Highlander's Love: Winter Solestice (Against All Odds Series 3) Read online

  But the coyotes were not good men. In fact, they were not even coyotes, but killers. Dirty white men who smelled of sweat and cigarettes who did bring her group to America, but they only brought them here to execute them and leave their bodies to rot under the boiling sun.

  Inez ran, though. The minute they stopped, she felt that something was wrong, and when the men rolled up the door of the box truck her group was riding in and she saw the semi-automatic rifles over their shoulders, she knew she was about to die, so she ran. She ran out into the hot desert with bullets chasing her, slamming into the dirt around her feet, whizzing through the air over her head. She had never been so scared in her entire life, but she didn’t lie down and cower in the hot dirt, she ran. She ran for hours under the scorching sun, her body dripping with sweat until she found an asphalt road and a sweet retired couple picked her up just as she was about to collapse.

  She told them her car had broken down and for some reason they believed her and told her they would take her as far they were headed, to a town called Apache Junction.

  Inez felt so lucky. She was safe, she still had a few hundred dollars hidden in her shoe, and she believed she would never see the dirty white men again.

  But she was wrong, they were coming for her.

  Chapter 1

  Most people think that Arizona is nothing but a bunch of gun crazed hillbillies running around in the desert, and the fact is, they wouldn’t be entirely wrong in that assumption. Arizona has more than its fair share of yahoos and peckerwoods running around shooting their mouths off, carrying around some big guns they don’t need, and driving around in gas guzzling pickup trucks that they don’t have much use for, either, other than proving that they have a lot of money, or at least pretending they do. But for the most part, Arizona has a lot more good, hard working people than we do crazies, and the only reason you hear about them more is because the whacko’s have bigger mouths and make for more interesting television footage.

  Arizona is in my blood. My family—the Collins—have lived in the state for 100 years longer than it's been a state. My family were a group of madmen who traveled across the country from Pennsylvania and Ohio in covered wagons, fought off bandits, fought off Apaches looking to collect their scalps, and decided for one reason or another that a nearly uninhabitable stretch of copper orange desert was a fine and dandy place to set up a homestead and raise a family. And I’m sure if I knew my ancestors from way back when, I would have laughed at them and told them to hustles their asses back home because one-half of them were going to die of heat stroke, and the other half burn up with fever caused by small pocks. But a couple of them, well, they would make it out of those harsh early times alive and prospered.

  The first of our wealth came entirely from gold. Back in the mid-19th century, southern Arizona was absolutely teeming with the stuff, but the thing was there weren’t enough people around to pick up off the ground and turn it into folding money. But the Collins’ were here and we scooped up by the ton. And when that all disappeared, we became a bit more sensible and went into copper. Needless to say, but precious metals were good to my family … At least until it all ran out. Well, the family at least with the family claims. Then for some reason or another, my father—the senior Henry to my junior—thought it was a fine idea to go into horse and cattle ranching. Which would have been incredibly profitable if we didn’t live in a sun-blasted desert?

  Now I won’t say that the Collins Ranch of Gold Canyon, AZ went belly up—it’s alive and well, obviously, because it's running takes up the bulk of my time and money—but it’s really just more of an expensive hobby as opposed to an actual business. Don’t get wrong, it brings in an income, and I’m damn proud of the horses—we dropped the cattle back in the mid-80’s due to the overall cost—that come out of here. But the fact is, year-after-year, more money goes out than comes in, and on certain days it feels like a thousand pound weight dragging off my shoulders. But on days like today, when the sun comes up and turns the sky into a riot of brilliants oranges and reds, and I’m riding on top of my favorite horse watching it happen, I love it more than life itself. Just like Arizona, ranching is in my blood, and even if it was completely bankrupting me—which it’s not even close to doing—I would still soldier on and work two or three jobs just to keep it afloat.

  “Henry!” But, yeah, there are some days, though, where all I want to do is hide away out in the desert, and when I hear Juan calling for me, I know today is going to be one of those days where I wish I could disappear. Not that he’s coming up here to tell me anything bad’s happening, but some days, all I want to do is ride and pretend the land around me is the land of my ancestors and that the only people out here are me, Myself, and I. But the illusion is completely broken when Juan rides right up on me on one of the ATV’s.

  “Boss, it’s time to get the Sanderson geldings loaded up. I know you wanted to be there to make sure out goes smooth.” He says as he spits into the rocks. Juan has been the ranch foreman going on 25 years. The man is as much a father to me as my old man ever was and I largely blame him for my love of ranch life, I couldn’t love him more even if I wanted to. I’m still not quite to him calling me boss, though, even if it’s been 10 years since he’s been doing it.

  “Yup, let’s get on down there and get it done while it’s still cool out.”

