Free The Salt Maiden by Colleen Thompson

his search for the missing woman, Jay had paused beside those two mounds, which someone had decorated with colored stones and desiccated petals, even a few iridescent feathers and a single, tiny skull bleached white save for the long orange incisors. Maybe a ground squirrel’s, he figured, and most likely Angie’s work. He wondered if the company of the dead had disturbed her or given comfort.
    Ahead he spotted the one-room dwelling she had claimed, an adobe with splotched, cracked walls painted gold by the late sunlight. Still some fifty yards distant, the house hunkered low and mean, a brick-shaped blot against the blue smudge of the distant foothills. Though a succession of squatters had attempted to improve it over the years, the covered front porch had collapsed on one end, and shutters dangled beside glassless windows. The peeling wooden screen door hung askew, as if in testimony to the pointlessness of his attempts to secure the place.
    Angie’s ancient Buick crouched beside the building, decaying just as quickly. Since Jay had last stopped by, a third dry-rotted tire had gone flat, giving the rusty brown sedan a drunken tilt. But his attention focused on the unfamiliar Ford that Dennis had reported.
    As Jay shifted the Suburban into park behind the vehicle, the hula dancer wriggled plastic hips. Staring past her, Max plunked his paws against the dashboard and raised his hackles with a growl.
    “What’s the matter, boy?” Jay asked. In the two weeks since he’d found the dog, hungry and abandoned at a roadside rest stop, Max had shown no signs of aggression other than his ill-advised lunge toward the snake. But clearly something was troubling him now, something Jay could neither see nor hear.
    Something that stirred the uneasiness he had been carrying inside him these past four months.
    His gun hand quaked as wraithlike figures took form in the shimmer of heat that rose from every solid surface.
    “Ali Baba, Ali Baba!” Baghdad’s children cried out, using the generic term for bad guys as they gestured toward the house.
    Jay looked in the direction their skinny fingers pointed, only to spot a sniper squatting with an AK-47 on the rooftop, his robe as black as his turban. A second terrorist peered out from the doorway, a Molotov cocktail in his hand.
    With a strangled shout Jay ducked low, his heart pounding and his eyes stinging with sweat. Distracted from whatever had captured his attention outside, Max gave himself over to this new game, his tail wagging and his tongue licking at his master’s face.
    “Shit.” Jay fended off the kisses and blinked hard, struggling to regain the when and where of his position. Once it came to him, he peered over the dash and forced himself to focus.
    The house, though homely, was certainly West Texan, a crumbling adobe in a familiar land. The only Ali Baba had sprung from his damned imagination.
    Screwing his eyes shut, Jay sat before the chill gale of the AC vents and cursed himself. He could have applied for work anywhere in the country, someplace with soft, green mountains or towering pine forests. The seaside might have been nice, or somewhere with a lake. Instead he’d dragged his sorry ass back to the one place whose sprawling expanses and limitless horizons kept him tied to that other desert, the desert that had swallowed up his foolish promises to bring all his men home safely.
    When he looked again, he saw a woman in the shadows of the porch’s standing section. For a bare instant terror clothed her in a dark abaya, but Jay willed himself to stillness until the illusion bled away.
    In its wake stood not Angie, as he’d hoped, but Dana Vanover, dressed in rumpled khaki shorts and a somewhat grimy pale green T-shirt. She held a broom in one hand, and her blond bangs had fallen limply across her eyes.
    Had she heard him, seen him spook at nothing? Maybe not, for she smiled and raised a bottle of water toward him in a casual greeting, not in the least