The sun had almost finished setting when I threw this guy over the fence, so I’m not sure how much light we’ll have when we get to the place where they left Byrdie. But the sooner we go, the sooner we’re away from the compound before someone notices this guy is missing and comes looking for him. And even if we don’t find Byrdie immediately, we can sleep in the car if we have to.
I’m not leaving New Mexico without her.
I thought he was afraid of me when I was sitting on his chest and threatening to break his fingers. Yet each time my eyes flick to the rearview mirror when he points out the next direction I need to take, his terror as he glances toward Makhi is palpable. I can’t see Makhi. He’s sitting directly behind me, so whatever he’s doing has the guy convinced he’s dead or soon will be.
He’s not wrong about that.
Three hours later, after we’ve gotten lost and the guy’s gotten confused or struggled to remember whether we need to go left or right, he says, “Here. This is the place.”
I cut the engine, though I leave the headlights on. Armed with a flashlight I pull from my glove compartment, I get out.
There’s not much to see. Just mountains off in the distance, small bushes, and clumps of dried weeds are everywhere. I turn around to look at the guy. Makhi has dragged him out of the truck and has a firm hold of his arm.
“You’re sure this is the place?” I ask him.
The guy nods and points left. “There’s an engraving on that rock. This is where we come to punish.”
“And how many people do you leave out here to die in the desert?” Makhi asks him.
When he doesn’t respond, Makhi drives his fist into the guy’s kidney.
He collapses with a pained groan.
I look at Makhi.
“What?” he mutters. “As if we haven’t all wanted to do that and more.”
True.
Even Nash, not usually a violent person, looks like he’s fighting the urge to kick the guy.
I turn back around and scan the ground. I’m not much of a tracker, but I know enough to get by. “Boot marks,” I say,dropping into a crouch and pointing them out for Nash and Makhi. “There.”
There are tire tracks too.
It’s easy to envision a truck like the one we saw in the compound, with Byrdie thrown in the back, maybe unconscious so that she wouldn’t run. They’d have driven out here in the fierce heat and tossed her out, then got in the truck and driven away without another look back.
Smaller footsteps lead toward the horizon and the mountains. But those mountains are hours away, maybe even days away. On foot, I doubt she’d have made it, and there’s no shelter to escape the heat.
The soft pounding of footsteps behind me has Makhi cursing loudly.
“He’s running,” Makhi calls out.
I lean closer to the footprints in the red dirt, trying to figure out which direction Byrdie took. “If he wants to run into the desert in the middle of the night, I’m not about to stop him. Seems like a painfully slow way to die to me.”
Which is probably why they punished Byrdie like that.
I get to my feet and point. “She headed that way.”
Nash nods. “Are we taking the car or leaving it here?”
I consider it. “Take the car. She’d have been disoriented, and I don’t see her getting too far. We’ll draw up a perimeter and flag this spot at the center, then search five miles in each direction in case she lost her way. She’s barefoot, without water, and looking for shelter. She won’t have gotten too far.”
There’s no sign of the guy who ran off. Part of me wants to go after him. The other part hopes he has a slow, painful death alone out here, just like he intended for Byrdie.
We get back to the truck to make plans. After spending the next ten minutes with the map out, marking our position anddrawing a big circle to focus our search, I start the engine, and we head toward the tracks leading to where she went.
Two hours later, we’ve combed the area and ventured a little past our perimeter.