  ***

  We get the Sanderson geldings—all 24 of them—loaded and secured onto the trailers in just a little over 4 hours. Roy Sanderson is one of the ranch’s oldest clients, and back in the day when my father was running the place, Roy was just about the only person keeping the ranch afloat. As much as the old man loved horses and the desert, he wasn’t much of a rancher. In fact, he wasn’t all that much of a businessman even though he came from such a long line of them. The old man craved action, and the thing with ranch life is, there ain’t all that much action to be found in it. Forget about anything you’ve read, or seen in the movies and whatnot where you see ranch hands moving around all day roping stray steers or horses. All that working from sun up-to-sun down stuff is nothing but pure nonsense. For the most part, ranching is really more about waiting to work and then waiting for more work to come. More than a few of my boys will get so bored sometimes that they’ll invent chores for themselves to do.

  Because of this, and my father’s nervous nature, he had to go outside of the ranch to seek his thrills and he went into law enforcement. At first, he joined up with the Phoenix police department, but after a few years of doing nothing but being parked out on the I-10 pulling over speeders—which, I imagine, was an even bigger torture than ranching for the old man—he ended up running for sheriff of Apache Junction. Which, because of his name and the family’s reputation, he won by a landslide.

  Apache Junction—or AJ as it’s affectionately called by the locals—used to be a small retirement village planted against the foothills of the Superstition Mountains. When the old man was sheriff, it was little more than a loose collection of mobile home parks, RV dealerships, and antique stores. It was quiet and peaceful. But then the Baby Boomers started retiring, and they brought in a load of their crappy, dependent adult children who brought along all of their crappy, dependent adult problems.

  Mostly drugs, specifically, methamphetamines, and lots of it.

  The old man basically went from having a sleepy little town of docile, white-haired grandmas and grandpas, where usually the worst thing that happened was that one of them would drop dead in the middle of the night, to having a town where break-ins and drug-related homicides became a daily occurrence. The old man got his thrills with his new job and then some. So much so that it eventually ended up getting him killed. He walked in on a couple of speed freaks tossing a trailer house, and both of them had shotguns. They let loose on him the second he stuck his head in the door. I was 25 when it happened and rounding out my second tour in Iraq. The army let me go a couple of months early to take care of things at home along with my brother Samuel and Paul.r />
  I thought when I came back, the three of us would re-bond over the old man’s death, and we’d end up running the ranch together side-by-side. But no such thing happened, it was nothing but a misty-eyed fantasy of a man who’d been gone from home for too long. Sam had his own thing going on down in Tucson—he was and still is a commander with the U.S. border patrol—and Paul was bent on revenge. Not so much revenge against the fellas who shot the old man—Dad’s deputies had taken care of that a couple of days after the shooting—but in a general angry young man kind of way. He joined up with the Phoenix PD with his eyes set on becoming part of their drug task force.

  For better or worse, the ranch was mine and mine alone. And for awhile, it was lonely as hell, but then I grew to love the solitude of it all and realized that I absolutely needed it.

  Chapter 2

  The retired couple dropped Inez off at a small motel on the outskirts of the town of Apache Junction called the Goldmine. It was a small, dusty looking place that only had two cars in the parking lot. But at that particular moment, it looked like absolute heaven. The front desk was attended by a little old woman who looked like she was evening older and more worn than the motel. But she was friendly and didn’t ask Inez for a credit card in order to check-in and she paid in cash for a two-night stay. She was actually quite surprised by the cleanliness of the room. The bed smelled of fresh sheets and the bathroom gleamed shiny and white.

  The very first thing she did once the door was locked behind her was strip out of her grimy, sweat-caked clothes and step under the ice cold spray of the shower and open her mouth to drink and drink until she felt like she was going to be sick. She had never been so thirsty in her entire life, nor had her skin ever felt so filthy. The dust and dirt that washed off of her left a dark brown ring in the tub. She climbed out of the tub shivering and exhaust and collapsed on the bed in a heap as her body finally gave out and she tumbled headlong into an 18-hour long sleep.

  When she finally woke up, she could barely move a muscle for nearly two hours. Her entire body throbbed with both dehydration and running for her life across the burning desert for miles and miles. When she was finally able to rise, she once again returned to the shower, but instead of standing under an ice cold jet, she sat on the floor of the tub and turned the temperature of the water as hot as she could stand it, allowing the steam and heat to lose her stiff muscles. After her shower, she washed her filthy clothes by hand using the free miniature bottle of shampoo and then wrapped in a thick terry cloth robe, she turned on the television, surfing through the channels until she found a local news program.

  She wanted to know if the group of immigrants she'd been traveling had been discovered or not? She sat watching the news for two hours and there was nothing reported about it, and for some reason, the lack of coverage sent a chill down her spine. It either meant that the local news media didn’t care about a group of dead Mexicans— that wasn’t just the American television news, either. Thousands of bodies were discovered in her country and never reported. There was just too much murder and death in her native country thanks to the narcos—or the bodies had been hidden or destroyed and no one but the coyotes knew that the people she had ridden in the truck with were dead. The coyotes and her.

  And this is what scared her the most, she was a witness. She had seen the men’s faces, each of them would be burned in her memory for all time and this was dangerous because she could identify the men and turn them into the police. She prayed that the coyotes had just decided to give up their search for her, but the one thing the life with the cartels had taught her was that criminals never left witnesses to murder alive.

