Supernatural: Coyote's Kiss (2 page)

It was too dark inside the truck to see the woman’s expression or if she was even listening at all. If she was, she didn’t reply.

“
I’m going to Los Angeles to work in my cousin’s poultry shop
,” Letty continued, nervous and talking too fast. “
Plucking chickens. My brother thinks this is funny, because he calls me Chicken Neck. Ever since we were kids. Because I’m skinny, you know, like a chicken’s neck. He won’t think it’s so funny when he sees how much money I’ll be sending our grandmother. And soon, I’ll have enough money to bring her and my daughter to live with me. My daughter’s name is Marisol. She’s three
.”

Even though it was too dark to see, Letty was suddenly certain that the woman was looking right at her, listening intently.

“
Shut up
,” one of the men hissed, digging an elbow into Letty’s ribs. “
You sound just like a chicken
.”

Letty shut up. Time passed. She could feel herself dozing, half dreaming of swimming naked through cool water.

Then Letty heard something that yanked her back into reality. Another engine. The crunch of tires. Another vehicle was approaching. There were a few short pulses of a siren and an incomprehensible foreign voice barked through a megaphone. A flash of desperate panic burned through the cramped and airless space and swiftly dissipated, leaving behind an apathetic kind of resignation. They were locked in. Nowhere to run. It was over. They were caught.

Letty was not proud of what she’d done to pay off the Coyote, and she knew in her heart that she could never put herself through that kind of hell again. This was her one and only chance to make it to the United States, to make a better life for her daughter. To make sure that Marisol would never have to do the kinds of things her mother had been forced to do. Now it was all falling apart. Her one chance, slipping through her fingers.

The truck slowed, then stopped. Without realizing she was doing it, Letty reached out and grasped the beautiful woman’s arm. At least that’s what she thought she had done. But what her fingers found didn’t feel anything like a woman’s skin. It felt first like the dirty, brittle hair clinging to a week-old roadkill dog and then more like the cold, chitinous plates of a scorpion’s tail. Then flesh again, human flesh burning with a fatal fever and squirming with movement like busy maggots wriggling just beneath the skin.

There was a strange sound. An unnatural growl so deep it was more felt than heard, rumbling beneath a wet crunching like fresh bones being cracked for marrow. Letty yanked her hand away, letting out a small, airless scream. Her head was spinning with vertigo, as if the beautiful woman were a deep hole and Letty were falling into her. Falling, or drowning. The smell of copal smoke sharpened in the airless space and that’s when the thing that used to be a beautiful woman leapt at Letty, not a hole anymore but real, all teeth and terrible, howling rage.

Supervisory Border Patrol Agent Marco Salazar watched the smuggler’s truck approaching through night vision binoculars. Behind the wheel was a luckless Coyote named Fernando “Ojon” Ruiz Hierra. Ojon got his nickname because of his large bulging eyes, but it had become a joke around the station that Ojon couldn’t see a 747 flying an inch from his nose. He was a loser, plain and simple, notorious for letting his charges die from dehydration before they even hit the border. But he was cheap, and there was no shortage of desperate migrants willing to take that risk in hopes of making it through to the land of opportunity. He’d been popped twice by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and skated by both times by claiming to be just another migrant in the group. All their evidence against him was circumstantial and none of the people he smuggled would testify that he was a hired guide because of his connections with a local drug cartel. The second time, they’d tried to hold him on re-entering the U.S. as a prior deportee, but strings had been pulled and they’d had no choice but to send him back to Mexico again, along with all the others. Salazar figured it was only a matter of time before his connections decided Ojon was more trouble than he was worth and put him out of their mutual misery.

But it was looking like that time might come sooner rather than later. Now that they’d caught Ojon behind the wheel of a truck full of migrants, the charges against him would finally stick and he’d end up getting shanked in prison instead of gunned down in the street. Of course, taking him out of the picture wouldn’t stop the endless flow of migrants, but maybe there’d be fewer senseless deaths in Salazar’s sector.

Salazar’s earpiece crackled, and then CJ’s voice cut through the static. Not saying anything special, just confirming the visual on the approaching truck and asking for permission to move in. But the sound of her voice made him flush hot, suddenly sweating under his body armor despite the cool desert night.

Border Patrol Agent Cara Jean Hogeland had only been on his team for three months. She was twenty-seven, thirteen years younger than Salazar. Hardly a beauty, she had a long, horsy face and frizzy red hair that stuck out every which way, but she was six feet tall with legs that could kill a man and eyes that let you know she had your number. Salazar had been married for nine years and had never been unfaithful. CJ had made short work of that.

It had been a terrible idea from the start. Terrible because it would break Rena’s heart if she ever found out and terrible because he was CJ’s superior officer. The threat of a sexual misconduct charge was serious business in a division that was still more than eighty percent male, but even knowing he could lose both his job and his family over this kind of indiscretion, he just couldn’t keep away from CJ. In cheap motels, in the back of his SUV, and one memorable occasion in the men’s room at the gun range. He thought about her nearly every waking minute of every day. He thought about her when he really ought to be thinking about not getting shot. He was thinking about her right now as he watched her and her partner, veteran agent Davis Keene, move their vehicle into position for the intercept.

He gave Keene and CJ the go ahead, then shouldered his rifle to cover them, watching their SUV through the infrared scope. Both times they had arrested Ojon, he had made the same crazy headlong sprint into the brush. Both times he tripped and fell on his face within 100 yards and was easily apprehended. Yet, Salazar was willing to bet he was going to do the exact same thing tonight. Like somehow, this time would be different. No chance of that.

