Strategy
Chapter five
Ethan Jacobson had been called many things in his three-point-something decades of life.
Some had been complimentary, some had been insults, some had been outright slander.
But one thing he had never been called—as long as one didn’t consider the mutually agreed, perfectly rational dissolution of his relationship with Sarah—was a quitter.
So when he’d reluctantly admitted to himself that he was not imagining things, that there was an impassable wall of cacti blocking his access to the botanical anomaly that was his key to tenure, professional acclaim, and even possibly wider fame, he’d allowed himself the barest moment of disappointment before he’d moved on to the next step.
Finding a new solution.
It would be easy, he knew, to just acquire a chainsaw and hack his way through.
But besides the fact that some cactus species like the saguaro were protected, making any harm to them illegal, he recoiled at the very thought of damaging the pristine landscape.
They were far from civilization here, which was of course inconvenient in some ways, but also meant a lack of pollution, litter, and human-caused damage.
He’d spent a lot of money making his overlanding gear as ecologically sound as possible while still allowing for basic comfort and his research needs.
And if there was any rule that had been drilled into him from his youth, from countless camping events and tournaments and festivals, it was to leave the site better than you found it.
Chopping through cacti to get to other cacti he wanted to study was against every tenet he held dear, every moral and ethical and spiritual standard he adhered to.
He was absolutely going to take every possible step to keep from damaging the plants, the soil, and the environment.
But he’d also be damned if he was going to let them stop him from doing what he needed to do.
So once he’d navigated the wash back to the highways, he made a beeline to the nearest town with a home improvement store.
Fortunately, the one he found was open late.
It required some creative Tetrising of the Jeep’s contents, but he soon had a goodly supply of cut-down lumber, hardware, and equipment, along with a couple of cordless power tools.
He drove back to the highway motel closest to his desert destination, booked a room, plugged his new tools in to charge, and sat down at the pathetic excuse for a table to create his plan of attack.
The problem was, when he tried to sketch out diagrams, all he could see was the strange woman’s face.
He wasn’t an artist. He couldn’t put her visage on paper, not in anything other than a stick figure doodle.
But he could see her, clear green eyes and golden skin and two-toned hair and heaving breasts, so real he couldn’t believe she was just his imagination.
So real he’d felt he could reach out and brush grains of sand from her cheeks.
Where had she come from? He knew his subconscious was a horny bastard, and after five years of regular sex, the weeks of celibacy he’d endured since his so-mature agreement with Sarah had been rough, but his heat-and-hormones-addled brain cells had clearly been working overtime to come up with a mirage so detailed, so realistic, and so unexpected. She reminded him of something…
Titian. Something by Titian. Not the formal portraits, or the peaceful nudes, not his best known works, but…
Ethan set aside his notes, opened his laptop to search, scanning images until there it was.
The Death of Actaeon, left in the artist’s studio at his death, possibly incomplete.
A wild goddess, clad in filmy, revealing drapery, leaping forth as her hunting dogs tore to shreds a voyeur who had dared to trespass while she bathed.
The resemblance wasn’t physical. It was just the painting’s vibe, its emotional expression. That had been what he’d seen in her, the outrage and fury in her voice as she’d shouted at him to go away. The feral passion of a woman wronged.
But all he had done was find her. Seen her sleeping in the sand, in a place that was…well, technically not public, but he had a permit to be there. It wasn’t private property. If anything, she was the trespasser.
And she wasn’t real, so how did it even matter?
She was a hallucination.
And he still couldn’t put her from his mind.
Women don’t take naps in the middle of the desert, he reminded himself. Women don’t have wings like embroidered silk. Women don’t sink into the ground like ghosts. You’re seeing things. And you’re seeing women because you’re single for the first time since grad school.
He wasn’t able to rationalize why the dream woman his brain had conjured up seemed to hate him, but there was probably a reason for that deep in his psyche.
