A smile appeared on her face. She’d read the Nuevo Gulf Cartel was close to being pushed out of the area by another cartel.
Always a bigger group of assholes looking to take over territory. Enjoy the fear, fuckers.
Shay’s only real concern was an odd reference she found in her research.
“Todos aquellos que buscan el oro de la familia Peralta deben saber que la codicia ciega a un hombre a la verdad,” Shay murmured.
All those who seek the gold of the Peralta family should know that greed blinds a man to the truth.
The phrase had been scrawled on an old map of the area. Shay had no idea if it was a simple moral observation or a riddle about the treasure meant to warn off seekers or help them find it. The truth, as much as anyone could know it, would present itself soon enough. She just hoped that the truth didn’t involve another massive volcano.
Shay spared a quick glance in the mirror. She wasn’t expecting to see anything other than shimmering Mexican desert air or mountains, which was why the two dust plumes made her do a double-take.
“Damn it. Of course. This is just my luck for the lack of Nazi zombies in Austria.”
Shay let out an exasperated sigh just as the alert went off on her phone.
Thanks, I know… Nobody followed me from town, that much I’m sure of. Some assholes who just happened to be rolling around in the desert? Maybe cartel or just local jerks, militia or bandits. I could still take them, but that’ll cause a problem.
Avoiding being linked to a single dead body was easy, almost trivial. Trying to avoid attention when you left dozens of bodies in your wake, not so much. Minimizing deaths would be to her benefit both in the short and long term. Now if she could just get everyone else to cooperate with her by not tempting their fate.
Just don’t follow me, assholes, and I won’t have to fucking kill you. I’m here to take some gold. Nothing more.
Shay scanned the area in front of her. Crags, overhangs, and outcroppings increasingly dotted the land, plenty of places for good cover if she wanted to hide. But any good hunter didn’t give up on the hunt just because they lost sight of the prey for a few seconds. She would need to both conceal herself and give her pursuers another rabbit to chase.
A magic invisibility ring would be handy about now.
A grin broke out on her face, deepening the dimples in her cheeks. She had just the idea.
Another ten minutes passed, and the dust plumes in her rearview mirror grew closer, the faintest hint of darker shapes as they became more visible. Shay found a nice overhang to provide cover for the Land Rover. She parked and calmly but quickly exited the vehicle.
Out of the cool air conditioning the choking heat smacked Shay in the face.
“Fuck, I bet even the cactuses are thirsty in this heat.”
The tomb raider hurried to the back of the Land Rover to yank out a large desert camouflage tarp and draped it over the vehicle. Unless her enemies already had eyes on her exact location, they were going to have a hard time picking the covered Land Rover out from a distance. A brown, dusty object in the middle of hundreds of miles of brown, dusty landscape.
Shay grabbed her loaded backpack from the vehicle. After retrieving binoculars from the bag, she peered into the distance at the dust plumes.
Two white Escalades barreled toward her general direction. They both abruptly halted after about fifteen seconds.
“Lost me, huh? Just following my dust, assholes? Amateurs.”
Shay could barely make it out as someone rolled down their window, and a man in a brown cowboy hat leaned out. At the distance, she couldn’t pick out much other than the hat. A brief conversation followed, and one of the other Escalades peeled off, pulling hard to the left. Mr. Cowboy Hat’s vehicle continued forward.
Shay grinned and hurried back to her Land Rover. She moved under the tarp to pull out a small emergency drone that came with the rental car. These days, with magic everywhere, just a car to rent wasn’t enough for people. They wanted toys, too.
“I am no different. The app is all ready to go. Let’s play.”
Shay stepped out from under the tarp, placed the drone on the ground, and flipped three switches on the machine. She yanked her phone out of her pocket to bring up the control program and surveyed the options. Her eyes stopped on Direct Control.
She moved the control forward and watched the drone lift into the sky under the careful control of her fingers. She kept it low and near the ground, moving off at nearly a right angle from her original driving direction. The buzzing whir of the drone’s propellers filled the air high above the desert, as if the world’s largest and angriest mosquito had decided to invade the desert.
Her pursuers gradually grew closer as her shit-eating grin grew and she kept her attention focused on the drone’s camera feed. A rock-strewn canyon appeared.
“Perfect.”
Shay brought the drone to a halt, hovering as she pushed the control forward and the small drone lifted in a straight line from where it was. Three hundred feet would work for her plan. She only hoped somebody in the approaching Escalade was paying attention.
Her gaze cut to a large red button on the bottom right of the app display. She tapped the screen. “Let’s do this.”
A bright red flare dropped from the drone and ignited, burning in the distance. Shay waited a few more seconds and dropped the other flare. She disabled the drone’s engine and chuckled as the ground rushed up to the drone in the camera feed.
FEED LOST.
Shay winced, suddenly realizing she was technically renting the drone. “Guess I’ll