Salazar checked his watch. He figured they’d have Ojon in custody and the thirsty migrants processed and ready to be deported well before 3 a.m. Which would give Salazar three full hours with CJ before he had to go home to his sleeping wife and children.

Keene pulled their SUV into the road, cutting the truck off while CJ hit the spotlight. The truck braked in a swirling cloud of dust and Keene’s voice boomed over the loudspeaker, telling Ojon to keep his hands where they could see them and not make any sudden moves. Of course, Ojon threw the driver’s side door wide open and took off into the scrub.

Salazar didn’t bother to shoot him. It was more entertaining to watch him run and fall. Keene took off at a comfortable pace after the fleeing Ojon. Salazar watched CJ’s white-hot, shimmering shape in his infrared scope as she threw her head back and laughed. He thought about the way she’d throw her head back just like that when she was on top of him. He wiped his sweaty hand on the leg of his uniform pants and then put his finger back on the trigger.

CJ made her way around to the back of the truck, checked the padlocked chain wound around the door latch, then took a sudden step back, hand on the butt of her side arm.

Salazar’s heartbeat surged, senses suddenly sharp and all thoughts of CJ’s anatomy washed away in a gush of adrenaline. Something was very wrong. He could feel it in his gut.

“Talk to me, CJ,” he said, instantly wishing he’d called her by her last name like every other officer on his team, but too concerned about her safety to worry about sounding overly familiar on an open frequency. “What the hell’s going on down there?”

“Sounds like...” CJ replied. “Like he’s got some kind of... zoo animal in there...” Salazar could hear a burst of terrified screams in the background. The truck was rocking on its axles. CJ drew her gun and took another step back. “Oh my God it’s...”

“Hold your position, Hogeland,” Salazar said, already half-running, half-sliding down the steep embankment toward the truck. “Keene, forget Ojon. We got a major situation here.”

“I just got him zipped,” Keene replied.

“Leave him!” Salazar said. “We’ll pick him up later.”

That was when the back of the truck burst open, roll-up door wrenched from its hinges and left dangling by the padlocked chain. Something leapt out and took CJ down, some kind of huge, lanky dog maybe, but whatever it was, it was inexplicably difficult to look at. Like its edges weren’t solid, but jittering and shifting with a seizure-like intensity. It gave off waves of rage like heat off a desert road at high noon.

Salazar tried to draw a bead on it, but focusing on its roiling shape was almost impossible and made the backs of his eyeballs ache. All he could see was CJ, laying there in the sand, head thrown back like it had been when she was laughing, when she was making love to him. Only now that sleek, muscular neck had been torn wide open, a fine crimson mist filling the air around what used to be her face as her body still tried to breathe through a ruptured windpipe. And then suddenly, that fierce, feral rage was focused on him.

He got off two shots before it was on him, tearing the rifle from his grip.

Ojon knelt in the sand, hands zip-tied behind his back. He couldn’t believe this was happening now, tonight. He had this blonde stripper in Phoenix who he was pretty sure would give it up the next time he saw her. He could tell she really liked him, not like all those other guys in the club. She obviously respected him, because of his reputation and connections to Las Maras. And even though she said she didn’t do that kind of thing, he knew she’d feel different when she saw the fat roll he collected from this latest crossing. Not to mention the nice clean eighth of coke he was planning to give her as a tip.
La pinché Migra
. They’d probably take that too.

Truth was, he was getting tired of these Coyote runs. It was way too hard, guiding all these stupid goats through the harsh desert. Sure, the pay was good and it got him laid by desperate women that were dying to get to the States, but he felt like it was high time he moved up in the organization. Something cushy, like sitting in a big office somewhere, telling people what to do over the phone while getting a
chupada
from his sexy secretary. He figured he’d talk to his cousin Beto about that as soon as he was processed and released.

When he heard shots, Ojon scrambled awkwardly to his feet and spun toward the truck. He couldn’t see what was happening from his angle, so he crept closer, peering through the brush and trying to get a glimpse of the action. When he did, he wished he hadn’t.

At first, he thought he was looking at a naked woman with wild black hair, facing away from him as one of the CBP officers drew down on her. If there had been a woman like that in the group, Ojon was sure he would have noticed. In fact, he definitely would have offered her his special discount. The officer was an older man, late forties with salt-and-pepper hair and a thick mustache. Ojon remembered him from one of his previous arrests, remembered that he was a real hardass. But he wasn’t acting like a hardass now. He was staring at the naked woman with wide eyes and a look first of horrified recognition and then stunned disbelief. The disbelief became terror as the thing that looked like a naked woman melted into something different. Something terrible.

Ojon turned and ran.

Dean Winchester eased the Impala up to eighty miles per hour. It was a knockout of a day. Sunny and perfect, like a vintage ad for America the Beautiful. Sky so blue it hurt. The red rock canyons of Sedona, Arizona had given way to windswept dunes as they headed west, toward the California border. He had a belly full of good greasy burgers from a Mom and Pop roadside stand a few miles back. Iron Maiden’s “Running Free” pumped through the speakers. His brother Sam rode shotgun, long legs bent at what had to be an uncomfortable angle and balancing his laptop on his knees, a scattering of clippings and photos spilling across his seat. The road seemed to stretch out forever. If Dean squinted, he could almost pretend things were the way they used to be. The way they were supposed to be.