"He's going to find you," she pleaded. "The thermal scanner—if Miller gets here with the infrared camera, you won't be able to hide in the rocks. Your body heat will light up the canyon."
I watched Cole’s heavy boots slip on the shale above me. He was twenty yards away, moving methodically, keeping his weapon leveled at the darkness. He was a hunter closing in on a wounded animal, entirely confident in his lethal authority.
I looked at the glowing screen of the burner phone in my palm. It was my only lifeline to my daughter, my only connection to the outside world. But it was also a live microphone.
"Sarah, I need to pull him away from the SD card," I murmured, my voice perfectly steady. "I'm going to leave the phone open. Record everything."
"Dad, no! If you drop the phone, I can't warn you—"
"Tell the troopers to look for the three-point boulder at the bottom of the wash," I said, cutting off her protest.
I didn't wait for her reply. I wedged the burner phone deep into a dense, thorny patch of sagebrush at the base of the rock wall, leaving the microphone exposed to the open air. I left the call connected, the silent digital timer ticking upward in the dark.
I abandoned my lifeline, pushing myself up from the freezing dirt. I moved silently away from the hidden electronics, creeping laterally along the canyon floor, forcing my bruised ribs to endure the agonizing stretch. I needed to draw his fire away from the rock fissure.
"I know you're down here, old man," Cole’s voice boomed, bouncing off the limestone walls. His flashlight beam swept directly over the boulder where I had been hiding just seconds before. "You can't outrun a radio. My supervisor is two minutes away. Come out with your hands on your head, and maybe you survive the arrest."
He was lying. The heavy grip he maintained on his trigger discipline proved it.
I crouched behind a rotting cottonwood stump, fifteen feet away from the hidden burner phone. I reached down to the canyon floor and closed my heavy, calloused fingers around a solid chunk of limestone the size of a baseball.
Cole stepped onto the flat floor of the creek bed. His flashlight illuminated the thorny sagebrush. He was ten feet from the hidden phone, scanning the shadows with a predatory intensity.
I drew my arm back, fighting the blinding flare of pain in my chest, and threw the heavy stone as hard as I could into the darkness behind him.
The heavy chunk of limestone sailed through the freezing air and slammed violently against the far canyon wall, thirty feet to Cole’s right. The sharp, echoing crack of stone hitting stone sounded exactly like a man desperately scrambling for footing.
Cole reacted instantly. He pivoted hard, his heavy boots grinding into the gravel, and raised his service weapon toward the sudden noise. He didn't issue a warning. He didn't shout a command. He simply leveled the black steel sights and pulled the trigger.
The muzzle flash erupted like a localized lightning strike, briefly painting the entire canyon in stark, violent white. The deafening roar of the gunshot slammed into my eardrums, followed immediately by the sharp whine of a ricochet as the hollow-point round shattered against the rock face.
He had fired blindly into the dark, entirely willing to execute a shadow.
"Target engaged!" Cole shouted into the darkness, loudly manufacturing his official defense for the recording he assumed would happen later. "Suspect is armed and advancing! Drop the weapon!"
He fired a second round, the bullet chewing through the brittle branches of a dead mesquite bush.
I stayed perfectly still behind the rotting cottonwood stump, my heart pounding a heavy, bruising rhythm against my ribs. The trap was working. He was moving away from the hidden SD card and the live IA microphone, drawn entirely by the phantom noise.
But as the ringing in my ears began to fade, a new sound cut through the desolate silence of the desert night.
It wasn't the wail of a state trooper's siren. It was the heavy, rhythmic crunch of oversized tires rolling slowly onto the gravel shoulder of the highway directly above us. A secondary set of headlights washed over the canyon rim, casting long, monstrous shadows down the limestone walls.
A vehicle door slammed shut, heavy and authoritative.