Desert Shadow

By Eileen Harris

We couldn't stand by while they took these children. We both had guns, but so did they, and we knew a firefight wasn't the answer. We would definitely lose, and some of the children might be hurt. I couldn't think of a single way to create a diversion that would keep us from having to confront these thugs. There were only moments left before we'd have to act. Paul and I tensed in readiness to rush out in a hopeless effort at rescue, when somewhere behind the smugglers and their charges the Shadow Wolf group rose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wings ePress, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781613090619

Book preview

One

We had driven into the large dry wash between our house and town and were coming up the other side when a black SUV sped out of the desert onto our side of the road, heading straight for us. Paul left the road to avoid a collision. The SUV missed us, but immediately spun around and began chasing us...hard. Both Paul and I have driven all our lives on these desert roads. A lot of them still aren't paved, and the ones that are tend to be narrow, bumpy, and filled with potholes. All our vehicles have four-wheel drive and we use it often. We realized quickly we couldn't outrun our pursuers. Maybe we should stop and ask them what the heck is going on?

That would be my normal response, Paul said. Somehow this feels different. Whoever is driving that car seems to have targeted us, and whatever the reason, I don't relish a confrontation.

I had to agree. It certainly feels that way. I can't see anything inside the car. All their windows are tinted way past the legal limit. If this were all a mistake, you'd think they'd have gone away and left us alone by now.

Gripping the wheel and not looking at me, Paul said, I have an idea, so hold on tight.

I didn't need the warning. I had already checked my seat belt and tightened my grip on the handhold. I stopped talking so I wouldn't distract him. In the center console, I had a little two-shot pistol, and I did loosen my grip long enough to ease it into my lap. I'd never shot anyone, but I knew how to use the gun.

This time, Paul left the road on purpose and drove out across the desert. This area had been used as an army base during WWII, and even now almost no vegetation will grow here. The ground is like the dunes in the Sahara desert. We call it blow sand. It's very fine and almost impossible to drive through when it piles up. Paul changed to four-wheel drive on the fly and drove over a three-foot ridge of pure blow sand. The larger SUV chasing us hit that wall of dirt and sank like a rock. I don't know if they had four-wheel drive or not, but they certainly weren't using it. We didn't stop to ask questions. Paul maneuvered back onto the road and raced for home. When we got to the house, we locked the doors and called the sheriff.

Sheriff Connors’ arrival about thirty minutes later was a quick response to our call. At normal speed, we're forty-five minutes from the closest county sheriff's office located in Green Valley.

Once we were settled inside, the sheriff said, Okay, guys, what's going on? I think this is the first time anyone from the department has needed to come out here.

We trap-shoot with Jack twice a month and consider him a friend. We explained what had happened and he said, That's strange. Just yesterday the Butlers, farther up the mountain, called complaining that a black SUV had been hanging around their place and creeping them out. It might have been the same vehicle. I imagine they're long gone by now, but I'll take a run down by the wash and look around. If I should happen to find anything, I'll give you a call. If you see them again or anything else happens, you call me right away.

I said, They were probably sightseers stirring up trouble, but if we see that SUV again, we'll sure call.

Sheriff Connors might look like a grizzled cowboy, but he is Arizona born and raised and knows this country well. He gets re-elected from year to year by being smart, capable, and a really good cop. If the SUV hung around, he would find it and do his best to find out why it had tried to run us down.

That first sign of trouble had come in the middle of a routine day, but another two weeks would pass before the events began that shattered our peaceful life.

TWENTY YEARS AGO, MY husband and I bought two hundred and forty acres in the high desert outside of Arivaca, Arizona. We thought it would be the perfect place to retire when the time came. The property is surrounded by mountains on three sides. The section behind is owned by the Bureau of Land Management, and to the north is a high, rugged mountain range. South at the edge of our property is a ridge of small rocky hills, and beyond that, four miles of desert to the Mexican border. In front of the house looking east is a wide open valley sloping gently down from our elevation ten miles to the highway. Across the highway are more desert and then another mountain range.

The weather is supposed to be ideal, but the winters are too cold, the summers too hot, and the wind blows up through our valley all the time. It varies from almost hurricane proportion to a gentle breeze. However, the air is clean, the water is pure, and the stars at night completely fill the sky. Our closest neighbor is two miles away, and we can't see anything but desert in any direction. A peaceful place. When we aren't traveling, our days are filled with pleasure over the vegetables growing in the garden and the entertainment of an infrequent trip to town to buy the things we can't make or grow. These trips give us an excuse for a meal out at one of our favorite restaurants, and we almost always run into a friend or two, giving us a chance to catch up on local gossip.

