Relentless (20 page)

There hadn't ever been any doubt in his mind that she was going to be killed. It was possible that by now the cops had put some kind of tracer on them and begun to get clues to their identities, but they'd all been pretty careful about that and most likely the cops still didn't know who they were chasing. That was what would make it possible for them to separate in Utah and melt into the itinerant traffic that flowed endlessly toward California. They had to safeguard their anonymity and now Mrs. Lansford was the only outsider who could identify them. Obviously the Major wasn't going to turn her loose to talk.

He probably wasn't going to turn Hanratty loose either. The spine had melted out of Hanratty a long time ago and if you found the right button and pushed it Hanratty would spill out everything he knew like a computer spilling out reels of programed tape.

And Walker. Walker wasn't one of the inner circle either. The three of them, the Major and Baraclough and “Sergeant” Burt, had their plans all neatly worked out to go someplace in South Africa or Latin America and use their share of the loot to finance the mobilization of a private army so that they could go out into chickenshit little countries and play little war games. That was fine, but it wouldn't work out that way if anybody remained behind who could finger them for the American law, because there weren't many countries in the world that wouldn't cooperate in their extradition when it turned out they were wanted for multiple murders and assorted federal crimes. Hargit and Baraclough were deliberate, methodical, careful; they didn't take unnecessary risks, they didn't leave loose ends lying around to be picked up, and at bottom they didn't trust anybody except themselves.

They were going to kill him. He had tried to talk himself out of the notion, tried to chalk it up to fear and paranoia and the general sinister portentousness and unreality of the past twenty-four hours; but when he looked at it with cold logic it always came back to the same thing: they weren't going to leave him behind because he might slip up, he might get caught, he might for any number of reasons decide to spill his guts to the cops, and if there was even a remote chance of that happening they would plug the hole.

They weren't going to do it now. Not now and not here in this place. It was still possible the cops would catch up, in which case they would need their hostage alive and they would need all the guns they could muster. All right then, they weren't going to kill him in the next ten minutes or probably the next ten hours. But sooner or later, before they got out of these mountains, they were going to do it.

And he didn't see any point in hanging around obediently waiting for it.

8

The woman sat with her knees against her breasts and her head tipped to one side on her folded arms. He realized she was watching him. Looking right at him.

He let his eyes open a little wider.

When she knew she had his attention she sat up and began to do something with her hair: pulled it back from her face on both sides and tied it in a horsetail knot at the back of her head. He could see tautness and pain ground into the lines across her eyes and mouth. She kept darting glances at Baraclough and the others: she had the look of a boxed in animal trying to watch five converging wolves at once. It was clear she was near the perilous edge of breaking, keeping herself rigidly under control.

Baraclough stood up, leaned his rifle against the wall, stretched, and bent forward a little to massage his thighs. His thin face glowed in the chilly air and his cynical eyebrows arched when he looked at the woman.

Walker watched him as he might have watched a barracuda.

His gut ached. He looked at the woman again and saw in her bloodless face the knowledge of what was going to happen to her. He suspected she'd known all along—she wasn't stupid—but she'd probably found some way, just as he had, to keep herself from believing it. Until now. Now the defenses were down and she knew. Looking at Baraclough she knew.

It was like a hunk of concrete in Walker's stomach: fear.

His slitted eyes moved and locked on the woman's. Her face turned until it was no longer in Baraclough's view but she held Walker's eyes with her own and now her expression changed and they had between them that same unspoken shared understanding he had felt in the ranch yard, a sudden impact of communication and contact: and her eyes went wide, full of silent pleading, desperate need, a voiceless cry for help.

Almost imperceptibly Walker nodded. It was more in the drooping of eyelids than in any movement of his head but he was sure she caught it and understood it; she almost smiled.

It wasn't important that she trusted him. What was important—in a way he sensed but did not really comprehend—was that she thought she knew him well enough to trust him. Something he had said, something he had done, something in the way he had looked at her: he had revealed enough of himself to give her that idea. And if he let her down now it wouldn't just spoil her picture of him, it would spoil his own picture of himself. He didn't have much self-respect left to his name but what was left he cherished.

So he knew he was going to try.

9

He sat up without hurry. Yawned, scratched his face. Tugged his boots on, got to his feet as if still groggy and extended his arms; stretching, he heard the crackling of his own musculature.

He felt his face color under Baraclough's stare but he managed a short meaningless smile, shrugged for no particular reason except that it seemed a disarming sort of thing to do, and turned to the shelves on the wall to run his eyes over the canned-food labels. He still had the heavy coat on; he thrust his hand under it, down the sleeve of his leather flight jacket, and extracted a cigarette from the bicep pocket. He lit the cigarette, inhaled, choked, recovered, took down a can of stew and set it on the stove. During all this he never once looked at the woman.

Burt and Hanratty snored away. The Major was deeply asleep as well: the trek had been hardest, most exhausting, for him.

Baraclough must have had a few hours' sleep and then relieved Burt on watch. He looked a little droopy but not likely to fall asleep.

Power of suggestion, Walker thought: he went into the sheet-metal lavatory and urinated into the john. The cubicle was no bigger than an airliner's rest room.

He flushed the toilet but the noise was almost obscured by the steady roar of the blizzard against the log walls.

He stepped out of the cubicle zipping up his trousers and went back to the stove to test the temperature of the can of stew; left the can on the stove and sat down against the wall, midway between the stove and the woman. Baraclough sat beyond the woman, smoking; he had left the rifle leaning against the wall.

For a moment Walker thought it wasn't going to work. But then Baraclough stood up, caught Walker's eye, nodded toward the girl as if to say “Watch her,” and went into the lavatory. Baraclough was the kind of man to whom superficial manners were important: he probably killed politely. Walker had counted on that: Baraclough closed the door.

