Relentless (17 page)

“Not good enough,” Watchman said. “You've made a long speech. Fine. Now I'll take equal time: One. They've got that man's wife with them. What happens if they walk right up to your National Guard lines with a pistol at the woman's head and use her as a hostage for safe conduct to the nearest Army helicopter? How many weekend soldiers do you know with balls enough to put up a fight when they're using a woman for a shield? Two. Any Indian with a brain knows enough to get down on his belly and let a cordon walk right past him and then get up and fade into the landscape behind them. At least give your Green Berets credit for that much sense. Three. When the five of them get away scot-free and leave you with Mrs. Lansford's dead body on your hands you won't need any help from me to make a fool out of yourself. End of speech.”

7

When Watchman came around past the back of the trailer he saw Lansford sitting on the porch steps, dry-washing his clasped hands. Watchman signaled Buck Stevens and went to the horses. Untied two of them and began to lead them toward the horse trailer. Stevens trotted over to it and let down the tailgate ramp and Watchman went inside to lead the horses into the box. Stevens lifted the gate behind them and latched it shut, and Watchman climbed out over the slats.

Vickers was standing there. “What do you think you're doing?”

Watchman glanced toward the house. Lansford sat holding his head as though it weighed half a ton. He was out of earshot. Watchman said, “I'm going to try and get his wife back for him.”

“Very noble.”

“No. It's my job.”

“You're living in the past, Trooper. This isn't a one-man job. It isn't one of those movies where the stalwart Indian scout goes out to rescue the captured white woman from the savages. You're two men who put your pants on the same way I do and you think you're going to win out against five well-armed soldiers who've got all the guts and all the technical know-how there is. They're organized—you're not. It takes a bigger organization to stop them. You'll just get yourself killed—and probably get the woman killed too.”

Watchman checked the tailgate latches and turned. “You could try to stop me if you want.”

“Suppose we put a call in to your superiors and see what they say.”

“Go ahead.”

Vickers showed his surprise. “I will. You'll wait right here until I have an answer.” And began to turn away.

“I guess not,” Watchman said, and went toward the cab of the truck.

Vickers gripped him by the arm and turned him back. “God damn you for a stubborn man. Do I have to put handcuffs on you?”.

Watchman just looked at him. “You could try.”

“Trooper, one shout from me and we'll drive you down into the ground like a tent peg.”

“Do that. And then explain it to the Bureau after you come up with nothing in your hands but Mrs. Lansford's corpse.”

“You are wrong.”

“Maybe I am. If I'm wrong I'm wrong. If you're wrong you're dead wrong. You've got a stupid way of figuring up odds, Vickers. If I was taking bets on you I wouldn't even bother laying them off.” Watchman opened the door and climbed up into the cab.

Vickers stepped back. He didn't say anything more. His hooded eyes pushed at Watchman.

Watchman triggered the starter and the engine caught and began to rumble. He reached for the headlight switch and then the passenger door opened and Buck Stevens climbed in. “Weren't you going to wait for your faithful white companion?”

“You don't have to make this run, Buck.”

“Who says?”

“If I make a mistake up there he'll have my head in a basket. If you're with me he'll have yours too. I'm not going to ask you to stick your neck out.”

Stevens pulled the door shut. “Okay, you didn't ask me.”

8

When he jammed the levers into four-wheel drive the transmission made a harsh whining growl. Watchman flicked on the high beams and they stabbed the hills, swinging wildly like searchlight beacons. Jouncing along high up in the cab of the old power wagon he had no trouble following the tracks of the eight horses: nobody could conceal evidence of that much traffic on this soft clay.

“Kemo sabe,
maybe I'm a wet blanket but what if they look back and see our lights?”

“I hope they do.”

“You do.”

“Can't hurt to keep them nervous.”

