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Page 5.
 It was accompanied by a tiny sigh or a gust of wind outside, or maybe a moan of pain or fright.
"Okay, what's going on?" he muttered to himself. He killed the reading light and turned off the little fan humming on the dashboard.
Holding the sandwich in his left, he brought the Glock over his chest with his right.
He laid the heavy gun in his lap.
He slowly and quietly clicked himself free of the seatbelt, which he let roll away over his shoulder.
He picked up the gun and held it flat against his chest with his index finger resting on the trigger guard. For about half a minute he held his breath and listened intently.
The faintest of breezes stirred the long, hanging willow branches. Here, out near Ocotillo Wells, several miles north of Interstate 8, there was almost no man-made light pollution. If he were to step from the car, and walk about 200 feet up the shrouded, corridor-like road under the tree canopy, he'd be on a dirt road in the desert, looking up at a collection of stars as rich as a carpet of diamonds.
Sometimes, on a night like this, it was hard to make out the grand wheel of the Milky Way because there were so many lights in the sky. But he wasn't about to leave the radio, since a call from the boss about Carlos Ochoa and his gang was due at any time. Even here in the dark, there was a glow, a Gegenschein, of starlight that almost made leaves of the massive river oaks look as if they had snow on them.
He took another bite and started chewing. Damn, he wanted this sandwich. His stomach was in knots with hunger, and that coffee smelled roasted and good, black and crisp.
He heard two thumps in succession, and a low gust of wind moaned past the car, buffeting it.
No mistake now. Something was going on. Were the Ochoa gangsters playing tricks with him? With each other? Or was it a group of illegals, of whom more than a million entered the United States every year in this sector alone? No, that couldn't be it. They would be anxious to keep moving. They wouldn't stop to make thumping noises.
Mack sneaked a hand over to the radio, but pulled his hand back. He wasn't supposed to break radio silence. He pulled his cell phone from the inside of his fatigue jacket, whipped the clamshell open, and, just as quickly, snapped it shut as a blaze of light nearly blinded him—he'd forgotten it would throw bright blue light all over the place. Now he saw stars. It was like getting a flashbulb in the eyes in the dark, when your pupils were wide open.
As he sat, waiting for bilious green blobs to stop floating before his eyes, he heard a sound like shredding tin.
The noise was loud, and went on for a long minute or two. The echoes bounced around in the shallow river canyon.
He couldn't figure out what it was, but it had to be humans doing something. Or someone not quite human.
Out here, anything was possible. The native people had walked the San Diego River and its tributary streams for thousands of years. They'd migrated seasonally between the mountains to the east, and the beaches to the west. Winter on the beach, where the weather was milder and the fishing good; summers in the mountains, where the hunting was better. They had been in the habit of defleshing their dead and breaking the bones up before putting them in pots and burying them, so that the dead would not walk at night. This was stuff you scoffed at in a downtown San Diego office building by day.
Out here, alone, on the river at night, it wasn't so easy to scoff. In the foothills of the Lagunas, Palomar, Volcan, and other mountains, where wild deer and rattle snakes and mountain lions roamed, it was said the ancient dead sometimes walked on their long-ago trails. Tonight would be such a night, Mack thought as his scalp prickled and cold sweat broke out as his neck tightened. He stopped chewing and listened intently, cradling the gun. He tried to tune in to what was happening out there.
Hearing a cry that could be from a man or woman, strong but high-pitched, he opened the car door and stepped outside.
Holding the gun in his right hand, he cupped his other hand behind his ear and tried not to breathe.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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