it stood up. “Hey Max, remember that perp I once killed by accident? Funny thing, it happened again.” No, that wouldn’t do.
I was headed back home, tucked way inside my mind, hardly aware of getting from here to there. But about five miles away from the road that led home I spotted Catalina State Park and turned in on impulse, to exercise the Pugs and relax my brain a little by looking at some big sky. The man at the entrance station gave me a ticket for my dashboard to show I’d paid my entrance fee. He admired the Pugs and added, “Careful. Monsoon’s predicted,” but didn’t try to stop me from going in.
I drove down the short road to the parking lot, saddled up the Pugs with the extra leads I kept in the trunk, stowed a bottle of water into my cargo pants pocket, wished I still had my hiking stick, tucked my hair up under a baseball cap for shade, and, seeing only a few cars parked with mine, also got my Smith out of the glove compartment. It was good to stay safe, but no one had been behind me coming into the park and I wasn’t the sort of person to hide.
I walked across the street from the parking lot to what appeared to be the start of the main trailhead. The map of the park was simple: Romero Canyon straight ahead, Canyon Loop Trail up and to the left, and the Birding Loop to the right. The last would be the easiest on the Pugs.
To get to that trailhead I had to take off my shoes and carry them over the Cañada del Oro Wash, the same wash where, just a half mile or so to the north, I had killed Peasil on a drier day. With rain the night before, the wash was now running, but only up to my ankles in places. I imagined I saw one of Peasil’s flip-flops near the edge of the wash but it was just some flattened coyote scat, filled with mesquite seeds.
A sign pointed me to a narrower trail that led through what passes for a grove in the high desert, scrubby trees not much taller than Carlo. They provided some shade, though, and we only stopped a couple of times for me to drink from the bottle and to hand down a palmful of water to the Pugs. Then rocks served as stairs leading up to a small mesa. The stairs were a little steep for the Pugs, so about halfway I hoisted one up in each arm and finished the climb that way, thankful that my back wasn’t giving me any trouble.
When I reached the top, where someone had put a park bench so you could rest and enjoy the view, I looked at the mountain ridge ahead of me to the east. As so often happened at this time of year, clouds were building up rapidly over Mount Lemmon, crawling in our direction like black paws.
I sat down on the wood and metal bench set up as a memorial to some unknown nature lover, gave the dogs more water, and figured I had just a few minutes before I should start back to avoid the rain. You didn’t want to be out in that kind of weather, when the lightning bolts came back-to-back and the water fell in sheets.
Though the network of trails on the map led all the way up and over the Samaniego Ridge, at this point the slope of the mountains was still a good distance off. The sun was losing a battle outracing the clouds but reflected off water slicing down the gullies and collecting in small pools. The reflection of the sun on the spots of water made me think of a giant smashing a mirror over the top of the mountain and scattering the glass shards. I wondered what Carlo would see if he was here, maybe dancing butterflies, and wished I could see it like that, too. Then I thought of my afternoon appointment with a badly decomposed corpse and figured the chances were against it.
While I was still gazing at the mountains, musing thus, one of the bits of sparkling mirror moved suddenly to the left. If I hadn’t been looking at it I wouldn’t have seen it, but as I watched it hopped again. The way it would hop if it were attached to a person who was jumping from one rock to the