Relentless (27 page)

Stevens said, “Sam, you take some pretty dumb chances. I suppose you learned that trick of riding the off-side of the horse from your old grandpappy Crazy Horse.”

“Matter of fact I saw John Wayne do it in a movie once.”

“One of those movies where the cavalry wipes out all the Inyuns, I'll bet.” Stevens pulled his pants up and suppressed a groan. “I take it these two beauties are Baraclough and the Sergeant. Where's Hargit?”

“Gone.”

“With the money?”

“I heard more than one horse moving.”

“That makes him pretty rich all by himself.”

Eddie Burt tried to say something through his gag.

Stevens zipped up his fly. “Those bastards shoot pretty damn good at night.”

Watchman took the first-aid kit over to Baraclough. Little pulsating jets of blood spurted out of his shoulder; when Watchman cut the coat away the broken bone ends showed white. Baraclough, half-conscious, stared down at the wound with bleak bitterness. Watchman said, “It's vein blood, not artery.”

“Now that's sensational.” Baraclough's eyes lifted to his face. “You're a God damned Indian, aren't you. If the Major'd known that …”

“If the Major'd known that, what?”

“Nobody ever took us apart before. But he'll be back for us. He knows how good you are now and he'll take you next time. He's a better Indian than you are.” Baraclough smiled with his teeth.

It reminded Watchman of something Keith Walker had said.
A better Indian than you are
.

“He'll be back,” Baraclough said again.

“Don't count on it.” Watchman dressed the wound as well as he could. While he was pasting the bandage over the sulfa powder Baraclough passed out.

He got Buck Stevens' handcuffs and trussed Baraclough's good hand to Eddie Burt's wrist. When he walked back to Stevens he said, “You're going to have to stay awake awhile, white man.”

“Going somewhere?”

“Vickers.”

“Oh yeah. Where'd he go?”

“I told him to stay put till we came after him.”

“Okay. I'll watch them. They don't look too dangerous right now. How the hell did you do it, Sam?”

“Nothing to it. Genius. A teaspoon after meals and at bedtime.”

“Conceited bastard.”

“Buck.”

“What?”

“Keep your eyes open and use your ears hard. Hargit may come back.”

Stevens' face changed quickly. “Yeah. Hand me my rifle.”

10

Not knowing where Hargit was made it difficult: he didn't want to sing out for Vickers and give himself away in the bargain. But if Vickers caught him creeping up Vickers would just as likely shoot him before making sure of his identity.

The thing to do was to make Vickers show himself first. He went up along the aspens on foot and kept close to the tree trunks, resenting the time this was taking; he didn't like leaving Stevens back there alone with Hargit loose in the woods.

If Vickers had done as he'd been told he would be somewhere around here. Watchman stopped and groped in the ground-snow for a rock. When he found one big enough he gave it a heave. It made a bit of a racket crashing through the twigs and when it landed in the stream it crashed through a film of ice.

If Vickers was here it would draw his attention. But there was no sign of movement.

Twenty paces further he repeated the performance with another rock but it didn't pull Vickers out of hiding. Watchman took a chance: he whispered Vickers' name, loudly enough to carry a good distance.

No answer. He scowled at the creek. The grenade had made a mess of Hanratty's body. Moonlight made a silver shine on the snow-blanketed shale slide. It was very cold now; ice was forming quickly on the surface of the creek. Probably going down below zero. He wasn't sure of the altitude here but it was at least seven thousand feet. The top layer of ground snow was freezing hard; his feet cracked through it when he moved.

He tried to put himself in Vickers' boots but it was hard to do, hard to figure how the man would think. Time was going by too fast and it would take too long to find Vickers' tracks and follow them. He didn't want to leave Buck alone that long. He stopped to concentrate his thinking.

Vickers wasn't here; so he'd gone somewhere. Where would he go? Then Watchman had it. He turned around and went back downstream through the aspens, angling to the right away from the stream, toward the little hill where they'd left Vickers' horse. That was where Vickers would go because that was where the walkie-talkie was.

11

The tracks showed that Vickers had stood around for a while, probably trying to get through to somebody on the walkie-talkie, and then had led the horse up toward the top of the hill, maybe hoping to get out of the dead spot and pick up a signal.

He found Vickers at the top with his ear against the walkie-talkie. Vickers had his rifle and looked quite alert; Watchman put himself against a tree and spoke his name.

Vickers came wheeling around with the rifle and Watchman said, “Take it easy. I'm coming in.”

“All right. What's happened?”

“We took two of them. Hargit's gone with the money.”

“Two of them, hey? Not bad, Trooper.”

“You raise anybody?”

“I just heard Cunningham talking. I didn't want to answer because I didn't know who might be around here in earshot.”

“You're learning. Come on.”

Vickers was pleased to see the two prisoners. Watchman had a look at Buck Stevens and when Stevens grinned he said, “You'll be all right, Buck.” Then he turned to Vickers: “Hargit might hide the money somewhere and think about coming back for these two, but he knows Baraclough's been shot and he can't drag an injured man with him. I can't see him caring more about Burt than he cares about the money—I think he'll try to get down in the foothills by morning. There are a lot of places he can disappear into. If he gets that far we may lose him for good.”

“Then you want us to go after him.”

“Not us. Buck can't stay awake all night on guard with a hole in him. You'll have to do that—and keep alert because Hargit may come back. I doubt it, but it could happen.”

“One against one? So far he's slipped you every time.”

