Deadly Stakes

4

Even without a hard copy in hand, A.J. followed his father’s directions with no problem. Once he turned off the freeway, he had to cross a cattle guard, and before he could turn onto the nameless dirt track, he had to get out of the car, open a metal-framed gate, drive through, and then close it again. Once on the far side of the gate, he began measuring off the six tenths of a mile.

The road was narrow and rough in places but drivable, even in the Camry. Garbage tossed out on the shoulders-beer cans, mostly-testified that it was a party spot, the kind of place favored by kids A.J.’s age to do their illegal drinking and smoking, probably all kinds of smoking. Truth be known, now that he and most of his friends had cars at their disposal, A.J. had done a modest amount of desert-style partying himself, not enough to get in trouble, as long as they didn’t get caught, but enough so that he recognized the landscape markers for what they were.

He had covered almost the entire six tenths of a mile when the narrow road widened out into a small clearing. Obviously, the area had long been used as an illegal dump, with abandoned rusting appliances and a collection of rotting furniture scattered here and there in the rocky dirt. Because this was the first wide spot in the road, A.J. decided to park and then walk the rest of the way. There might not be a place to pull off properly when he reached his destination.

He stopped next to the rusted hulk of what had once been a turquoise dishwasher. Remembering James’s none too subtle warning about the possibility of being followed, A.J. got out of the car and stood for a while, listening and watching the road behind him. All he heard was the low grumble of traffic roaring down I-17 half a mile or so away. Between there and the turn-off, there was no telltale plume of dust that would have revealed a vehicle tailing him to the appointed place. Only when he was sure he was unobserved did he open the trunk and pull out the shovel he had stowed there. That was when he heard an unexpected noise-the shrill jangling of a cell phone, ringing somewhere nearby.

The hair prickled on the back of A.J.’s neck. With his heart hammering in his chest, he realized that whoever his father had been worried about most likely hadn’t followed him here. They must have learned about the destination well in advance, and they were already here, waiting for him to show his hand. His first panicky thought was to ditch the shovel. He quickly pushed it out of sight under the back of the car, then straightened up and looked around. At first he saw nothing. There were no other vehicles, but if someone were watching him, he had no intention of walking closer to the original target and giving away the location of the critical boulder. Instead, shoving his shaking hands deep in his pockets, he sauntered as casually as he could manage in the opposite direction.

That was when he saw what looked like a lump of rags lying next to a burned-out hulk of a sofa with springs sticking out in every direction. At first he thought the pink he was seeing was a swath of material of some kind, like a long, thin scarf. It was only when he edged closer that he realized he was looking at a person, and the length of pink was actually a terrible sunburn on her long bare leg.

She lay so still, breathing so shallowly, that at first A.J. thought she was already dead. Dried blood from a wound on her chest had burned black in the sun, with flies and ants both feasting on the appalling mess.

“Hey, lady,” he said. “Are you okay?”

To his surprise, a pair of green eyes fluttered open in the sun-blistered face. He reached down and brushed a single ant from her dried, cracked lip. Disturbed by his arrival, a cloud of frenzied flies swooped into the air. She made an awful sound of some kind, something he couldn’t understand. Looking around, he noticed the cell phone lying just beyond the reach of her outstretched fingers. He grabbed it up. It was all he could do to make his fingers dial the emergency number. When he punched send, however, the NO SERVICE notice showed up on the screen. There was enough of a signal for the phone to ring, but not enough to place a call.

A.J. remembered someone telling him once that text messages sometimes went through when voice calls wouldn’t. He tried texting 911. Almost immediately, a text response appeared on the screen: “911. What are you reporting?”

Typing with shaking fingers made for a slow, cumbersome process. It took a lot longer than it would have taken to say where he was and describe the situation, but eventually, he made it work. Only when the operator told him that help was on its way did he turn his attention back to the stricken woman. He explained to her that an ambulance was coming. It worried him that she couldn’t seem to move at all. The heartbreaking noises she made weren’t words, but he realized that she had to be terribly thirsty.

“I’ve got some water in the car,” he told her. “I’ll go get it.”

He was gone for only a matter of seconds-the time it took for him to race back to the Camry, retrieve the half-empty bottle of water he had left on the car seat, and make his way back. She needed water. Now wasn’t the time to wonder if she’d object to drinking from a bottle with his germs on it. By the time he returned to her side, however, he could tell it was too late for water.

She tried to say something. “Dennis.”

“Dennis,” he repeated. “Who’s that? Your boyfriend? Your husband?”

She didn’t answer; she was gone. The light went out of the bright green eyes. Open and empty, they stared sightlessly into the blazing sun. For a moment, waiting to see if she would breathe again, A.J. found it hard to breathe himself. When she didn’t, he dropped both the cell phone and the open water bottle and fell to his knees beside her, agonizing about what he should do. He wondered if he should try to revive her, but compressing her chest would have meant burying his hands in the bloody mess, and he couldn’t bring himself to do that.

A.J. was a month and a half past his seventeenth birthday, but this was the first time he had ever seen a dead person. Sure, he’d seen pretend dead people in movies and on TV shows, but never like this. He knelt there, sick and dizzy, as the breakfast burrito he had eaten at a fast-food joint in Black Canyon City threatened to erupt from his gut and the spilled water disappeared into the parched earth.

A.J. stayed where he was, swaying on his knees, until he could breathe again; until he could quell his roiling stomach; until the sharp stones biting into his kneecaps got his attention. Then he staggered upright.

He needed to think, and he needed to put some distance between the dead woman and himself. When his head cleared, he had only one thought-to get away. Once the emergency responders got there, to say nothing of the cops, there would be all kinds of questions: Was A.J. the one who had placed the 911 text? Who was the woman, and who was he? If he didn’t know her, what was he doing there? Why wasn’t he in school? Eventually, the whole story would come out-the lame story about his father’s fool’s errand to find a buried treasure. If that emerged, so would all of A.J.’s other secrets-the ones he’d been carefully keeping from his mother.

Half sick to his stomach, he made it back to the car. Because he wasn’t thinking straight, he did something incredibly stupid. He turned the key in the ignition, shifted into gear, swung the Camry into a tight U-turn, and drove away. He was opening the metal gate to let himself back onto the highway intersection when he realized he had left the shovel behind. He was tempted to go back and get it, but he didn’t dare. Out here in the middle of nowhere, he had no idea how long it would take for emergency responders to arrive, but he was sure they were well on their way. If he went back for the shovel, they’d find him at the crime scene, and then he’d be stuck answering all those difficult questions. So he went through the gate, closed it behind him, got back in his car, and drove like a bat out of hell.

He hadn’t gone over a mile on the freeway when he saw the flashing lights of an approaching state patrol car speeding north on I-17. As the cop car flew past, siren blaring, A.J. breathed a sigh of relief. He had made the right decision in not going back for the shovel. Had he done so, they would have caught him there for sure.

That was what he was thinking as he drove back to Phoenix with plenty of leeway for making it to work on time. No one had seen him come or go, and as long as he didn’t tell anyone about it, no one was likely to find out. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut. As far as his mother knew, he was at school, and when he turned in his excuse tomorrow, school would think he had been at home with a sore throat.

It wouldn’t take long, however, for A. J. Sanders to realize how wrong he had been. It turned out that leaving the scene of the crime was the worst possible thing a Good Samaritan could have done, and once the cops did come looking for him, his entire future would be hanging in the balance.