Something Freudian, or maybe Jungian? It had been well over a decade since the philosophy class he’d grumbled his way through as an undergrad, but one of those old fusty buggers would surely have had some insights into his apparent unconscious desire to be despised.
Or why remembering her feminine rage turned him on, made him want to get up close and personal with her trembling curves. Despite the Titian painting reminding him of the torn-apart-by-dogs flip side of that rage.
But he finally managed to set her image very slightly to the side, her imaginary popsicle-green eyes watching disapprovingly as he sketched rough diagrams. Carpentry had never been his art, but he’d watched his friend Ivan craft enough boxes and camp beds to understand the principles of joints, supports, and braces.
He knew how to use the basic tools. And since his goal was function and not an attractive form, he didn’t need to fuck around with crap like mitering and finishing.
He didn’t need a work of art. He needed a siege engine.
And by the time his stomach reminded him he hadn’t had his nightly meal, he had a crude but workable design for one.
He shoved back in his chair without thinking, hastily sitting up straight again when the wooden legs groaned beneath him. Cheap motel furniture tended to the rickety, that was for sure.
A quick check of the motel brochure told him the diner attached to the building was already closed, so he went back to the Jeep to grab a protein shake, considering his supplies.
He’d still been in the brainstorming phase when he’d stalked through the home improvement store, given the lumber associate cutting instructions, but for the most part he’d chosen well.
If anything, he had more supplies than needed—enough to construct three or four of what he’d designed.
He’d spend the next day in the motel’s parking lot doing what he could off-site, then head back to the mysterious hill once he and his tools were fully recharged.
In the meantime, he could enjoy a good night’s sleep on a mattress very slightly more ergonomic than the one folded up in his tent, have a good diner breakfast in the morning—or maybe a mediocre one, one could never tell, but at least it wouldn’t be hardtack—and replenish his stores of water.
It was going to work. He could feel it in his bones.
The desert was not going to defeat him. Not now.
***
The clearing where he’d parked the Jeep before was gone.
Ethan frowned at his GPS, his maps, the photos.
He was in the right place. He remembered that saguaro in particular—it had a hole in the side where a woodpecker had made its nest, and an arm that pointed crazily perpendicular instead of reaching for the sky.
He even recognized the shape of the shadows cast on the hill by the midmorning sun.
But where he’d once found a convenient bare shelf of rock was now a thick patch of creosote bushes.
Not small ones, either. These seemed to have years of growth, maybe even decades.
Nothing record-breaking—it wasn’t unheard of for the hardy evergreens to live centuries—but certainly nothing that could have happened in the two days he’d been gone.
Half of him thrilled to the mystery. There was something happening here, something that he had to get to the bottom of.
The other half of him was fucking pissed.
He growled and turned the Jeep around, driving back a few hundred yards, until he found another stable-looking spot. It would be a longer walk, and his siege equipment wasn’t light. But he’d be damned if he waved a white flag now.
He’d left the motel well before dawn, gauging his journey so that he’d arrived at his offroading exit from the dirt roads right when the sun was peeking over the eastern mountains, and had been able to move swiftly, following his own tire tracks most of the way.
They’d disappeared just as he’d been approaching his destination, wiped clean as if by a mystical broom. Just ended. And now, with his campsite eliminated, the pieces were all falling into place, becoming a revelation.
None of it was an accident. It couldn’t be.
If it had just been the cacti, he might have brushed it off as coincidence. But no, there was too much happening. Too many incidents to be accidents.
Someone was directly fucking with him. He was sure of it now.
The question was who.
Also how.
Also why.
The only things he was sure of were what and where—and he was starting to think he didn’t know those, either.
Hell, maybe he’d accidentally gotten some jimson weed in his protein shake and he was actually lying on the desert floor in the throes of a vision.
Maybe his real body was dying of hallucinogenic poison and dehydration while he gallivanted about having adventures in his hallucination body.
But this was the reality he had to deal with now. And the anger that was settling in the pit of his stomach, spiteful and petty, was all the impetus he needed.