There was no point answering that. Vickers turned to stare past him at the prisoners. Baraclough had come to; he was looking on with a kind of self-disgusted bemusement Burt's eyes glittered with steady anger. Without Hargit and the money the two of them weren't much of a consolation prize: that was probably what Vickers was thinking when he turned back to Watchman. “We've played it your way so far and you've done a good job. All right, try it. In the meantime I think I can get through on the walkie-talkie. I'll get helicopters up here first thing in the morning to pick up your partner and these two and the corpse up the stream there, and we'll try to get another chopper up to the top to collect Mrs. Lansford and Walker. I'll try to cordon the foothills north of here as well as I can, so that if Hargit gets down that far he may be driven back into your arms.”

“Fine.”

“Anything else?”

“You're doing all right so far,” Watchman said.

“I'm beginning to learn my limitations.” Vickers smiled with white teeth, his features looking firm and frank and clean and fully in command, but underneath there was an absence of center: he had never found his own core. He was playing up to Watchman now because he saw Watchman as his only chance for redemption and if Watchman succeeded he wanted Watchman on his good side afterward. And if Watchman failed it wouldn't have cost Vickers anything to cement relations beforehand. The rest was a lie: Vickers hadn't learned anything; he didn't have the capacity to learn. When this was over, if they nailed Hargit, Vickers was going to claim credit for the whole thing because he knew Watchman wouldn't dispute him: Watchman didn't care about glory.

It wasn't very fair. But Watchman had stopped expecting things to be fair when he was eight years old. If he nailed Hargit all he'd get out of it would be another citation. There wouldn't be any promotion in it for him; there was never going to be a promotion as long as the old-line hairbags cops had control of the HP. Vickers would come up smelling like roses with a new job as district director back East somewhere.

He'd already caught the man who'd killed Jasper, in a way at least: Hanratty was dead. Baraclough had killed the other cop and they had Baraclough too. The money was of no particular importance except to the men who stole it and the men from whom it had been stolen. Altogether, Watchman had very little to gain and a great deal to lose by going after Hargit, risking his neck when he didn't have to, taking the chance when there were plenty of cops and FBI agents down on the Utah side of the mountains who could take the blame for losing Hargit if he got through.

In the end it was a foolish thing that boosted him onto the saddle of Buck Stevens' horse and sent him up into the woods after Major Leo Hargit. It was the fact that two people had told him Hargit was a better Indian than he was.

Nobody was a better Indian than Sam Watchman. He didn't know why, but it was necessary to prove that.

CHAPTER

11

1

The temperature kept dropping sharply, well past midnight; Leo Hargit had everything buttoned and belted and wrapped around him but the cold was in his bones and he cursed it. It was the one thing he had never had to fight before. All his fighting had been in semitropics or along the barren slopes of the warm montagnard country of the Indochinese Central Highlands. Up here now it was probably ten or fifteen below; he knew it wouldn't kill him but he couldn't stop cursing it.

He reached the end of this particular stretch of forest and stopped to scan the open slope above him before he put the horses out onto the packed snow and ran across the rocks into the farther pines, where he drew rein and hipped around to look back across the heaped-up mountains he had traveled. The moon was about halfway down; there was a surprising amount of light on the slopes, reflected back from the frozen surface of the snow that covered them.

He had a faint sense of regret. Steve and the Sergeant had traveled a long way with him. But he had seen the way the bullet had smashed Steve's shoulder and he knew Steve wasn't going to survive a horseback ride out of these mountains. He'd be better off in a police chopper. Burt had been a good man, steadily loyal, but in warfare you had to be practical, you had to take your losses. The world was full of Eddie Burts, competent and reliable; it made no sense to risk sacrificing a Hargit for a Burt. The money on the two packhorses would be enough to hire a thousand Sergeant Burts.

In a way being alone made it easier: Easier to disappear, easier to fade into the traffic and escape. There would be men looking for him at the foot of the range but that didn't worry him. He would isolate one of them, kill the man and take the man's uniform. He'd had plenty of experience infiltrating enemy lines. The only danger came from the rear. There was no way to conceal the tracks his three horses left in the crusted snow. And now, waiting at his vantage point and watching his backtrail, he saw a slow-moving dot detach itself from the shadows two or three miles back and advance down the slope like a crawling ant. But from the haze of kicked-up snow that drifted around the moving figure Hargit knew he was being deceived by mountain distance; the rider was coming along at high speed across the open there.

He waited long enough to be sure there was only one rider and then he checked the packhorses' lead-ropes and turned into the forest, and began to cast around for a good ambush spot.

2

Quarter past two. Watchman stopped and looked out across the ascending boulder field. The tracks went straight up and into the trees beyond. A good place to get whipsawed. He turned right and circled the boulder patch and came back along the upper timberline until he intersected the tracks. He studied them long enough to see what had happened here. Hargit had stopped and the horses had milled a little. Watching the backtrail. One of the horses had dropped a pile of manure marshmallows and Watchman got down to touch it. Still green and a little warmer than the frozen ground: forty-five minutes old, perhaps, no more.

From here he looked back to see what Hargit had been able to see. He measured the distances with his eye and decided Hargit had watched him cross that saddle two and a half miles above this place. So Hargit knew how much of a lead he had and knew he was being followed by a solitary horseman.

When Watchman put his horse into the trees he knew Hargit would be setting up the ambush somewhere very near and very soon.

He began to think about how Hargit would set it up.

A grenade, tied to a tree with a tripwire running across the trail. A likely possibility: and so instead of riding in Hargit's tracks he rode parallel to them, a dozen feet to the right of them.