Free The Devil’s Share by Wallace Stroby

would be a good vantage point. From here, she could see anything coming down the highway in either direction. The truck blew past, raising dust.
    Behind the boulder was a natural depression, already shadowed. She gouged at the ground with a boot heel. Beneath an inch of dusty topsoil, the earth was packed flat and hard. Enough traction for a vehicle, she guessed, especially if it was four-wheel drive.
    She pushed her sunglasses up into her hair, raised the binoculars. Empty land in all directions, mountains beyond. To the west, California and the Mojave. To the south, Arizona and, beyond that, Mexico. Above the southern mountains, a white contrail etched slowly across the blue sky, the plane too high to be seen.
    She got back in the car, set the binoculars on the seat. It was a new Nissan Altima, fewer than two thousand miles on it, and she’d need to be careful taking it off the road. It would be bad news to get stuck out here in the middle of nowhere, break an axle on a rock, or drive into loose sand she couldn’t get out of, have to call for a tow.
    She started the engine, pulled slowly off the shoulder and into the dirt, the car rising and falling on the uneven ground. Once behind the boulder, she backed and filled until the entire car was in shadow. With the motor running, she got out, walked north up the highway for about two hundred feet, looked back. Standing on the center line, she couldn’t see the Nissan at all. She went another hundred feet, where the angle of the road changed, but the car was still hidden.
    She walked in the other direction, stopped, looked back, went fifty feet more and did it again. The car was out of sight from all angles. It would do.
    She got back in the car, put it in gear. The rear tires bit the ground easily, with no fishtailing. She pulled out of the shelter of the rock, back onto the solid ground of the shoulder, and parked.
    The digital camera she’d brought was cheap, but good enough for her purposes. She took it from the glove box, got out of the car, and began snapping pictures in all directions. Wide landscape shots at first, then details: the surface of the road, the loose stones on the shoulder, the hollow behind the boulder. She walked out toward the cell tower, took distance shots before moving in closer. Inside the chain-link fence, squat boxes of machinery hummed. On one of them a bright yellow sign with a black lightning bolt warned DANGER! HIGH VOLTAGE!
    Something moved in her peripheral vision, and she turned to see a jackrabbit run past, then vanish into an unseen hole. The wind whined through the razor wire. A tumbleweed blew against the chain-link.
    She walked back to the road, her shadow stretching out in front of her. In the coolness of the car, she got out her cell phone and dialed Hicks’s number.
    When he answered, she said, “I found it. You need to come take a look.”
    â€œWhen? Where?”
    â€œAs soon as you can. And I’ll show you when you get here.”
    â€œI’ve been traveling,” he said. “I just got back to—”
    â€œCall me when you get to Vegas,” she said, and hung up.
    *   *   *
    At the motel restaurant, she sat at a table near the big window, looked out at dark mountains, lightning pulsing in the clouds. The motel was thirty miles from the spot she’d picked, set back from the highway and close to the hills. She’d finished her dinner, was on her second glass of wine. Her work for the day was done. She could relax until she heard from Hicks.
    The restaurant was dark paneling, wagon-wheel chandeliers. There was a bar beyond, through a short hallway and swinging saloon doors. Noise coming out of there, laughter, and country music from a jukebox.
    Occasionally a tractor-trailer rolled by on the interstate, rattling the chandeliers. Other than that, it was blackness out there, broken only by flashes of dry lightning that, for all she knew, were a hundred miles