The borrowed jacket was tight across his shoulders. He cracked a window against the heater's stuffy warmth. The hoofprints angled up into higher foothills and the truck engine strained on the grade against the weight of the horse trailer. Half-past three in the morning: it would be dawn soon, if the blizzard held. Along the hilltops here the wind was bending the scrub and an occasional snowflake drifted against the windshield but the edge of the storm was holding still, circling, a visible black-on-black wall eight or ten miles to the west. He had known storms to sit still like that until they blew themselves out. He had also known them to sit still like that until they had gathered maximum centrifugal strength and then burst forward like nuclear explosions, ripping out trees, peeling roofs off houses, overturning trucks, shoveling livestock into steep canyons by the ton. Two years ago they'd had an early fall blizzard in the high country that had stranded ten thousand Navajos and wiped out half their sheep; and the other half had been saved only by massive air drops of feed.

It was the kind of night on which you wanted to be home snug in bed. In bed with a healthy firm-haunched young Lisa lying warmly against you, idle talk or long easy silences until she felt stirred to make love again. The nerve-ends of his hands and lips remembered the textures of her. Right now she would be asleep but in a few hours, getting up and going downtown to open the shop, she would be ripping off a few choice words about his absence. Lisa was not your average housewife worrying about stubborn kitchen sink stains. Nor likely ever to become one.

Thinking about her unsettled him. In fact he was unsettled merely by the fact that he was thinking about her at all. Not the time and place for it.

He bestirred himself. “You put the stuff in the truck?”

“You betchum. But you sure as hell don't plan to travel light. Snowshoes, Sterno, blankets, axes, ropes—I didn't know we were outfitting a Polar expedition.”

“Just minding the Boy Scout motto.”

9

It began to get rocky and the power wagon pitched and skidded on the stones. They had covered eight or nine miles in an hour and that had cut the fugitives' lead but they were going to have to abandon the truck soon. The hills were beginning to buckle and heave.

He swung the grinding power wagon up a steep grade, all four wheels scrabbling at the pebbled surface. At the top the hoof tracks turned across the sand shelf into a wide thicket of scrub oak and piñon that twisted up the spine of a razorback fin toward the pine-wooded heights. Watchman set the hand brake and switched everything off. “Unload the horses and get everything packed on them.”

When he pushed the door open against the wind a blade of cold stabbed into the truck. He turned his collar up and climbed down; got the ax from the truck bed and went out into the scrub with it. Without much discrimination he hacked down a succession of three-foot bushes and dragged them into a pile on the hardpan fifty feet from the truck and downwind. He wasn't satisfied until he had a good big stack. He whacked half a dozen thick hard scrub trees apart and scattered the logs judiciously on and inside the brushpile and when it looked satisfactory he brought both five-gallon gasoline cans from their fender-runningboard brackets and drenched the woodpile with fuel.

Gasoline stink was raw in the wind. He was sweating from his exertions; he lifted his hat and dragged a coatsleeve across his forehead. The wind roughed up his hair. Stevens was standing by the horses, packed and ready, watching him with a long face. After a moment Watchman put his hat on and walked over to him, slipped the leather scabbard over the head of the ax, and strapped it to the saddle. “I hate a noisy silence, Buck. Say what's on your mind.”

Deep breath in and out: Stevens put his head down, thinking. In the end he said, “The truth is I don't like the odds all that much.”

“You can stay here. You can go back.”

“No. But it would help to know what we're trying to do,
kemo
sabe.”

“Trying to keep Mrs. Lansford alive, mostly.”

“How?”

“Keep pressure on them.”

“You said something like that before. I don't follow.”

“If they thought they had a long lead and a good chance to get out clean then they'd have no reason to keep her alive. They took her for a hostage but you only need a hostage when somebody's pushing you.”

“I see. You want them to know we're pushing them. But I still don't see where that gets us.”

“Maybe with a little luck it gets us in close enough to get her away from them.”

“That'll take a lot more than luck,
kemo sabe
.”

“Now that depends on the weather, doesn't it.”

“I see that. But it's still two against five. I don't see why you figure it's up to you and me to tackle it by ourselves. Like the FBI man said it's not our responsibility, it's his.”

“Well you need to have some reason to get up in the morning, Buck.”

“I'll put that in your obituary.”

“I'll tell you the way I was thinking. I was thinking suppose I was that poor son of a bitch Ben Lansford and the woman they took was Lisa.”

Stevens' head lifted and Watchman caught the swift cut of his eyes. “You don't really think you're going to get her back from them alive.”

“I think I'd like to try.”