There are a few other desert dwellers scattered around this area. We know most of our neighbors and many are friends. When we lived and worked in Tucson, we barely knew the people in the houses next to ours. Out here it's different. People make the effort to get acquainted. Arivaca isn't a town, just two steakhouses, a bar, a post office, and a convenience market. Its biggest claim to fame is the entrance to one of the restaurants. The whole front of the place is a huge plaster cow head including very large horns. The door is through the mouth. This restaurant has been there a long time, and I've seen pictures of it in several western magazines. When we want to shop, we first drive the five miles to Arivaca and then another twenty miles to Green Valley. My once-active contractor husband, at age fifty-eight, is now retired. At fifty-five, I continue to write books, but not with the same dedication I once did. We may be retired, but we don't live a sedentary lifestyle. We never have, and so far we haven't had any reason to change. Paul, with his great build, a full head of silver hair and engaging grin, still turns the ladies' heads. At five feet six inches and one hundred and twenty-eight pounds that I work hard to keep mostly muscle, I do my best to keep up with him.

Two

Because the next two weeks passed quietly, we had nearly written off our encounter with the black SUV. All kinds of people drive out into the desert to explore, and many of them drink a lot, spend time target-shooting, rock hunting, or photographing plants. Littering, shooting cactus, and general mischief go right along with the rest. Some people even use the lonely stretches of desert as a place to dump trash. Being the only people in a huge expanse of desert is a different type of isolation, and it seems to make some people a little crazy. It's hard to explain the desert around Tucson that extends south all the way to Mexico. The area boasts a wide variety of cactus, from the tall majestic saguaro to the smallest prickly pear. In the spring, the cactus blooms in a rainbow of colors. Every inch of open ground covers with wildflowers. When you add in mesquite and palo verde trees in abundance, it bears almost no resemblance to the pictures we see of the barren desert sand with no vegetation in sight. Unlike forested areas, you can see to the horizon in every direction. That may be a mountain range tinted blue, purple and pink, or when the view is unblocked by these huge rocky peaks, the horizon is as far as your eyes will carry your sight. The desert is huge and ever-changing. At times you can see rainstorms miles away, and the sunsets are legendary. Many people accustomed to being surrounded by trees feel very exposed and find the desert an inhospitable place. It takes time to let your mind stretch to accommodate the vistas painted in pastel colors. When I've had the opportunity to visit woodland areas for any length of time, I have a bit of the opposite reaction and feel caged by a wall of green. Here again, it takes time to appreciate the variety that's there when you look for it. Given a chance, nature is beautiful in all her different costumes.

THE NIGHT TWO WEEKS after the incident with the SUV, we went to bed with no worries but maybe with a little extra caution because Paul locked the doors last thing before turning out the lights. It wasn't unusual for us to leave them unlocked, even when making a trip to town. I noticed, but made no comment, and we quickly fell asleep. We'd had a long day working on a new building we were calling the grill house. The ever-present wind interfered whenever we wanted to cook outside, so we decided to build something that would protect both the smoker and the grill. This way we could use them without the wind making it impossible to control the temperature and without being pelted by blowing sand. We designed a ten-by-ten building with windows on three sides and a door on the other. With a full screen door in addition to the main door, we could open our cookhouse to the weather, or close out the annoying wind. We were installing an exhaust fan over the grill area, and down the other side we planned to put a counter with a sink. We'd already run electricity and water to the building. It wasn't a necessity, but it was typical of the way we'd built everything to suit our personal needs. We'd had twenty years to work on the house and grounds before we retired, and even now, we enjoyed adding something new from time to time. With so much time to design not just a home but a lifestyle, we'd been able to eliminate most problems. The only annoyance we had never been able to get rid of completely was the difficulty of producing electrical power. We enjoy never having to see power poles marring the landscape, but even with lots of solar panels, plenty of batteries, and a wind generator, there are still times we had to run a diesel generator to produce all the power our lifestyle demanded. Even more troublesome than the times the power died and we had to run to turn on the generator, was the extreme amount of maintenance required to keep everything going. Keeping and storing enough fuel for the generator wasn't fun either. We kept looking for a better way to power our ranch, but so far technology was behind our needs. Power remained our one unsolved negative, but we hadn't given up looking for a better way.

THIS PARTICULAR NIGHT at about two in the morning, our dog, Stretch, jumped on the bed. He can bark but almost never does. We got him from the animal shelter at five months old, and now at the age of two we'd heard him bark maybe four times. He has his own bed and the only time he ever joins us in ours is when something happens he finds frightening. He isn't afraid of much. Coyotes are his biggest fear, and when they are howling close by, he often moves into our bed looking for reassurance. When he hit the bed, I knew something had upset him and I sat up, ready to assure him everything would be fine. That's when I heard the noise. Out here where everything is dead silence, noise carries a long way. At first I thought it must be the wind rattling some of our many supplies stored in the garage, but it hadn't sounded quite right. You can't live here long without recognizing every usual sound. Listening as it came a second time, I realized someone had turned the door knob on the front door, causing the screen to rattle. I knew then what the dog had heard. It wasn't coyotes. For one second, I froze and then I leaned over and whispered to Paul. Are you awake?

