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  Otto the Bump scrambled back into the Navigator while Mickey and Mango pushed and pulled each other in their haste to climb inside lest they get left behind.

  “Feds,” Otto growled between clenched teeth as he started the big V-8 engine. “I told you, I don’t like messing with Feds.”

  “She ain’t the freaking Feds,” Mickey snapped. His face red with anger, he turned on Mango. “You want to shoot off that piece of yours, you freaking idiot, shoot that damn girl. Otto, go get her.”

  The old quarry made a box canyon. Its dead-end access road was too narrow for the Navigator to turn around, so it had to back out the way it came in. Pansy was impressed by the driver’s skill as he made a fast exit, but she still beat the Navigator to the mouth of quarry. For a moment, she stopped her bike crosswise to the road, blocking them. There was no way, she knew, that she could hold them until the authorities might arrive. Her entire purpose in stopping was to announce herself and to lure them after her, away from the nest. She hoped that they would think that size and firepower were enough to take her out.

  Pansy’d had enough time to get a good look at her opponents, to make some assessments. The two little guys were casino rats with a whole lot of starched cuff showing, fusspot city shoes, jackets buttoned up when it was a hundred freaking degrees out there. Beach Boy would be fine in a cabana, but dressed as he was and without provisions . . . Vegas rats, she thought; the desert would turn them into carrion.

  Rule one when outmanned and outgunned is to let the enemy defeat himself. Pansy figured that there was enough macho inside the car that once a little-bitty girl on a little-bitty bike challenged them to a chase, they wouldn’t have the courage to quit until she was down or they were dead. Pansy sniffed as she lowered her helmet’s face guard; overconfidence and geographic naïveté had brought down empires. Ask Napoleon.

  Pansy didn’t hear the burst of gunfire, but twice she felt the air wiffle past her head in that particular way that makes the hair of an experienced soldier stand up on end. As she bobbed and wove, creating an erratic target, she also kept herself just outside the range of the big handgun she had seen. Still, she knew all about random luck and reminded herself not be too cocky herself, or too reliant on the law of averages.

  Because she was in the lead, Pansy set the course. Her program involved stages of commitment: draw them in, give them a little reward as encouragement, then draw them in further until their training and equipment were overmatched by the environment and her experience. Play them.

  The contest began on the decently paved road that headed out of Lee Canyon. Before the road met the freeway, Pansy veered onto a gravel by-road that took them due north, bisecting the canyons. When the road became a dry creek bed, Pansy disregarded the dead-end marker and continued to speed along; the Navigator followed. The canyons had been cut by eons of desert water runoff. The bottoms, except during the rainy season, were as hard-packed as fired clay and generally as wide as a two-lane road, though there were irregular patches of bone-jarring embedded rocks and small boulders and some narrows. The bike could go around obstacles; the four-wheel-drive Navigator barreled over them.

  Pansy picked up a bit of pavement in a flood control culvert where the creek passed under the freeway, and slowed slightly to give the Navigator some hope of overtaking her. But before they could quite catch her, she turned sharply again, this time onto an abandoned service road, pulling the Navigator behind as she continued north.

  At any time, Pansy knew she could dash up into any of the narrow canyons that opened on either side of the road, and that the big car couldn’t follow her. She held on to that possibility as an emergency contingency as she did her best to keep her pursuers intrigued.

  The canyons became smaller and broader, the terrain flatter, and Pansy more exposed. Sun bore down on her back and she cursed the wusses behind her in their air-conditioned beast. At eleven o’clock, right on schedule, the winds began to pick up. Whorls of sand quickly escalated to flurries and then to blinding bursts. Pansy pulled down the sand screen that was attached to her face guard, but she still choked on grit, felt fine sand grind in her teeth. None of this, as miserable as it made her feel, was unfamiliar or anything she could not handle.

