The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

creature—an adult male mountain lion, 150 pounds of cunning, sinew, and hunger—froze, its belly pressed to the rock. After a long pause, punctuated only by the sound of labored, painful breathing twenty feet away, the big cat flowed forward again, its tail twitching as it closed on its prey.
    Its prey was Jesús Antonio Gonzales, a new, illegal, injured, and unsuspecting immigrant. Fleeing what he’d feared to be a Border Patrol truck jolting along the ridge in the darkness, Jesús had darted off the road and scrambled down the slope. Suddenly he’d taken a step into nothingness—one moment the mountain was solidly beneath his feet, the next moment it was gone. Tumbling off a ledge, he’d landed on his left side, hard, atop a boulder. He’d tried to regain his feet but quickly sank back against the rock, the pain in his ribs causing him to gasp and groan. He now lay twenty feet below the rim of the outcrop, and even if he hadn’t been injured, he felt sure he wouldn’t be able to climb back up the way he’d come down. He dared not risk another fall in the steep terrain—he’d barely missed cracking his head on the boulder, and if he fell again, he might not be as lucky—so he resolved to stay where he was, to wait until dawn before limping out of the mountains and into the outskirts of San Diego. There would be other, different risks in daylight—for one, he’d heard that La Migra, the immigration police, had cameras and motion detectors and dogs everywhere—but Jesús would just have to take his chances. He closed his eyes and shifted against therock. The movement caused the ends of his splintered ribs to grate against one another, like shards of glass grinding inside him, and he grunted in pain.
    Jesús could have paid a coyote, an immigrant smuggler, to bring him across—he probably should have, he realized now—but the coyote had demanded an outrageous sum: five thousand U.S. dollars, which Jesús didn’t possess, and for what? A bone-jarring ride across the desert inside the hot cylinder of an empty water truck, followed by a two-day hike to the nearest city. Cheaper and safer to find his own way, he had decided; after all, coyotes weren’t infallible, either; some, he’d heard, had been known to leave people dying in the desert—abandoned hundreds of miles from the nearest town, or even locked inside a cargo container. Besides, he consoled himself, maybe everything would still work out just fine, despite his fall and his broken ribs: maybe, by daylight, the stabbing pain in his side would ease, and Jesús would find a good path down, and San Diego would spread itself before him like a glittering kingdom—a kingdom so rich that even his namesake, Jesús Cristo, would have yielded to temptation and bowed for the sake of such glory and wealth. Sí , Jesús Antonio Gonzales told himself, San Diego será mío. He practiced it in English: Yes. San Diego will be mine.
    Somewhere in the darkness, he heard the throaty hum of an aircraft engine—or was it two?—and he prayed it was not Border Patrol helicopters scouring the hills. As he listened, trying to place the source of the sound, a pebble clattered down the rocky face above him. Bouncing off a nearby boulder, the stone tapped Jesús Antonio on the arm, as if to get his attention. Puzzled, he looked up, and in the darkness above him, he saw the gleam of jewels: a pair of green-gold eyes. They glittered, brighter and brighter in the light—the lightthat had inexplicably appeared in midair and was now rushing toward him, its glare accompanied by a deafening roar. A cone of incandescence encircled Jesús Antonio—Jesús and the mountain lion, too, spotlighting them as neatly as if man and beast were actors on a rocky stage. And as the single-minded beast made its instinctual leap, closing the gap between its fangs and Jesús Antonio’s neck, the cone of light narrowed, narrowed, narrowed, so that at the precise instant Jesús Antonio reached up to