Relentless (21 page)

His foot caught, he went down again. His belly churned; his thinking wheeled as if in a dream. He lay where he was, unable to rise and wanting sleep, and he fought a battle there and won it and forced his frozen body up. Now a strange question came to him: were his legs really moving or were they not; was he lying in the snow imagining he was walking? Something whipped his face, tingling sharply yet distantly, and he reared his head back, supposing he had run into a branch. He felt the lash of it again and blinked.

It was the woman, standing vaguely before him, slapping his face. Putting her lips by his ear: “Stop shouting. I'm here. Stop shouting.”

He realized he had still been shouting her name.

Laughter bubbled out between his stiff lips.

“Come on—come on.” She had him by the arm and he felt himself being dragged along. When she let go his arm he fell to his knees. His hand had fallen on the horse's fetlock and the horse stirred, frightening him, but when he looked up he could make out the horse's ghostly gray outline against the paler background, the tops of windbent pines. He could see his hands and the ground under them.

When he looked up again the woman was standing there against a tree, slumped, her stomach thrusting forward, and another bundled figure stood on two widespread legs looking down at him. Hargit, he thought. Major Hargit. You could never get away from that man. Sudden tears came in a scalding, bursting convulsion and vomit pain twisted his stomach and he fell flat on the frozen earth.…

The man was bending over him, stripping off a glove, laying his fingers behind Walker's jaw hinge. Walker felt his own pulse beat against the man's hard fingers, and he heard the man's voice—not the Major's voice, not any voice he'd ever heard before: “You'll be all right. Come on.” And the man was picking him up under the arms, lifting him onto his feet.

11

At first he thought it was a cave they dragged him into but when he looked around he saw it wasn't quite that. A rock cliff, a slight overhang, an improvised lean-to of dead logs and saddles piled cleverly to form a kind of triangular shelter. The wind was not canceled, but at least it was reduced. Two men squatted inside; the woman went in and crowded between them for warmth and the man who was dragging Walker pushed him inside and he collapsed on the ground, drawing his knees up foetally.

The woman was crying. “Look at me. I can't stop.”

“Take it easy, Mrs. Lansford.”

Walker felt dizzy; he couldn't breathe. The man who had dragged him inside turned and Walker glimpsed his face. He looked like an Indian.

The others were huddled together watching him. The Indian said, “Vickers, your horse is just about done anyway. Bring him here.”

“What for?”

“Do it.”

And one of the men got up with a grunt and went out, stepping across Walker. The Indian was kneeling beside him again and began to slap his cheeks. Walker tried to jerk his head away but the Indian kept slapping him. “Got to get your circulation going, man. Don't fight me.”

His cheeks began to sting dully. The woman said, “There's no way to build a fire?”

“Not till the wind lets up.”

The other man came into sight leading a horse that was limping badly where balls of ice had formed in its hoofs.

The Indian went back into the shelter and reappeared with a rifle and Walker's face crumpled. The Indian stood up and shot the animal in the head.

The horse fell right beside Walker and the Indian put the rifle away and came out again with a hunting knife. Faint streaks of light flashed fragmentarily from the blade when it moved toward the horse and plunged in, opened a great slit in the dead horse's belly. The Indian methodically gutted the horse, throwing the insides away in the wind, and the smell of escaping gases made Walker turn his face away. He began to lose consciousness, not unpleasantly; sleep drifted vaguely into his mind and somehow his concentration focused on the numbness of his bad tooth.

They were shaking him violently. He tried to push them away but they kept shaking him and finally he cursed thickly and opened his eyes.

The Indian said, “Come on—get inside.”

“Inside what?”

The Indian began to tug him toward the dead horse. He saw a gaping maw: flap of hide folded back, several ribs torn away. “Inside,” the Indian said. “Pull it shut over you. It's going to stink like hell but it'll get you warm, keep you thawed out.”

The smell nauseated him. The woman was kneeling beside him. Her slender fingers reached out. “Thank you.” Eyes full of concern.

The Indian shoved him into the carcass. The hide flapped down, closing him in stinking warm darkness. The heat enveloped him and there was no wind. He sagged against the sticky wetness of his black cavern and gagged on the stench. He felt an insistent hammering behind his eyes; the beat of his heart was loud; needle pricks quivered the flesh of his hands and feet and face, and sleep rolled his head against the warm rib cage of the dead horse.

CHAPTER

7

1

Watchman batted his hands together and thrust them under his armpits and squeezed into the lean-to. The woman was lifting the mess-kit cup of instant coffee off the Sterno. She sucked at it and passed it on to Buck Stevens and said to Watchman, “Do you charge extra for the coffee or does it come with the rescue service?”

“The coffee's free. So's the weather.”

“Do you think he'll be all right?”

“He'll be fine.” Maybe a touch of frostbite, but not serious. The temperature wasn't all that low; it was the wind effect that seemed to drive it down. Without shelter you could die out there but the pilot would pull through now.

Paul Vickers was blowing his nose, giving Mrs. Lansford a bloodshot look. He was taking the weather badly. He had lost his hat in the blow and his hair stood out in wild disorder. “I'd like to know what really happened up there—why this man helped you get away. What he expected to get out of it.”

“Maybe he found a streak of humanity in him.” Mrs. Lansford said it a bit sharply, as if in rebuke.

“I don't see that. I don't want to put down your gratitude to the man, Mrs. Lansford, but if he thinks that will get him off he's mistaken. Two men have been murdered—by this man and his friends.”

“I don't think they're his friends.”

“Then why was he with them?”

Buck Stevens stirred in the back of the shelter. “Can't you leave her alone? Why don't you just shut up for a while?”

Vickers' head whipped around. It was the first time the rookie had talked back to him and it seemed to catch him off guard: he didn't know whether to bluster or sneer or ignore it. He twisted his gloved knuckles, looking cranky.

