Arrest

A faint screeching sound echoed through the distant canyon walls.  Sirens?  All the way out here?  Luna Cruz couldn't quite identify the noise over the beat of her pounding heart.

"How the hell did I get so out of shape?" she asked herself silently, too winded to get the words out.  Luna biked past a wooden cross on the side of the dirt road.  Three red roses lay at its rickety base.  Another drunk driver strikes again, she thought.  She pedaled a hundred more yards and then reluctantly stopped her bike.  For a moment, only a moment, she swore.  She coasted to the dirt driveway of an old mobile home, the only vestige of civilization out here in this stretch of the New Mexico High Desert.  She'd long since exhausted her one bottle of water for the ride.

Luna's left foot hit the dirt as she came to a halt.  She felt relief from the endless oppression of the sand hills and rock mesas that had stolen the air out of her lungs for the last few miles.  At thirty, she was in better shape than anyone else in Crater County, but that was little consolation to wither her legs or her lungs right now.  She cursed her bike as if it were its fault.

With a glance, she recognized where she's stopped - "Shark's High Desert Tattoo," an old mobile home that hadn't been mobile for quite some time.  The windows were boarded up and a weather-beaten mural showed a ferocious sea creature that challenged her to "Get your mark from the Shark!"

Luna glanced down at her exposed skin.  She wore her usual black bike shorts and sports bra on rides, so there was a lot of skin to choose from.  She had once promised herself the Olympic Rings around her belly button when she made the triathlon team, but that certainly wasn't going to happen, not anymore.

She took a good look over at Shark's, now that the oxygen had finally made it up past her neck.  Shark's looked abandoned, but two old cars sat in the dirt parking lot.  The place has always given her the creeps when she had biked past here as a child.  It still did.  No, she definitely wasn't going inside to ask for water, and definitely wouldn't swipe a drink from the garden hose.

She took off her helmet for a second and wiped the sweat out of her long brown hair.  Luna hadn't known the desert could get so humid, but storm clouds were appearing over the horizon with the last of the summer monsoons.

Then she heard something clearly this time.  Definitely police sirens way in the distance, but definitely coming her way.  More police sirens than she's ever heard in her life.