam had his laptop set up on the rickety table on the other side of the narrow room, surrounded by open files and crumpled papers.

“So what have you got on little Ritchie Keene?”

“He’s in a band.” Sam said. “They’re terrible.”

“How about something useful? Like his DOB?”

“April 16th,” Sam read off the screen. “1988.”

“When Mrs. Keene was talking about whatever she thinks might have happened to her husband on the job,” Dean said, “she referred to it as the day after the youngest son’s seventh birthday party. Not the day after his actual birthday.”

“Still,” Sam said. “At least that narrows it down, gives us a window of about a week or so. I’d say we should look for something that occurred between April 10th and 20th, 1995.”

“Looks like I’d better pay a visit to our friends at Customs and Border Protection,” Dean said. “Where was Keene stationed?”

“There’s no way either one of us is getting into a CBP station,” Sam said.

“Why not?” Dean asked.