Avenging Angel (22 page)

Wager shrugged; it wasn’t his town, and now Gargan belonged to the sheriff. “You’re going to have to hold a news conference soon. They’ve linked Orrin to the angel killings. You might want to give Chief Doyle a call before you make a statement. That way you two can coordinate your news releases.”

“I might, and by God I might not!” He pressed the intercom button and a moment later Cynthia came back, trying not to look flustered. “You give Nelly Winston a call without them goddamn reporters hearing you—tell her to find someplace to get where they can’t hunt her down or she won’t get a minute’s peace. Then get me that man Doyle in Denver.”

“Time’s getting short for Zenas, Sheriff.”

“I know that, Wager! But I damn well don’t like what you’re suggesting.”

As Wager had pointed out, Tice could come up with nothing better. The two men now stood in the day room of the county jail, the only place safe from the clusters of reporters and photographers who dashed after each other like kids chasing a football. Tice’s stocky figure seemed heavier behind the wide cartridge belt that glinted with the oily brass of rifle bullets. He studied, one at a time, the nine uniformed men standing in line before him. Wager, feeling baggy in the oversized tan shirt and brown trousers of the Grant County sheriff’s department, stood at the end of the line.

“That’s all the information I can give you right now,” Tice said quietly. “Now I’m not ordering you reserve officers to come with us. I’m asking you to, but any one of you that doesn’t want to is free to leave, and no questions asked. Just keep your damn mouths shut about this here meeting.”

“You ain’t told us what it is you’re asking us to do,” said a nasal voice down the line.

“That’s for security reasons. Anybody who stays will not be allowed to telephone or talk to anybody until after this operation’s over—wife, sweetheart, nobody.” He added grimly, “If it’s what I think, it won’t be no picnic. And not a damn one of us is getting paid enough to do what we might have to do.” He waited a long moment, eyes moving up and down the line of faces. “All right—last chance. This is going to be damn dangerous, and any of you reserve officers who want out, you’re free to go right now.”

From one of the newer and more carefully tailored uniforms near the middle of the line, a drawling voice said, “Hell, D.L., we don’t get paid anyway. We might as well not get paid for this as not get paid for something else.”

A couple of other voices chuckled, and all stood without moving.

“All right, boys, I appreciate it. And I know Earl and Roy do, too.” He cleared his throat. “Now here’s what we’re going to do, and I don’t want anybody outside this room to learn about it. Those destroying angels seem to get information quicker than the housewife’s grapevine; and if they get wind of this, God only knows when we’ll get another chance at them.” Quietly, he told them the plan, not mentioning that it was Wager’s idea initially, but taking all the responsibility for it on himself. When he finished, somebody gave a low whistle and asked, “Fifteen or more? Well armed?”

“We hope they won’t be expecting to run across us. And we’ll get some help from the Winstons.” He added dryly, “We could call out the National Guard, I suppose, if we wanted the whole damn state to know about it.”

From the other end of the line where he stood with Deputy Hodges, Yates asked, “Does Zenas Winston know we want to use him for bait?”

Tice winced. “I don’t like to think of it that way, Roy. But if you or anybody else can come up with a better idea, let’s hear it.” He paused, but there was no answer. “All right, let’s get the details worked out, because we don’t have much time. This here’s Detective Wager from the Denver Police.” He pointed to the end of the line. “He’ll be the second in command. Earl, you’ll be in charge of Team One; Roy, you’ve got Team Two. Appoint yourselves a second in command just in case. I want you to draw radios and ammunition, and then move your teams out of here real quiet and in different directions so we got none of these newspaper people on our trails. You all know where we’ll be going—the benchland—so you know what tack you’ll need from your lockers. We’ll rendezvous at Six Mile Spring at,” he checked his watch, “three o’clock. That gives us time to get the horses there. One more thing,” he said, “I want nobody bringing any whiskey. Not even a beer. Just water and plenty of it.”

“No whiskey?” said a voice from the middle. “Damn, this must be serious!”

“It is. Let’s head out now.”