  Always, Pansy was impressed by the skill of the driver following her and by his determination. He pushed the big vehicle through places where she thought he ought to bog down. And then there were times that, if he had taken more risk, he could have overcome her. That he had refrained clued Pansy to the strategy: the men in the car thought they were driving her to ground. They were waiting for her to fall or falter in some way. She used this assumption, feigning, teasing, pretending now and then to weaken, always picking up her speed or maneuvering out of range just before they could get her, to keep them engaged. Some birds used a similar ploy, pretending to be wounded or vulnerable as a feint to lure predators away from their nests.

  The canyons ended abruptly and the terrain became flat, barren desert bottom. There was no shelter, no respite, only endless heat and great blasts of wind-whipped sand. Pansy could no longer see potholes or boulders, nor could any of them see roadside markers. Though Pansy could not see the road and regularly hit bone jarring dips and bumps, she was not navigating blind. Three times a year she ran a survival course through the very same area. She had drawn her pursuers into the hollow between Little Skull and Skull Mountains, headed toward Jackass Flats, a no man’s land square in the middle of the Nellis Air Force Base gunnery range.

  ~ * ~

  “Get her,” Mickey growled. The silk handkerchief he held against his nose muffled his words. “I have things to do in town. Take her out. Now.”

  Mango’s only response was to reload.

  Otto swore as he switched off the AC and shut down the vents. Sand so fine he could not see it ground under his eyelids, filled his nose and throat, choked him. Within minutes the air inside the car was so hot that sweat ran in his eyes, made his shirt stick to his chest and his back, riffled down his shins. There was no water, of course, because this was supposed to be a quick job, out of Vegas and back in an hour. He had plenty besides heat and thirst to make him feel miserable. First, he thought he could hear the effects of grit on the car’s engine, a heaviness in its response. Next, he had a pretty good idea what Mickey would do to him if he let the girl get away.

  How could they have gotten so far into this particular hell? Otto wondered. In the beginning, it had seemed real simple. Follow the girl until they were out of the range of any potential witnesses, then run over the girl and her pissant bike like so much road kill. But every time he started to make his move, she’d pull some damn maneuver and get away: she’d side-slip him or head down a wash so narrow that he had to give the road — such as it was — his undivided attention. The SUV was powerful, but it had its limitations, the first of which was maneuverability: it had none.

  And then there was Mickey and his constant nudging, like he could do any better. By the time they came out of the canyons and onto the flats, Otto was so sick and tired of listening to Mickey, contending with the heat, the sand, and the damn girl and her stunts that he didn’t care much how things ended, only that they ended immediately. He knew desperation and danger could be found on the same page in the dictionary, but he was so desperate to be out of that place that he was ready to take some risks; take out the girl and get back up on the freeway and out of the sand, immediately.

  Between gusts Otto caught glimpses of the girl, so he knew more or less where she was. Fed up, he put a heavy foot on the accelerator and waited for the crunch of girl and bike under his thirty-two-inch wheels.

  ~ * ~

  Pansy heard the SUV’s motor rev, heard also the big engine begin to miss as it became befouled by sand. With the Navigator accelerating toward her, Pansy snapped the bottle of wine out of its breakaway pouch, grasped it by the neck, gave it a wind up swing as she spun her bike in a tight one-eighty, and let the bottle fly in a trajectory calculated to collide dead center wi
th the rapidly approaching windshield.

  As she headed off across the desert at a right angle to the road, she heard the bottle hit its target and pop, heard the windshield give way, heard the men swear, smelled the brakes. The massive SUV decelerated from about fifty MPH to a dead, mired stop in the space of a mere sixty feet. Its huge, heavy-tread tires sliced through the hard desert crust and found beneath it sand as fine as talcum powder and as deep as an ocean. Forget four-wheel drive; every spin of the wheels merely kicked up a shower of sand and dug them in deeper. The behemoth SUV was going nowhere without a tow.