  ***

  Inez paid for another two nights, and the little old woman—who named Mariel and she was the owner of the Goldminer—gave her a substantial discount.

  “I’ll just book you at the weekly rate, dear,” She said as she patted Inez’s hand affectionately.

  She couldn’t believe the sheer amount of kindness she had experienced since she’d crossed the border. True, the men who had brought her here had tried to kill her, but everyone since then had been so willing to provide her favors without expecting anything else in return. So often in Mexico she had seen news reports about people who would voluntarily “guard” the invisible border between Mexico and the United States with high-powered firearms. These people would say the most hateful things about Mexicans who were only attempting to go to the U.S. to search out better lives for themselves. Most of these immigrants weren’t criminals, they were hard working people who weren’t able to find decent paying jobs in their home country. But yet, these people—most of whom looked like the coyotes who had tried to kill her—only saw them as parasites who wanted to do nothing but rape, murder, and take jobs away from American citizens.

  Of course, the jobs illegal Mexicans were “taking” weren’t the kind of jobs most Americans wanted to work, so their ire made no sense to her.All the same, she was grateful for the kindness she had received, especially after what she’d endured.

  Now that her lodging had been taken care, Inez needed two more things: Fresh clothing and food other than the surgery and salty snacks she had been living on out of the vending machine next to her room. After she paid for her room, Inez asked Mariel if there was a clothing store and market close by.

  “There’s a Wal*Mart about a mile down the road. I can call you a cab if you want?”

  Inez declined the offer. A mile long walk was nothing, when she first went to work at thirteen, the factory she worked at was a four-mile walk from her family’s home and she made this trek back and forth for close to 10 years, so one mile was no effort for her. Besides, she knew that if she didn’t stretch her tired muscles a bit chances were they would remain stiff for several more days so it was better that she exercised them.

  As she walked, as far as she could tell, there weren’t that many differences between Mexico and the United States. There were just as many cars—although the cars here were nicer and newer—and just as much pollution and crowding. The only real difference that she’d noticed so far was that most people only spoke English, whereas Inez not only spoke Spanish fluently but as well as both French and English Her father very much believed in education—despite the fact that he pulled all of his children out of school by age 13, but this was entirely for financial reasons and you could tell it broke his heart to do it—and being able to adapt to an ever-changing world.

  She arrived at the shopping plaza which was jam packed full of cars as dozens of people streamed in and out of Wal*Mart. Although the retail chain had been in Mexico for almost 30 years, Inez had never stepped inside of one other than to use the restroom. As she walked inside with a large group of customers, her skin was immediately cooled by the blasting air conditioner, It was absolutely heavenly after her walk. She surveyed the store in wonder. Everything a family would need to run its household was all under one enormous roof. It felt decadent and a bit overwhelming.

  It took her a few minutes to orient herself to her surroundings and then quickly located the things she needed: Bread, vegetables, fruit, prepackaged lunch meat, two changes of clothing. Her emergency money that she had hidden in her shoe was quickly evaporating, she knew she would have to find a job sooner rather than later otherwise she would be out on the street. For a moment, she thought about the possibility of maybe living and working at the Goldminer? Mariel seemed very nice, and most likely she needed people to clean the guest rooms. And if she didn’t have an opening, maybe she knew of another motel that needed maids?

  As she paid the unsmiling cashier from her crumpled wad of bills and change, she felt a sudden sense of dread wash over her, as if someone was watching her too closely. As the cashier handed her back her change, she understood why she experienced this creeping feeling. In the lane directly in front opposite her’s, she saw one of the coyotes who had tried to kill her staring right at her, his eyes narrowed as if he was searching his memory of where he’d seen her before? Inez qui
ckly looked away from the man and snatched up her three plastic bags and kept herself staring straight ahead as she passes his checkout line.

  She felt her heart hammering in her chest as mind replayed those final minutes at the box truck. He had been the one to pull open the door, his machine gun hung casually over his shoulder, his dead, flat eyes unmoving and cold. As she walked, she could still feel him behind her, his eyes boring into the back of her head. She knew he was following her and she began to panic. The walk back to the motel was a desolate one. Yes, there were a few buildings she remembered passing, but she didn’t think they would give her any real place to hide. Plus, she would be leading him right back to where she was staying and she might not only be endangering herself but everyone at the motel as well.

  She needed to either lose the coyote in the parking lot or find a place close by to hide, and then double back to the motel. She scanned the parking lot and the other buildings surrounding the massive store. Most of the shops were small businesses that looked like they were getting ready to close for the evening. But then she spotted what looked like a restaurant in the far corner of the shopping complex. It looked as busy and crowded as the Wal*Mart had. She didn’t know if she would be able to lose her pursuer inside of the restaurant, but she didn’t think he would be bold enough to try and grab her with so many people inside of it. She wound her way through the busy parking lot, purposefully striding towards the restaurant entrance praying that she wouldn’t feel the coyote’s dead hands suddenly grab her.