The men scattered quietly, with a curious glance or two in Wager’s direction, but mostly with preoccupied looks pinching their eyebrows together. They followed their team leaders, Hodges or Yates, to the jail’s armory to draw ammunition, and then to the shift room for their gear. Wager went with Tice back to the sheriff’s office. There was something he wanted to check out before they left. Two pieces of the puzzle had clicked, almost unbidden, in the back of Wager’s mind as he stood listening to Tice and watching the man’s nervous, worried eyes. If it was what he thought, then some sense was beginning to emerge from the conflicting facts in the case. But with that sense came a feeling of foreboding as boundless and implacable as the desert they were about to enter.

“They’re a good bunch of boys.” Tice sighed as he settled into the creaking chair behind his desk. “I pray to God nothing happens to a single one of them.”

“It’s the only way,” Wager said absently; his mind was still on the department’s radio logs that Esther, the woman at the radio console, had let him study.

“I know that. Or I sure as hell wouldn’t be doing it.”

“Do you want to call Doyle and tell him about it?”

Tice shook his head. “It’s my responsibility, Wager. Not yours, not his. Mine. Besides, if that Denver reporter knew about you getting shot, then I think you got some security problems right in your own backyard, boy.” He ran a finger down a list of telephone numbers taped to the glass on his desk. It was for a corral that rented riding horses and pack mules to local dude ranches and outfitters. “Mary Jo? This here’s Daryl Tice. I’m going to need some horses and tack delivered out to Six Mile Spring. It’s an emergency, but I don’t want any noise about it, all right?”

Six Mile Spring was at the end of a road different from the one Wager had taken with Orrin. A small pool of water seeped from somewhere beneath a tangle of wind-sculpted boulders and ran in a short stream over the black roots of thick willows before sinking just as mysteriously into the grit. Two by two, the horses were led to the shallow water, where they bent and sucked loudly, their hind legs stamping to jar off the flies. Tice explained that a horse trail shortened the distance to Zenas’s ranch by several miles, and that the party could twist down the shelves of rock and sand without raising dust like a column of automobiles would. “You and me,” he added, “we’ll drive over. One Jeep with two people in it won’t scare off Willis. In fact, if he’s anywhere around he might suspect something if he didn’t see some kind of official activity.”

Wager looked at the rangy horses being blanketed and saddled, their tails switching nervously, and nodded with relief. He’d ridden a horse years ago when he was a kid, and the only thing he remembered about it was the raw chafe of rear end and thighs that had been the result of an hour’s ill-governed jolt around a level and well-marked horse trail.

When the last of the saddles had been unloaded from the pickup trucks that hauled the four-horse trailers, and the corral’s drivers had pulled away in a clank of couplings and chains, Tice called the deputies together for a final briefing.

“You boys know the trail and you know time’s short. Stake your horses down by Jones Bend—there’s enough feed and water there, and you’re only a mile or so from Zenas’s place. Move up on foot and keep it quiet. No radio talk. When you’re in sight of the ranch, give me three clicks on your transmitter, Earl. Three clicks, wait three seconds, then three more clicks, got that? We ain’t going to take the chance they got a scanner somewhere.”

Hodges nodded and spit.

“You move up low and quiet and get under cover,” Tice repeated. “Then give me the clicks and I’ll come out and find you—I know which way you’ll be coming from.”

“You figure on getting there before we do?” asked Yates.

“I sure don’t aim to waste time on the road. But if we’re late just sit tight and wait. You’ll see us coming through the notch. Be sure you stay out of sight at all times.”

“Right.”

Wager and Tice watched the column of horsemen quickly disappear among the interlaced willows, the occasional knock of a hurried hoof loud in the silence. The pungent smell of fresh horse droppings hung briefly in the air until a gust of hot wind blew it away. Then, wordless, Tice put the Jeep in gear and pulled out rapidly.

Their road, scarcely marked in the sand between widely spaced clumps of seemingly dead brush, led south along the edge of one of the stony benches. Ahead, in the rising afternoon wind, a dust devil swirled, erect in a wavering column. It thickened to a solid core of whirling sand that whipped rapidly up the slope, then lifted to disappear as a faint tan smudge against the heat-paled sky. Now and then a gully notched the stone rim and gave Wager a glimpse of tumbled and shattered rock falling away like bleached bones toward the next bench of earth five hundred, a thousand feet below. In the distance beyond that he made out the channeled blue that marked the sky over the river. But the countless spurs and thrusts of contorted mesa walls gave him no idea at all of the site of Zenas’s ranch.

