my heartbeat, I stopped long enough to listen if any observers had noticed the accident and were screaming and running toward the wash. There was no sound except one delayed thump like a sack of cement mix falling in the back of the van. The scumbag’s body, I reasoned, which must have caught on something before making the drop.
It had taken less than fifteen minutes to reach the point of no return from my decision.
Ideally it would be at least a week before the van was discovered, decomposition and insect activity obliterating the slashed artery. If not, this could be judged a suicide of a derelict John Doe. They wouldn’t look closely enough to see some of the cuts were postmortem; he’d be stored in the morgue fridge and no one would ever ask for him.
I went over the scene carefully in my stocking feet, leaving the tracks that showed my presence in the wash but dragging the backpack behind me to obliterate his footprints near the bridge. That brought me back to where the van had originally been parked, and I saw the manila envelope on the ground. Staying to look inside, removing it from the scene, both were risky. I picked it up and put it in my backpack.
When I hefted the backpack over my shoulder, I noticed it was lighter than usual. I had been in the wash about ten minutes before the perp showed up and had only gathered a half dozen or so rocks. Questions would be asked if I returned home after such a long time with so little. I picked up the rose quartz and a few others.
Phase four: rather than taking the main road home, I trudged up out of the wash about a hundred yards past the bridge and crossed Lago del Oro Parkway. Morning rush hour was past, so the dozen cars it comprised and any hope of their providing rescue was long gone. If some other woman had been down there, she would be lying in the back of the van right now, broken. Because it had been me, the man was broken instead. That comforted me.
Other women. Unfortunately, I had accidentally silenced the asshole before I could find out about those other women. But more important, there wouldn’t be any others, ever again.
Listening to my ragged breathing and trying for a time to cleanse my mind of death, I looked again at the nearby mountains about three miles to the east. They had that whole purple-mountains’-majesties thing going for them. That thing I thought I was going to defend in my more naive days as an agent.
I made my way across the arroyos separating Lago del Oro Parkway from the edge of my housing development. Only a quarter mile as the crow flies, but it was some rough going, sliding down the gravel on one side of a narrow gulley and having my back spasm as I dug with my stick into the other side for the climb back out. There were about six of these, each one higher up than the last so that at the very top you’re looking back into a small valley that the river had carved over millennia.
Other than that there was nothing, nothing but desert scrub highlighted by occasional orange-red blooms blasting from the top of a barrel cactus and the track of horseshoes, but my nervous system couldn’t seem to get out of hyperalert mode. Peering through scraggly tree branches and behind low hills, I kept my stick ready and stayed on the balls of my feet. Every sound, from a motorcycle roaring on the road that ran parallel to my route to the rustle of a rabbit in the brush made the nerve on the side of my neck spark.
I could have disabled him in the wash and then called for backup. That’s what I should have done.
The 10 percent humidity and dehydration began to affect me, making me a little woozy. My blouse was already dry, stiffened a bit by the blood saturating it. I craved water but wouldn’t open my lips to drink, aware that the dead guy’s blood cells, a few of which had probably collected in the corners of my mouth, were likely infected with something.
Despite the wooziness, when I came to the last arroyo before the house, I buried my bloody walking stick in the softer sand on the side toward the top, where it would not likely be washed away in the next hard