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Kane and Maddox gave each other a ‘holy shit’ look. I felt another swell of pride.

All those episodes of Columbo… finally paying off.

“Where was the first truck parked?” Maddox demanded.

The three of us shuffled around, sweeping our flashlights. It took some doing, but eventually we found one set of tracks that was deeper than the others, like it was doubled over. It also ended abruptly.

“Here.”

Kane knelt and began poking the ground. So did Maddox. So did I.

Five minutes passed. Ten. We were on our hands and knees, smoothing through the hard-packed gravel. Knocking on the desert earth with our bare fists, which were starting to get chewed up.

“I was looking more at their faces,” said Maddox. “Trying to recognize someone. I wasn’t really looking down at—”

He stopped talking as his whole body froze. Then he looked up.

“What?”

Maddox lifted his hand from the dirt. Clenched in his fist was a short length of sand-colored rope.

“Damn.”

Kane came over, and the two of them grabbed it. The pulled together, hard, and suddenly the entire desert floor shifted.

Or at least, a five-by-five foot section of it.

Holy fucking shit!

It was a hole. Carved into the sandstone, chipped into the clay, it was about three feet deep with squared off corners.

“You gotta be fucking kidding me.”

Maddox was holding his hair back from falling over his eyes. Down in the hole were a few dozen packages, all wrapped in brown paper. They were stacked neatly, like bricks, all tied off with butcher’s twine.

“What is it?” I asked, knowing the answe

r.

“Drugs.”

“You sure? Maybe it’s money.”

Kane huffed disgustedly. “It’s never money,” he spat. “It’s always drugs.”

“I can’t believe this,” Maddox was saying. “What do we do now?”

“We leave it.”

Kane and I muttered the same sentence at the same time. We looked up at each other in acknowledgment.

“For now, anyway,” he added.

A scratching noise floated in from off in the distance — a critter maybe, or an echo from further away. It lent a sudden urgency to the overall mood.

“I can’t believe we found this,” said Maddox.

“We didn’t find shit,” said Kane. He nodded my way. “She found it.”