Stevens' head nodded up and down slowly. “I may not be much good except to hold your coat but I'd like to watch you try. If I don't get killed I might learn a thing or two.”

10

“One more thing I don't understand,” Stevens said when he reached for the reins. “Why'd Vickers get so upset about it?”

“Because he was wrong.” Watchman took off a glove to dig for his matches. “Those guys aren't used to having anybody tell them they're wrong. Most folks seem to think of them the same way they think of Motherhood and the Flag and God. Of course nowadays none of those items drag down the kind of veneration they used to, but the Bureau just chalks that up to an epidemic of Commies and radic-libs.”

Stevens smiled with slow wickedness. “Maybe when he turns in his report you'll turn out to be the first un-American Indian in history,
kemo sabe.”

But Watchman wasn't listening. The corner of his vision had picked up the bouncing glow beyond the ridgeline behind them and he turned quickly and squinted down toward it.

In time the headlights burst over the crest and swung wildly across him and dipped below as the truck growled over the lower hilltop and came gnashing forward with its horse trailer clanking and wobbling.

“Looks like we've got help.”

“Aeah—but whose?”

It downshifted again and came wheeze-whining up alongside the parked power wagon. The door opened and Agent Vickers climbed out of the cab, straightened, jabbed his fists into the small of his back and arched his body backwards. “Jesus. My kidneys.”

“It must be the cavalry,” Stevens said. “Coming to the rescue.”

Watchman said, “Since you're waiting for us to ask, to what do we owe the honor?”

The FBI man's face was not readable in the sudden darkness after the switching-off of headlights. His voice issued from the shadows as he moved forward. “Maybe I decided to play it your way. On the theory that it's not wise to change even horses' asses in midstream.” He came into slightly better view behind the horse trailer and lowered the tailgate ramp. “Somebody want to help me back this beast out of here?”

Watchman said, “I seem to remember a speech you dropped on Lansford back there. We don't need any amateur help.”

“And I seem to recall he answered you've got it whether you want it or not.” Vickers turned: his face picked up a bit of illumination from the sky and seemed remotely angry, bitter. “I may as well tell you. If we live through it you'll find out anyway. They've called off the National Guard.”

11

“Why in hell would they do a thing like that?” Stevens asked.

“Politics and money. The State Attorney General got to thinking it over. Decided in the first place it's a criminal case—not a military matter—and in the second place it would cost five times as much to mobilize the Guard as the bank lost in the holdup.”

“And in the third place,” Watchman said, “they probably wouldn't have done us much good in the first place.”

“You're wrong about that, you know.”

“All right. We had that argument before.”

“Let's get this horse out of here and get moving, all right?”

There were a lot of things Watchman felt like saying but he only waited while the rookie backed the saddlehorse out of Vickers' trailer and tightened up the cinches. Vickers seemed to have bundled himself up in half a dozen mismatched layers of borrowed clothing. He danced around quite a bit with one foot on the ground and one foot in the stirrup before he got purchase on the saddlehorn and heaved himself aboard.

There was no point belaboring it with questions. Vickers was here because if he hadn't come along he'd never be able to claim credit for the outcome, whatever it might prove to be. Obviously he had considered it from all angles and ended up with the judgment that Watchman's chances for success, however dim they might be, were still the best chances anyone was offering.

Among police officers the FBI was notorious for its hunger to hog glory but Vickers' decision had grown from something more basic than that: survival. He had already been on a kind of probation before this case had erupted; he'd been shipped to the boondocks and no doubt he was being watched by his superiors—one more foul-up and he'd likely be discharged; the Bureau wasn't noted for forgiveness toward its agents. So to keep his job Vickers had to bring in a winning score on this one. That was why he'd overreacted, mobilized enough machinery to fight a medium-size war. Then they'd kicked his National Guard props out from under him and when that happened he must have realized that if Watchman didn't nail the fugitives there was an excellent chance they wouldn't get nailed at all. Watchman's warning—
You'll come up with nothing in your hands but Mrs. Lansford's corpse
—must have gone around in his mind like a palmist's ghastly prediction of doom and in the end Vickers had forsaken by-the-book caution and chosen to throw in with the only players left in the game. It was a long shot but when it was the only shot you had, you had to shoot it.