Relentless (3 page)

“They're likely to run into some turbulence, heading that way,” Stevens observed.

“Those guys usually know what they're doing.” Watchman had a secret admiration for pilots. He'd only been up in airplanes a few times, mostly in big liners, but every time he happened to drive past a private airport he would run his eyes over the little planes and start to think about maybe investing a little money in flying lessons and getting himself a license. The Highway Patrol had a few planes and maybe …

It was idle fantasy; nothing was likely to come of it but daydreams. Basically he was a groundling, rooted in the earth. In the Army after high school he'd been MOS Infantry all the way—that had been in 'fifty-seven and 'fifty-eight—and they'd flown him all the way from Fort Bliss to West Berlin during the crisis but there'd been no action and when he had returned to the States they had refused his application for transfer into the Military Police, so he'd let his enlistment expire and come back to school on the GI Bill—two years at the State College in Flagstaff and then a rookie beat with the Highway Patrol. At thirty-three he had been a cop almost exactly one-third of his lifetime. To show for it, he had three commendations, two citations for bravery, and five written reprimands.

Just the same it was a long way up for a
Diné
, which was the Navajo word for
Navajo
(
Navajo
being an Apache word that meant “enemy”). He had been born in 1938 in one of four mud-brush hogans that belonged to the cluster of his grandmother's family—grandmother and married daughters and their children—just about dead center on the sixteen-million-acre Window Rock Reservation. When he was a kid they'd had to carry water up to the hogan in a bucket from a well a quarter mile away and it was a twenty-five-mile walk to the trading post where his father worked as an Agency cop. You never got out of debt to the white trader. But you were taught never to complain. In those days there hadn't been any Red Power movements but Watchman's father had been a man of strength who had refused to be degraded by charity or the patronizing paternalism of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The old man had had one thing nobody had ever taken away from him and that was his sense of humor; and that was Sam Watchman's legacy. No point in fighting the Indian wars all over again; the thing to do was get along with folks, have a few laughs, love a good woman and take pride in the dignity of your work. On the college psychological tests there had been a question, “How would you characterize yourself?” and of the five choices for answers Watchman had picked “Easygoing.” He just didn't understand folks who made one big crisis out of life.

They passed Holcombe's roadside oasis—half a dozen sycamores, a dusty trailer park, a decrepit old motel with five “modern cabins” and Holcombe's store and filling station with its untrue sign, “Last Gas Before Desert.” Watchman got comfortable in the seat for the long afternoon's drive ahead, with his wrist hooked over the top of the steering wheel and his left elbow poking out the window, and then the radio coughed and sputtered and Buck Stevens reached down to turn up the volume against the noise of the wind.

“… Repeat, we have a Code Ten Thirteen from San Miguel. Car Niner Zero, acknowledge. Car Niner Zero.”

Watchman plucked the mike off its sprocket and took his foot off the gas while he talked into the microphone. “Niner Zero to Dispatch, Niner Zero to Dispatch. Go ahead—what's the ruckus?”

“We have a Ten Thirteen from San Miguel, Officer Needs Assistance. Robbery in progress—repeat, robbery in progress. That you, Sam?”

“Aeah, Ernie, go ahead.” He had the brakes on now to swing wide for a U-turn.

Buck Stevens sat up higher in his seat. “What the fuck?…” The shape of his blue eyes was changing.

The rear wheels slewed in the gravel as Watchman hung the end-for-end turn on the shoulders and started back the way they had come. The radio kept coughing: “It looks like the San Miguel bank, Sam.”

Watchman's eye flicked the passing milepost—twenty-three more miles into town. Stevens was switching on the flasher. Watchman cranked his window closed to hear the two-way's speaker. The needle climbed up past the eighty m.p.h. mark.

“… coming in on the emergency shortwave band. Their teletype lines must be down and we can't get through on the phone. It could be some ham operator pulling a hoax but they've got the right signal codes. It keeps fading in and out—pretty weak. Something about robbery in progress, officer needs assistance, maybe the bank. It's coming in garbled—possibly one of Cunningham's company cops on the key.”

“We're on our way.”

“How far out are you?”

“Be there in fourteer minutes.” Watchman saw Buck Stevens' hand reach the jolting dashboard and grip its edge. “We're east of town. You'd better put a stopper on the road west.”

“Affirmative, Niner Zero. Two Nevada patrol cars coming east from the state line. They'll cross the line in seven minutes.”

They worked like that up here, operating vaguely under” interstate “hot pursuit” statutes; in fact a Utah sheriff's office regularly covered the northwest corner of Arizona's Mohave County. It had to be done that way. Watchman's was the only Arizona police car in fifteen thousand square miles.

Even so it would take the two Nevada cars an hour to reach San Miguel.

Watchman reached up for the siren switch. “God knows what we'll run into—better get armed.”

Buck Stevens was pale. He twisted in the seat to get at the rack inside the back door that held the riot shotgun and rifle; dragged both weapons over the back of the seat and held them across his knees. In the corner of his vision Watchman saw the rookie's Adam's apple shift up and down.

They whipped past the city-limit sign and several cars and pickups crowded over close to the curb to let them by. Watchman brought the speed down and came into the last bend at forty; the cruiser swayed on its springs, tires wailing, the ten-foot spring-mounted radio antenna lashing violently from its mountings on the rear bumper.

A small crowd stood gaping outside the bank and Watchman slid in at the curb, switched off the siren but left the flasher on. “Never mind the guns.” People in crowds could be stupid but not that stupid; if there was any chance of shooting here these people would have been behind cover. Conclusion: if the bank had been robbed, the robbers had already fled.