“Is there any other way Willis can get to the ranch?”

“If you know the desert, sure. Six Mile Spring trail’s one. But I don’t think they’ll use that, not if they’re coming up from Mexico.” Tice lifted his mirrored sunglasses and wiped his forehead with his arm, then resettled them. “Most likely, they’ll come up from the southwest—there’s roads enough across the Navaho reservation if you know where you’re going. And they do. Willis was born and raised out there.”

“How close can they drive?”

“Ten, maybe twelve miles. Then they got to walk. The Frying Pan Trail follows along the river, so they’d have plenty of water.”

Wager tried to picture the column of armed men stumbling across the red and sun-heated rock down below the twisting lip of river gorge. “Can they be spotted from the air?”

“Sure. If they stand out in the open and jump up and down.”

He let the sarcasm go. “When they run—if they run—we might call in an air search to round them up. Doyle can get the National Guard helicopters for us.”

Tice shook his head. “Not even a helicopter can get in some of those cracks. An air search is all right if you’re looking for somebody who wants to be found. But there’s too many places where a man can curl up and hide. No.” He shook his head once more. “It’s got to be on the ground, and I hope to hell we’re lucky.”

They bounced in silence, Tice picking his way as quickly as he could along the crumbling rim. The scattered clumps of desert brush gave way to a valley so wide that Wager would not have noticed it if the Jeep’s motor had not slackened. Juniper trees no taller than a man stood far apart, dotting the slope like sentinels, and at the valley’s bottom spread a delta of rippled sand. When the Jeep’s motor once more strained uphill, Tice bobbed his head. “The road’s just up on that ridge. Then we can make some good time.”

With the last few dragging, jouncing miles, Wager’s mind had returned to an earlier question, one there hadn’t been time to ponder in Tice’s busy office. “Is there any way Orrin or Mueller could have learned about Willis’s plans?”

Tice steered around a broken outcropping of pitted sandstone. “You mean that’s why they might have been killed?”

“Just another possibility.”

The sheriff chewed it over. “Maybe Orrin found out something. Damned if I can see how, though. Mueller, no. Too long ago. It would be before the Kruses ever got to Zenas’s ranch. If they got there.”

That was true. And it didn’t tie into the sale of Mueller’s land to this Carmen Louisa Gallegos. “Did your clerk Esther ever find out anything at the courthouse?”

The sheriff grunted. “I forgot to ask. All this news of Willis, and the goddamn reporters …” He keyed his microphone, calling his code number to the dispatcher. Only static answered. “Can’t get there from here, I guess. Maybe up on the ridge.”

They finally lurched up the last bit of slope and turned onto the now-familiar dirt road. Tice tried the radio again, getting a faint, thin voice in return, “Go ahead, go ahead. I’m receiving you.”

“What did Esther find out at the courthouse? I’m in a hurry.”

“Wait one.”

They fidgeted in the hot wind that blew through the open sides of the Jeep and carried a fine grit that clogged the nose and crackled faintly between the teeth.

“She says no sales …” Static broke the transmission. “… has been trying to buy options.”

“Say again—you’re breaking up.”

“She says no sales recorded last two weeks. But her uncle told her that somebody’s been trying to get options on all the land that’s up for sale.”

“Ten-four. Any name on that somebody?”

Static. Tice tried again and then said, “To hell with it, the band’s breaking up. Options wouldn’t be recorded anyway. Let’s move—we’ve wasted enough time.” He plunged the Jeep in gear and tore through the sand toward the next series of switchbacks.

They paused at the notch that overlooked the Winston ranch. The line of Lombardy poplars tracing the main irrigation ditch cast shadows like a giant picket fence across the shaggy surface of the cornfield. The square house sat in the deep shade of the cottonwoods, and behind it the sun on the river glinted a quivering silver. Out of the trees came the startled squawk of a blue jay, and then only the wind.

Tice used his binoculars to scan the surrounding rock walls, quartering the vista and working methodically and slowly through each section. Finally he said, “Nothing. Not even a dog. They’ve pulled out.” He dropped the roughly idling Jeep into low gear for the sharp descent.

“We’re ahead of Willis?”

“I didn’t see any buzzards.” Tice added, with that twist at the corner of his mouth, “But if he did beat us, I hope he’s had time to leave before you and me get there.”