  When she heard the rear deck hatch pop open, Pansy careened to a stop and dove behind a waist-high boulder for cover. As Beach Boy, leaning out the back hatch, unloaded a clip in her general direction, Pansy, lying on her belly, pulled out her slingshot, strapped it to her wrist, reached into the pouch of three-eighths-inch steel balls hanging from her belt, and, aiming at the dull red flashes coming from the end of Beach Boy’s automatic, fired back. She heard random pings as her shot hit the side of the Navigator.

  “She’s packing heat,” Otto yelled. Pansy continued to ping the side of the car with shot; sounded enough like bullet strikes.

  Mango finally spoke. More exactly, Mango let out an ugly liquid-filled scream when Pansy’s steel balls pierced his throat and his cheek. Mortally hit, he grabbed his neck as he fell forward, tumbling out of the SUV. With the big back window hanging open, the SUV quickly filled with fire-hot, swirling yellow sand.

  “She got Mango!” Otto yelled in Mickey’s direction. “We try to run for it, she’ll get us, too.”

  Mickey Togs, feeling faint from the heat, barely able to breathe, pulled his beautiful silver-gray suit coat over his head, being careful not to wrinkle it or get sweat on it, and tried, in vain, to get a signal on his cell phone. He didn’t know who to call for help in this particularly humiliating situation, or, if he should be able to get a call out — and he could not —just where he happened to be for purposes of directing some sort of rescue.

  Otto the Bump heard Mickey swear at his dead phone and nearly got hit with it when Mickey, in a rage, threw the thing toward the cracked and leaking windshield. Not knowing what else to do, Otto reached for the little piece strapped to his left ankle.

  “I’m making a run for it,” Otto said.

  “Idiot, what are your chances?” Mickey asked. “You got thirty, forty miles of desert, no water, can’t see through that damn sand, and a lunatic out there trying to kill you.”

  “If I stay in this damn car or I make a run for it, I figure it’s eighty-twenty against me either way,” Otto said. “I prefer to take it on the run than sitting here waiting.”

  “Ninety-five to five.” Mickey straightened the knot in his tie. “You do what you think you gotta do. I’m staying put.”

  “Your choice, but you still owe me a hundred K,” Otto said. He chambered a round as he opened the car door, brought his arm against his nose, and dropped three feet down to the desert floor.

  ~ * ~

  5:00 p.m., April 20

  Downtown Las Vegas, Nevada

  Without pausing for so much as a perfunctory hello to the clerk on duty, Pansy Reynard strode past the reception desk of the regional office of the Department of Fish and Game and straight back to the pathology lab. Pansy had showered and changed from her dirty desert camouflage BDUs — battle-dress utilities — into sandals, a short khaki skirt, and a crisp, sleeveless linen blouse; adaptability, she knew well, is the key to survival.

  She opened the lab door and walked in. When Lyle, the so recently absent Lyle, looked up, she placed a large bundle wrapped in a camouflage tarp onto his desk, right on top of the second half of a tuna sandwich he happened to be eating, and then she flipped her sleek fall of hair over her shoulder for effect.

  Eyes wide, thoroughly nonplused, Lyle managed to swallow his mouthful of sandwich and to speak. “What’s this?”

  “I went back to the nest this afternoon after the sandstorm blew out.” Pansy unfastened the bundle and two long, graceful wings opened out of the tarp chrysalis. “I found her in the canyon.”

  “Oh, damn.” Lyle stood, ashen-faced now, tenderly lifted the mother Aplomado falcon and carried her to a lab bench. He examined her, discovered the deep crimson wound in her black chest. Through gritted teeth he said, “Poachers?”

  “Looks like it,” Pansy said.

  “What about the hatchling?”

  “He’s okay but he has to be hungry.” With reverent sadness, Pansy stroked the mother falcon’s smooth head. “Another week or two and the baby will be ready to fend for himself. But in the meantime, someone needs to get food to him. Or he needs to be brought in to a shelter.”

  Lyle sighed heavily. He was obviously deeply moved by this tragedy, a quality that Pansy found to be highly attractive.

