Tijuana Straits

Chapter 1 The woman appeared with the first light, struggling across the dunes, a figure from the Revelation. Fahey saw her from the beach. There was a pack of feral dogs loose in the valley and Fahey had been hunting them for the better part of three days, without success. To complicate matters, he'd attempted to work behind a little crystal meth and it had left him in a bad place. He supposed that buying in the parking lot of the Palm Avenue 7-Eleven from a kid with a head shaped like a peanut and a hoop through his nose had not been the best of ideas. He watched as the figure crested a dune then disappeared from sight, still too distant to be properly identified as a woman. From the beach she appeared as little more than a hole in the dawn, a spidery black cutout in the faint yellow light just now beginning to seep from the summit of Cerro Colorado on the Mexican side of the fence that cut the valley into halves, and Fahey took her for one more clueless pilgrim stumbling toward the river that would most likely mark the end of the road. She might weep in bewilderment upon its banks or drown in its toxic waters. In either case there was little he could do, for he'd accepted as his charge the protection of certain migratory birds, most notably the western snowy plover and light-footed clapper rail, and within this jurisdiction the ubiquitous pilgrim was hardly a concern. Still, on the morning in question, Fahey found his obduracy mitigated by a kind of relief. It was, he believed, helpful to share the dawn with someone whose prospects were at least as fucked up as his own.As if on cue, Fahey's heart resumed hammering at an absurd rate. Earlier, at about that point when it was becoming clear the bargain-basement chemical intended to do him wrong, he'd considered seeking help. The thought, however, of actually presenting himself in the emergency room in San Ysidro, along with such theaters of humiliation as were bound to follow, was so appalling he'd abandoned the idea almost at once. One might, after all, have expected more from a man of Fahey's age. But then one would have been disappointed.Fahey put the pilgrim from his mind and knelt to examine the tracks. To his great disappointment, the prints were diamond-shaped and spaced to suggest the short, even gait of coyotes as opposed to dogs. The dogs' tracks would be rounder and farther apart. There would also be more of them. There were four dogs in the pack Fahey was hunting. He guessed the impressions before him to have been made by no more than two animals. He rose unsteadily in the soft sand. He'd glimpsed the tracks in his headlights from the opposite bank, then driven around for a closer look, slow going in the old valley's predawn Stygian gloom, his clutch beginning to smoke as the truck churned through the long beach in approach to the mouth of the river. He stared after the tracks as they veered into the dunes before losing themselves in shadow. Fahey considered himself a competent tracker. That he had been chasing the same four dogs for the better part of a week did not speak positively for his state of mind or, by extension of that logic, portend well for the future.He walked the short distance to his truck, a battered 1981 Toyota, nearly half as old as Fahey himself, of indiscernible color. The bed was a jumble of poorly maintained tools, a variety of traps, nets, and poles, remnants of a time when these sorts of outings had been what he'd done to earn a living. His preferred method of dealing with feral animals had always been to trap them and he'd hoped to catch one or more of the dogs in the same way. He had accordingly run two dozen cages and another half dozen leg holds. The leg hold traps were, strictly speaking, illegal in the state of California but Fahey was not anticipating complaints. The dogs were an unusually bad lot and Fahey could not remember any quite like them. Already they had mauled a border patrolman andNunn, Kem is the author of 'Tijuana Straits', published 2005 under ISBN 9780743279826 and ISBN 0743279824.