Watchman's voice was rusty, tired; it had been a bad day for them all. “Let's all settle down and try to get some rest.”

Vickers turned to him. “They're right up the mountain there.”

“Then go get'em, tiger.”

“I know my limits, Trooper. I couldn't find that cabin in this storm to save my life. But you could.”

“Look at your watch, Vickers.”

“What's that got to do with it?”

“The sun's going down. Another half hour and what little light we've got will be gone. We're not going anywhere for a while—neither are they.”

2

It had to be the fire-lookout station they were heading for; Watchman had known that by midmorning, before the blow had hit, following the tracks and seeing which way they were heading. They were boxing themselves into a series of step-up mountain passes that could only lead them toward the ranger cabin and once he had determined that much it had become unnecessary to track them; he had been able to keep moving after the blizzard had wiped out the tracks. Vickers, who was an indifferent horseman and a stranger to mountain weather, had slowed them down but they had kept pushing it until the middle of the afternoon when Vickers' horse had gone lame with ice-split hoofs and they had come under the lee of the cliff. By that time Watchman had no clear idea of their position but he had a feeling they were not too far below the summit; the trees, briefly glimpsed in slack flurries of snow, were stunted up here and that meant they were close to timberline. It might have been possible to continue but with odds of three against five, with the woman being held hostage, and with the blizzard likely to confuse things beyond control there was no point in trying to close in on the cabin.

The fugitives most likely believed they had left pursuit far behind. If they had reached the shack at all it could be assumed they wouldn't leave it again before the storm blew over: its comfort would be too compelling and there was nothing outside except the risk of dying in the snow.

Of course there was a good chance they had never reached the cabin. Maybe they had got separated in all this madness and were perishing one by one on the exposed flanks of the mountains. Maybe they had given up their try at the summit and doubled back, passing their pursuers unseen in the wheeling murk, heading back down toward the plain. But if they had done that they would run into police lines sooner or later and Watchman doubted they had tried that; when they hadn't fallen for the bonfire invitation he'd set by the abandoned trucks he'd accepted the idea that the fugitives were well led by a man confident of his wilderness skills.

Probably they had reached the cabin. If they had they weren't going anywhere for a while. Here under the cliff he had called a halt and built the shelter.

The woman had stumbled right into their camp for several reasons, but mainly because this was the only way down from the south face of the summit—the rest of it was too jagged, too crowded with boulders—and because it was a reasonably narrow trail, the same trail the fugitives had gone up. Mrs. Lansford had meant to come this way, it had been no accident of fate; it was the way she had arrived, it was the way home. She had known that if she managed to get down the trail a little way she would find at least a bit of protection from the wind because there were trees and boulders and mountain shoulders to hold back the storm.

Once out of the full brutality of the wind she had stopped and waited for quite some time on the trail, waiting for the pilot Walker, but he had not appeared and she had known she couldn't wait forever.

In the end she had had to assume Walker wasn't coming: either he wasn't coming this way—he had gone down the other side of the mountain or taken shelter somewhere near the cabin—or he wasn't able to come at all because the others had retrieved him or killed him.

She had been very bitter when she had wandered into the steep cut leading her horse and had almost trampled Buck Stevens. There had been a few moments of confusion there, Vickers ready to start shooting at the intruder, but it had got sorted out and they had brought the woman inside their shelter and fed her hot liquids and she had told them pieces of her story.

She was a remarkable woman, full of endurance and spirit, but women who chose to live isolated lives on the fringes of the wild country tended to be strong characters. At one point Vickers had told her how anxious her husband was about her and Mrs. Lansford had given him a twisted look and said, “How intrepid of him,” and looked around as if to emphasize the fact that Ben Lansford wasn't here, hadn't come after her. It was evident, and therefore sad, that Mrs. Lansford despised her husband; Watchman found himself regretting that because it violated his sense of orderly romantic neatness: a woman is in peril, you rescue her from it, you prepare to return her to her man, and you want her to look forward to that reunion with ecstatic joy. For a moment he resented Mrs. Lansford, he made her out to be an ingrate for obscure reasons, he even felt that her attitude somehow threatened everything good between himself and Lisa.

It was a brief passing irrationality and he had no time to dwell on it. Mrs. Lansford was just getting herself thawed out and beginning to answer questions coherently when they had heard the faint sounds of a man shouting. She had got up quickly and left the shelter before any of them had time to move. Watchman had gone after her; she had for some reason picked up the reins of her horse and was leading it along with her, and Watchman only just caught up to her when she found Walker and began to slap his face to stop his hysterical shouting.

Now they had Walker bundled into the stinking carcass and Vickers was talking to the woman in his methodically polite FBI voice: “Now Mrs. Lansford if you don't mind I'd like you to tell us everything you can about those four men up there.”

The woman began to talk and Watchman listened with close attention. A corner of his mind marveled at her resilience; mostly he just absorbed her words, forming a picture of the four men. The images of two of them were only vague outlines—the older man, Hanratty, and the one called Burt; but she had reacted sharply to the one they called only “Steve” and the other one, “Major.” From the information Washington had sent, Vickers supplied their names: Baraclough, Hargit. When Mrs. Lansford talked about those two men there was a change in her voice; the mannerisms of country drawl fell away, the syllables tightened up. These men had frightened her: frightened her in a different way from the kidnaping itself. When you were abducted your fear was likely to be self-focused—
What's to become of me?
—and Mrs. Lansford had reacted that way but in time she had worked up another kind of fear, induced by Hargit's awful predatory indifference and Baraclough's sadistic malice, and she was not surprised when she learned that the police deputy had been left dead in her house: she recalled that Baraclough had been the last one to leave the house and remembered the look of satisfaction on Baraclough's strange face.