A Serpent In Turquoise - Peggy Nicholson

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a blast of its horn, a pickup loomed up on her blind side. Storming out of the north, it cleared the winch on her front bumper by a foot.

      Raine stomped on the brake, staring after the dwindling truck, and the herd of black-and-white goats that filled its rusty bed.

      Having stalled the Jeep, she coaxed it back to life, then sat in Neutral. Might as well give the cloud of dust that the pickup had raised a minute to settle—along with her heart. She glanced toward the cantina’s screen door just as it banged open. The barroom brawler plus his skinny pal lurched out onto the boardwalk. “Uh-oh.”

      As he spotted her, the hulking man pointed her way, and the two broke into a purposeful trot.

      Raine turned out onto the road and ran smoothly up through the gears. The Jeep reached the veil of dust that swirled in the pickup’s wake. The last rays of the sinking sun struck it and Mipopo vanished beyond a wall of shimmering copper. Raine stomped the pedal to the metal.

      Within minutes she caught up to the pickup with its four-legged cargo. “Pull over and let me by!” she fumed, beeping her horn.

      But here in the land that invented machismo, the driver had his honor to defend. The pickup swung out to the crown of the road and trundled on at its top speed. The goats gazed back at her with demonic yellow eyes, their wispy white beards blowing in the breeze.

      And behind her, she heard the first rumbles of pursuit. The dust cloud swirled as they rounded a bend, and Raine caught a glimpse behind. Here came the lumber truck, its pile of raw pine logs towering above the battered cab, the whole top-heavy load swaying monstrously on the curve.

      Trey had trained her and all her siblings in hand-to-hand combat, but the foremost lesson the ex-SEAL had drilled into their heads was: “Run when you can. Fight only when you must.”

      Given an open road, she could outrun that truck. Then with a few miles lead, she could dive down the side trail she’d intended to take and vanish down into the canyon before they had a clue where she’d gone. The road widened suddenly and Raine pulled out to pass, but the pickup swerved to block her. “You son of a—” She got a grip and swung back to the right.

      Behind her, Señor Skinny leaned halfway out the passenger window to jeer and hoot as he pumped his bony arm.

      Okay, forget about passing. She supposed she could simply follow the pickup till her lunatic lumberjacks grew bored with the chase. “Hey!” she yelped as the truck made a roaring charge at her back bumper. She stepped on the gas and surged ahead, till the goats could have leaped out onto her hood.

      “What is with you guys?” Harassing a lone foreign female seemed just their style, but instigating a three-way pileup was downright suicide.

      If they knocked her off the road, she had to respond at maximum intensity. She hadn’t brought a gun this trip; flying made it impossible. And her usual weapons, her blowpipe and her knife, she’d stowed with the rest of her gear beneath a tarp in the back, before she’d strolled into Magdalena’s.

      There’d be no time to put her pipe together, but maybe she could get to her knife in time. Meanwhile, she leaned toward the glove compartment, fished out a heavy flashlight and laid it in her lap as, up ahead, the road took a rising bend to the right. And there at last, beyond a screen of wind-tortured pines, the rim of the canyon yawned, a dark slash in the ground, falling away out of sight.

      If she remembered correctly, the road snaked back to the east just beyond that promontory, while a side road cut away to her right and down. At this speed it lay maybe a minute ahead.

      Just then the truck crunched her bumper, and Raine’s teeth clicked together as her head slammed back against her headrest.

      “So be that way!” She grabbed the flashlight, flipped it up and over her shoulder.

      In her rearview mirror, she saw the truck’s windshield glitter in a crazy spiderweb of cracks. Above the cab, the logs groaned against their chains. An outraged bellow sounded over the engine’s roar.

      Up ahead, the goat chauffeur was finally realizing he was traveling in bad company. The pickup belched smoke and squeezed out a few more miles per hour, but Raine didn’t close the gap. She’d gut it out, ride the lumber truck’s front bumper for another quarter mile, then hang a last-second hairpin right down the canyon trail. The truck’s greater momentum should carry it well past the turn.

      The engine behind her revved, roared. She gritted her teeth and eased ahead, hoping to soften the oncoming crash.

      “Ooff!” Another blow like that and she’d be riding with the goats. She kept her eyes trained for her turn. Couldn’t be more than a hundred yards to go…then fifty, then… “Where the hell is it?”

      McCord was driving up the last switchback on the trail out of the canyon, when the coyote popped up on his right. “No way!” He braked the ancient Land Rover, raising a wave of sandy gravel, as the dusky form flashed past his front bumper then flowed over the drop-off to his left. “Jorge?” McCord cut the ignition and leaned out of his doorless vehicle to whistle, then call, “George-boy? C’mere, fella.” He scanned the brush that edged the track, the top branches of a pine jutting up from below.

      “No way that coulda been George.” He’d left the mangy beggar back at camp, forty miles down the gorge. The coyote liked to tag his tracks, but he’d never have followed him this far. Besides, he couldn’t have gotten ahead of him, if he had followed.

      “Jorgito? If that’s you, go home. Take it from one who knows, city life’s not what it’s cracked up to be.” Magdalena kept a shotgun behind the bar, and the only varmints she tolerated walked on two legs. “Follow me there and she’ll chop you up for chili.”

      No answer but a breeze, sighing through the pine needles.

      McCord engaged the parking brake, then reached for the canteen on the seat beside him. He swung around to watch the sun flaming on a purple peak, far beyond the far rim of the canyon. He took a cool swallow while the light faded from copper to blue, sighing happily at the thought of the cold beers to follow, with a plate of tamales and mole on the side. Definitely a slice of real bread; he was sick of campfire biscuits and hush puppies. His stomach rumbled at the thought.

      It had been complaining ever since he’d declined an invitation to supper when he’d stopped by the doc’s place, an hour back down the trail. But McCord had his first-night rituals for whenever he straggled out of the canyons. It was best to ease back into civilization like a bather into a hot tub, and Magdalena’s made a good halfway stop on the road to polite society. His first night out from camp, he didn’t need stimulating conversation or a fight for his life on the doc’s treacherous chessboard. He’d rather kick back, let a warm, curvaceous woman swaddle him in comfort and admiration.

      Whilst he’d sat there anticipating, the sun had sunk itself, curving off toward the Gulf of California, and Baja beyond. “The Blue Hour,” he mused aloud, then frowned at the noise coming from just above—a big roaring diesel rasping at the quiet, rumbling down the road from Mipopo. One of those damned lumber trucks, carting off pine trees that had struggled a thousand years or more to attain their rightful growth, cherishing every drop of rain, standing fast against landslides and winter gale—only to fall to some greedy little guy with a rusty chainsaw.

      With a rueful grunt, McCord glanced back down the long sloping track that clung to the canyon wall. Too late for supper at the doc’s? Maybe he wasn’t in the right mood for the cantina tonight. It was no place to pick a fight. If that crowd ever suspected he was a closet tree hugger…

      On the other hand, if he meant to change his mind, he’d have to drive the last little stretch up to the main road, then turn around there. Only a fool would attempt a K-turn on this one-lane ramp that was scarcely wide enough for two burros. And if he got as far as the main road, then he might as well—

      He’d swung back around with this resolution and now McCord sat, transfixed. “What the—” A car plunged out of the twilight, heading straight at him, its left flank hugging the mountainside, scraping a shower of

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