  “What are you going to do, Lyle?”

  “I’ll ask for a wildlife team to come out,” he said. “Someone will get up there tomorrow to rescue the hatchling. Too bad, though. We’ve lost a chance to reestablish a nesting pattern.”

  “Tomorrow?” There was a flash of indignation in her tone.

  “He’ll be okay overnight.”

  “What if the poachers come back tonight?”

  Again he sighed, looked around at the cluttered lab and the stacks of unfinished paperwork. Then he turned and looked directly into Pansy’s big brown eyes.

  “Pansy, I need help,” he said. “Will you watch the nest tonight?”

  “Me?” She touched her breastbone demurely, her freshly scrubbed hand small and delicate-looking. “Alone? Lyle, there are people with guns out there.”

  “You’re right,” he said, chagrined. “Sorry. Of course you shouldn’t be alone. You shouldn’t have been alone last night and this morning, either. It’s just I got jammed up here in the office with a possible plague case in a ground squirrel, Chamber of Commerce all in a lather that word would get out. I couldn’t break away.”

  “Ground squirrels aren’t in danger of extinction,” she said.

  “I am sorry, very sorry,” Lyle said, truly sounding sorry. “Look, Pansy, I really need you. If I join you, will you be willing to go back to the nest tonight?”

  She took a long breath before responding, not wanting to sound eager. After a full ten count, during which he watched her with apparent interest, she nodded.

  “The two of us should be able to handle just about anything that comes up,” she said. “I’ll meet you out front in five minutes.”

  “In five,” he said as he peeled off his lab coat. “In five.”

  <>

  ~ * ~

  ANDREW KLAVAN

  Her Lord and Master

  from Dangerous Women

  It was obvious she’d killed him, but only I knew why. I’d been Jim’s friend, and he’d told me everything. It was a shocking story in its way. I found it shocking, at any rate. More than once, when he confided in me, I’d felt the sweat gathering under my collar, on my chest. Goose bumps, and what in a more decorous age we would have called a “stirring in the loins.” Nowadays, of course, we’re supposed to be able to talk about these things, about anything, in fact. There are so many books and movies and television shows claiming to shatter “the last taboo” that you’d think we were in danger of running out of them.

  Well, let’s see. Let’s just see.

  ~ * ~

  Jim and Susan knew each other at work, and began a relation­ship after an office party, standard stuff. Jim was Vice President in charge of Entertainment at one of the larger radio networks.

  “I don’t know what my job is,” he used to say, “but by gum I must be doing it.” Susan was an Assistant Manager in Person­nel, which meant she was the secretary in charge of schedul­ing.

  Jim was a tallish, elegant Harvard grad, thirty-five. On the job, he had a slow, thoughtful manner, a way of appearing to consider every word he spoke. Plus a way of boring into your eyes when you spoke, as if every neuron h
e had was engaged in whatever tedious matter you’d brought before him. After hours, thankfully, he became more satirical, more sardonic. To be honest, I think he considered most people little better than idiots. Which makes him a cockeyed optimist, if you ask me.

  Susan was sharp, dark, energetic, in her twenties. A little thin and beaky in the face for my taste, but pretty enough with long, straight, black, black hair. Plus she had a fine figure, small and compact and gracefully, meltingly round at breast and hip. Her attitude was aggressive, funny, challenging: You gonna take me as I am, pal, or what? Which I think disguised a cer­tain defensiveness about her Queens background, her educa­tion, maybe even her intelligence. In any case, she could put a charge in your morning, striding by in a short skirt, or draw­ing her hair from her mouth with one long nail. A Watercooler Fuck, was the general male consensus. In those sociological de­bates in which gentlemen are prone to discuss how their vari­ous female colleagues and acquaintances should be coupled with, Susan was usually voted the girl you’d like to shove against the watercooler and take standing up with the overnight cleaning crew vacuuming down the hall.