Long Range (Joe Pickett Book 20)(43)

His den couldn’t be spotted from the air, and it wouldn’t be stumbled upon by anyone other than perhaps a hiker or trekker walking directly up the draw. That was unlikely, he’d determined, because there was no public access to the foothills from either above or below. Even then, the camouflage mesh material he’d strung across the opening of his den disguised it so well that he’d walked by it a couple of times himself and not realized where he was.

The Toyota Land Cruiser he’d driven up from New Mexico was two miles away and above him, deep in the timber and covered by camouflage netting. If it were discovered, the authorities would learn that the license plates had been stolen years before in El Paso, Texas, and the VIN was bogus.

He’d left no paper trail on his journey north. No hotel room stays, no gasoline purchases except with cash. Orlando varied his look prior to and during every interaction he had with the public on the way north. In a gym bag at the foot of his sleeping pad were an array of wigs and press-on facial hair that he’d alternated three times a day until he got to his destination. He couldn’t be tracked electronically because he didn’t have a GPS device or cell phone.

The satellite phone they’d given him was turned on for no more than ten minutes at 9:30 p.m. During that period, they could call him with updates or fresh intel. That was the only way and time he could be reached. He’d yet to initiate a call of his own, and his habit was not to do so until his assignment was completed. They trusted him completely and he’d never given them a reason not to.

It was the same with Luna. She trusted him and she knew he always came back.

*

ORLANDO PANFILE WAS short, stocky, and dark with small stubby fingers and an oversized shaved head. One of his friends had nicknamed him El Pu?o, The Fist, because they said he looked like one walking around on two legs. He didn’t like to be called that, although he knew it was used when his back was turned. He was forty-six years old and he’d grown up fending for himself and living off the land.

Camping by himself for weeks on end, even so far away from his home, meant nothing to him. It reminded him of the months he’d spent alone as a teenager high in the Sierra Madre Occidental range after the corrupt local cops and the federales had surrounded his boyhood home in El Pozo, twenty minutes northeast of Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa.

Orlando’s father was a farmer and his crops were marijuana and poppies for the buyers from the cartel. Both crops would be packaged or refined and sent north where the market for them was. All of the locals had switched to those cash crops. Like their neighbors, the Panfiles didn’t consider themselves to be part of a criminal enterprise. They considered themselves to be what they were: farmers.

Nevertheless, the authorities had slaughtered his mother, father, and uncle as well as his younger brothers and his only sister in a hail of gunfire.

It was well known in the state at the time that the police were conducting raids on farmers in the area. The cops were doing it because they were associated with competing cartels, not because they were enforcing existing drug laws. After the local farmers were wiped out, new growers affiliated with the competing cartels were moved in to replace them.

Somehow during the firefight—and he still thought about it almost daily—Orlando had hurled himself out a back window and had run away, covering his head with his arms as if he were being attacked by swarming bees, not bullets. One brother had followed him, but he went down with a headshot.

Rounds had snapped through the air all around Orlando but, miracle of miracles, he wasn’t hit. He kept running until he was beyond their fields into the tangled brush and then he climbed, vanishing from the assailants into the mountains that rose six thousand feet. They searched for him for days and he saw them coming, but he hid and continued to go up. He climbed so far that the nights were cold and the pines, oaks, and firs gave way to grasslands on the mountaintops.

He ate nothing but roots and tubers for the first five days. Although he caught glimpses of mountain lions, badgers, coyotes, gray foxes, and white-tailed deer, he didn’t find meat until he stumbled on a fresh ring-tailed cat that had been killed by an eagle. He skinned the carcass, then roasted and smoked the flesh while the eagle circled through the sky above him.

Orlando had climbed so high that when he reached the top of the mountains, he could view the Sea of Cortez to the west and the state of Durango to the east. He’d eventually found an unoccupied, well-hidden cabin probably used by drug smugglers and he’d broken into it and stolen tools, clothing, binoculars, a tarp, and a bedroll. He’d been disappointed that there weren’t any weapons to take. Orlando didn’t stay long, though, because he knew that if the smugglers caught him, they would kill him as quickly and easily as the cops and federales would.

Orlando now thought of those months in the Sierra Madre Occidental as his real education. Living alone in the mountains taught him to be patient, resourceful, and tough. He learned how to catch rabbits with snares and he once dropped from a tree onto the back of a deer and slit its throat. Mountain lions stalked him at night, although none ever attacked. Regardless, he knew it was kill or be killed, and Orlando turned into an apex predator.

Once, while he was tracking a deer with a bow and arrow he’d made himself, he heard low talking and the footfalls of men in the bush. He flattened himself against the root pan of a downed pine tree when they got close. There were two of them: wiry, well-armed bounty hunters. Orlando never found out if they’d been sent by the police or the smugglers, and it didn’t matter. He shot an arrow through the temple of the first man, who’d dropped straight down and died before he hit the ground. While the second man bent over the first, trying to figure out what had happened, Orlando charged him from behind with his knife and sliced through both of his femoral arteries on the backs of his thighs, then retreated into the forest until the bounty hunter bled out. Before the second man died, he fired bullets wildly in the direction Orlando had run. Rounds smacked into tree trunks and cut down pine branches. Orlando waited him out while lying flat on his belly in the pine needle loam.