Sounding completely alert, he said, I am now. What's up? He kept his voice as quiet as mine.

Someone tried the front door. The dog is upset, so it has to be strangers. Should I get the guns, or shall we go out the tunnel?

Already standing, he answered. Both I think. You get the guns and I'll get the cover off the entrance.

By the time I grabbed the pistols and ammunition out of the night stands, he already had the trap door up and had begun throwing clothes down the hole.

Because we live in the desert, the summers get very hot, and our elevation is high enough that the winters get very cold. In order to help deal with these harsh conditions, Paul had built a four-by-four open chase under the house. It had concrete block walls, and these were used as the supports for the concrete floor of the house above. Our bedroom closet had a two-by-two-foot opening into the tunnel below. A lot of the plumbing and electrical wires were located in this out-of-the way space. Besides the opening in the closet, under our front deck a small door opened to the outside. During the summers, we pumped cool air into the chase, and during the winter we filled it with warm air. The rooms above had vents to receive this air, which helped keep our house comfortable whatever the temperature outside. There were a lot of strange features to our home, but they all suited our lifestyle.

Before I lowered myself into the opening, I dropped two bright flashlights, the portable phone from the nightstand, and our dog into what we hoped would be our escape route. While we were preparing for escape, I heard more noise from outside. This time, someone had begun working on the back door. I hoped the lock would hold long enough to give us time to enter the tunnel and close off the opening. I wished we had engaged the metal bars that went across the doors and fit into metal holders on each side. The metal holders are built into the concrete of the walls. Our doors are heavy duty metal, and with the bars in place, it is close to impossible to gain entry. Unfortunately we hadn't seen the need for this usually unnecessary caution before going to bed.

As I lowered myself into the hole, I got several scrapes from the sharp edges on the tile that covered our floor and surrounded the opening. Wearing nothing but a nightgown, I had almost no protection, but I was so caught up in the moment I hardly noticed. I worried a lot more about snakes and spiders, even though I knew we'd built this area so tightly sealed that creepy crawlies were unlikely. Once we were in the chase, it proved almost impossible to put on the jeans, sweatshirts and tennis shoes Paul had dropped through the opening. We were afraid to turn on the flashlights, even though Paul had put the cover back over the opening. The cover matched the floor above and when in place you had to know where to look to see it, but if any light escaped around the edges, it would stand out like a sore thumb.

Getting dressed in a four-by-four foot space in complete darkness isn't easy. The tunnel runs the whole length of the house, but from floor to ceiling and side to side it's only four feet. Limited by space and light, we were also trying to be as quiet as possible. Tension and a rapidly-beating heart didn't help. By the time we finished dressing, we could hear people walking on the floor above. They were talking to each other, but we couldn't make out what they were saying. With Paul leading, we crawled toward the far end of the tunnel and the small hidden door. Stretch followed along, calm now that we were awake and in charge.

When we reached the end, Paul unlatched and eased open the door. The small sliver of moon left the outside almost as dark as the tunnel. Because his eyes were already accustomed to darkness, even this small amount of moonlight helped enhance his vision. He watched for several minutes, but it seemed like hours to me. When he spoke, he kept his voice to a whisper. I see a car parked on the circular drive, but I don't see any movement. They all seem to be in the house, so it seems like a good time to make a quiet run to the battery house, and then decide where to go next.

The battery house is a small slump stone building about two hundred feet from the main house. As part of our electrical system, the batteries store the power we received from solar panels and a wind generator. The space from here to there would be visible from the windows on this side of the house, but our small orchard growing in between would help to hide us. The path runs along the back of the garage and workshop, and since we were wearing dark clothing, I thought it might be possible to make it unseen.

Paul and I believe in adventure and had taken an interest in caving, skydiving and mountain climbing, as well as a variety of other activities during our marriage. We had twenty years of working together and trusting each other's decisions. I didn't try to second-guess his choice. I said, You lead. I'll be right behind you. I hoped I sounded braver than I felt. Something about having your home invaded is terrifying. Home is supposed to be a place of safety.

We wiggled through the small opening as silently as possible and made our way across a short open space to the side of the garage. I felt exposed, and the short walk had never seemed so long. I worried Stretch would take off on a nighttime romp, but decided that if he did, a dog would seem like a normal sight out here, and if he didn't bother the intruders, he should be okay. From there we crept down the side of the garage to the battery storage building. I held my breath, waiting for an outcry from the house when they spotted us, but