The moment the lavatory door was shut Walker scooped up his hat and mittens and crossed the room. Past the woman, moving swiftly and without sound. He picked up the rifle Baraclough had left tilted against the wall, and turned to sweep the rest of the room with a wary inspection.

Nobody woke up.

The woman was on her feet without a word, coming after him.

He had one mitten on. He put the other one in his coat pocket to keep his hand free on the rifle. Ducked under the nylon rope and walked between the horses to the front of the shed.

The woman's face was upturned, alive, expectant. He pointed to the horse nearest the door and when the woman reached for its reins Walker made a signal with a jerk of his head to indicate that she should go first. With his mittened left hand he reached out and gathered up the trailing reins of the blue roan. Then he backed up against the front door and collected the lead-rope of one of the packhorses and wrapped that in his left hand along with the blue's reins. Finally he nodded to the woman, braced the rifle across the crook of his elbow and slid the wooden crossbar back out of its slot. And shoved the door open with his boot.

The wind slammed in, banged the door back against the outside wall; the candles guttered out and he felt the woman go by, urging her horse through the doorway. The horse didn't want to go out into that. Walker whacked it with the rifle—whacked where he thought the horse was, and seemed to hit it because it jumped and went rushing past him, almost knocking him over.

“What the fuck?”

“Jesus …”

“
What's going on
?”

The lavatory door slammed open with a tinny clank. If there were other sounds they were swallowed in the rock-crushing growl of wind.

Walker was through the door, outside, head bowed against the blast. Pulling the blue's reins and the packhorse.

But something got stuck. He couldn't see but it had to be that the two horses had wedged together in the narrow door. One of them screamed, a high whickering neigh; he felt the leather reins slide out through his mitten. Trying to grab for them with his right hand he dropped the rifle. And missed the reins.

Now all he had was the packhorse's lead-rope and somebody inside the cabin started shooting.

Shooting at the door because they thought they were being invaded.

Walker dropped flat on his belly and rolled out of the line of fire.

He'd lost the rifle and he'd lost both horses. What he rolled into was a deep bank of loose snow that the wind had piled against the side of the shed. The gale had packed it semi-firm but the flakes were quite dry and didn't adhere to one another, so that his body penetrated the drift and a small avalanche tumbled down over him. A sense of burial, of drowning, of being sucked under: impossible to get his breath.

He swam out of it and crawled on his hands and knees, shaking himself like a wet dog. His knuckles banged into something solid and when he felt for it he found the corner of the cabin: he crawled around into the lee of it and got to his feet.

Somebody fired two or three more gunshots and he heard a fellow bellow—the Major?—and the shooting stopped.

It occurred to him he could go back inside. They hadn't seen anything; they'd never know he had tried to get away. But he had let the woman go and they would kill him for that.

Then he felt a thud and heard the slam as if from a far distance, and knew he no longer had the choice of going back inside: they had shut the door and now they would be lighting candles, counting heads.

He was behind the cabin; the woman had gone in the opposite direction. He had to find her. He had no horse, no blanket, no gun, no food. She had all those things except a gun.

He reached the corner and stepped into the shrieking wind. There was a little light, it was gray rather than black, but the grayness was opaque. He had to feel his way forward along the side of the cabin and when he reached the front corner he hesitated, half expecting the front door to slam open and the others to come charging out with guns. He stood paralyzed by that fear until the realization crept into him that they weren't going to come out after him: they couldn't see any better than he could out here.

The woman had gone straight out from the front door. He stepped away from the cabin, only two paces but it seemed to put him in the middle of nothingness. The wind came at him against the front of his left shoulder and if he kept the wind on that quarter he ought to be able to keep moving in a straight line toward the woman.

If she had stopped: if she was waiting for him. But why should she?

He had to find her. Find her or freeze to death out here all by himself.

10

The next hours never came back to him clearly afterward. He moved in a disoriented daze with the icy wind driving right through him. It kept blowing him off his course, or so he kept thinking. He rubbed the palm of a glove over his face, scraping off frost. Needles tingled up his legs as his feet hit the ground and his bowels were knotted with unreasoning hollow terror: a child's awful fear that not only is the house empty but nobody will ever come back to it. Hunger, and the thought that the beans he'd eaten in the cabin had been his last meal. Shoulders and head butted into the blast, he had the feeling he was only treadmilling in his own former tracks.

The wind was a grating roar, a deep rumble like a heavy artillery barrage, and the snow driven upon it never reached the earth: it flew horizontally, beating his cheek, rolling against him with a steady weight that made him lean into it to keep balance. The world spun drunkenly. He lost sensation in the flesh of his face and tiny icicle fringes hung like sweat beads from his nose and ear lobes and eyebrows. In one lucid moment he estimated that fifteen minutes more would mark the farthest limit of his strength: find shelter or die.

Like debris torn loose from anchor he flapped through the snow and somewhere in that run of seconds or minutes he remembered the woman's name and began to shout with the full power of his lungs: “Marianne! Marianne!”

And could hardly hear his own voice as it whipped away. He beat his hands together, staggered with numb legs.… He jerked himself erect and discovered that he had fallen; yanked his body forward with the desperate knowledge that he had to keep moving as long as the muscles would pull.

A spasm of agony wrung him out. It was unendurable. So stiff with cold he could hardly move, he kept sawing painful breath into his chest to call her name and the pitch of his voice climbed in panic.

Most of the time he moved with his eyes shut, keeping the wind against his left cheek, trusting the pain in his feet to keep him moving. When the pain made way for no feeling at all that would mark the end of hope.

Now when he passed them he could vaguely see trees bending in the wind. Must have descended in the lee of a mountainside, out of the full blast of it.