Nightwing by Martin Cruz Smith

those men over there are going to do if they hear the world ‘plague’? You ever seen a limousine vanish?”
    “I didn’t say anything about plague,” Paine said.
    The long moment that followed turned exquisite for Paine. In fact, his picture was of a Mexican Indian who’d been bitten months before but he calculated swiftly and accurately.
    “You have a photo like this, too,” he told Chee. “You have somebody with wounds like this and he has plague. Do you know what made those wounds?”
    Chee didn’t answer.
    “Then you’re very fortunate,” Paine said, “Because I know, and you’re going to hire me.”
    That encounter with Chee at the strip mine was only the first. After, were more meetings at Window Rock and on the mesa, transfers of an unpublicized autopsy report from Chee and lists of equipment demanded by Paine.
    Now, in the dozing heat of midday, Paine was searching for fleas.
    The desert’s arroyos were still slightly dark, as if bruised by yesterday’s rain. Yucca stems vibrated through waves of warm air.
    The Painted Desert appealed to Paine. He appreciated the false sterility that masked such desperate adaptations of life as limbless lizards and giant saguaros. More than that, he savored the loneliness, the sense that he could go days, months if he wanted, without seeing another human soul. Other people, no matter how different, were mirrors of one’s self. Paine wanted no reflections.
    He drove over a sand dune to hard ground, where he stopped and climbed to the roof of the Land Rover. He’d seen one vulture earlier. This time through his field glasses he spotted two about half a mile up and two miles away, spiraling down a thermal. A third vulture joined them. Paine slipped down into the cab, throwing the glasses aside to get the truck into gear.
    A matter of minutes could make his work a hundred times more difficult. Paine pushed the Rover up to 30, running over mesquite and crashing through sand drifts. Already, without glasses, he saw more vultures descending the thermal. A deep arroyo about six feet wide stretched in front of Paine. He swerved right, found a rise, and shoved his foot to the floor. At 40, the Rover cleared the arroyo, bounced stiffly, and continued over a drift.
    Paine hit his horn. A mile off on a surprisingly green knoll was a truck in the middle of sixty or seventy vultures. Sheep carcasses covered the hill. Horn blaring, Paine drove into the scavengers, scattering them off his fenders. Red eyes staring out of black faces, the vultures hopped away, trying to gather air in their four-foot wing-spread. Paine braked and jumped out of the Rover, cocking his .45 as he hit the ground. He fired, taking the head off one bird. The rest scattered in a black wave, lumbering up. Paine fired again, straight up, just to keep them moving.
    Death, he’d long ago learned, was not a moment of calm. Without the squabbling of vultures, the hill still resounded with the vibrant activity of flies. When he left the vultures would return, and mice and smaller birds, a whole chorus of scavengers great and small. He only hoped he was in time.
    From the back of the Land Rover he took his aluminum case, which he spread open beside a lamb that had been reduced to head, feet, and a thousand flies fighting for room to lay their eggs. He tied on a surgical mask and slipped on rubber gloves. Around his waist he strapped a belt of his own design. In addition to a holster for his automatic, the belt carried in leather-and-felt cups an odd number of jars, syringes, scalpels, operating scissors, glassine envelopes, and a jeweler’s eyeglass.
    The truck stationed on the hill didn’t even have wheels, it was on blocks. The windows and windshield were smeared with blood from the inside. Paine grasped the handle of the door and stepped aside as he opened it.
    No one fell out. There was no body in the cab, although the seat and floor were covered with dried blood. Paine was disappointed, but at least the