The crowd was a tight knot around the door and when Watchman and Stevens came across the curb the crowd parted like the waters of the Red Sea. A barefoot kid in frayed jeans stood open-mouthed with his nose pressed to the window. Watchman went inside.

People were clustered inside the bank. Most of the men had no trousers on.

There was a little group crouched around an object on the floor by the rear teller's cage.

There was a lot of talking, everybody shouting at one another and at Watchman. He lifted his voice; “All right, let's hold it down.”

The racket subsided from clamor to mutter. A thin shape straightened and detached itself from the knot of people by the teller's cage—Jace Cunningham, looking greenish and soft around the mouth. He came forward quickly and showed his consternation by shaking his head grievously and letting his hand dangle limply at the wrist, shaking it back and forth as if wearily drying his fingertips. “Jesus H. Christ.” He had his pants on.

“What happened, Jace?”

“I ain't sure. I wasn't here—I just got here. But somebody hit the bank, a bunch of them. They got the cash, pretty close to a million. And that over there …”

Past the crowded people Watchman could see a pair of boots protruding and he heard Cunningham say, “They killed Jasper Simalie, Sam.”

5

Watchman gripped Buck Stevens by the arm. “They didn't pass by us going out so they've gone out the other way—west on 793. Get on the radio and report. Tell those Nevada patrol cars to stop and search anything that moves on that road. On the run, now.”

When Stevens sprinted past him he pushed Jace Cunningham aside with the heel of his hand and shoved into the crowd around Jasper Simalie. He recognized Doctor Jamieson—a gaunt man with a hollow-cheeked death's head and big yellow teeth, sparrow-chested and frail. The doctor was breathing like a teakettle. He looked up at Watchman and shook his head.

Jasper lay on his face. There was a great deal of blood on the floor.

“Shotguns,” the doctor said through his teeth. “They weren't pistols, they were shotguns. The poor son of a bitch never had a prayer.”

A pudgy man with pink hands was waiting, licking his lips with a pink tongue, when Watchman straightened and turned. Cunningham said, “This here's Mr. Whipple. He owns the bank.”

“Not really,” the pudgy man said. “I'm the manager—I work for the San Miguel Copper Company and I'm supposed to—”

“Were you here?”

“What's that?” Whipple's eyelids fluttered like semaphores.

“When this happened. Were you here? Can you tell me what happened?”

“I suppose so. It's all so unreal, you know?”

The doctor came by, lugging his bag. “I've got to have a look at those armored-car guards. You coming, Jace?”

Watchman turned with an abrupt snap of his wide shoulders. “What about the guards?”

Cunningham flapped a bony hand reassuringly. “Don't worry about it. They're okay. They got sprayed with something and need gettin' their eyes washed out, that's all.”

The doctor said, “I think it was chemical Mace,” and went.

6

It was the biggest bank haul in the history of Arizona.

Watchman absorbed the facts quickly, piecing them together from the disjointed reportage of Whipple and Cunningham and two of the tellers he questioned. The tellers stood awkwardly, trying to ignore the fact that they were standing there in shirts, neckties, and underdrawers.

That was because the bandits had relieved them not only of the better part of a million in cash—Terrell, the head cashier, estimated $930,000—but of their pants as well, to discourage them from venturing out in pursuit.

It wasn't clear whether there had been four men or five. The company guards who rode the armored truck and its two convoy cars had instructions to stay near the bank in case of trouble and they had developed the habit of playing dime-quarter poker in the mud room in the back of the bank where employees hung their coats and boots on winter days. The bandits had known that; at least two of them had rushed in through the back door and squirted a chemical from spray cans—probably Mace, a disabling gas. It had affected the guards' vision, disoriented them, made them violently nauseous. Whatever it was, it had taken the eight guards out immediately and silently and none of them was able to give more than a sketchy description of their attackers. The bandits had relieved them of their side arms and locked them in the mud room. When Watchman talked to them the Tally Ho cards and coins were still scattered all over the room.

One man had entered the bank proper from the rear and two others had walked in the front door. They wore stocking masks and carried two double shotguns and an automatic pistol. About eight customers had been in the bank along with Whipple and seven employees. Another robber had waited outside at the wheel of the car. It was possible a fifth man had remained posted by the mud room to make sure the guards didn't break through the locked door.

In the bank the robbers had told everybody to remove their trousers and get down on the floor. Two of them had leaped over the low fence and gone into the vault, carrying military duffel bags which they stuffed with loot. The third man, with a shotgun, had waited just inside the front door. The bank guard, Jasper Simalie, had sneezed and stirred or had not stirred—there were conflicting eyewitness reports—and in either case the nervous bandit had fired. The shotgun charge had blasted Jasper Simalie back against the tellers' counter and he had slid down and fallen over on his face, leaving behind a red smear on the face of the counter.

The head cashier, Terrell, had pressed the alarm button under the lip of his desk very shortly after the bandits had entered the place, and the alarm had sounded in the police shack four blocks away. Jace Cunningham had been in the office with one of his patrolmen and he had told the patrolman to get through to the Sheriff and the Highway Patrol; Cunningham himself had grabbed a rifle off the rack and sprinted for the bank. But by the time Cunningham arrived the bandits had fled; he got a glimpse of their car speeding by, heading west.

The entire operation had taken no more than four minutes.

7

“They must have cut the phone and telegraph wires at both ends of town,” Cunningham said. “Everything's dead except the radio. They had everything figured out—it took a lot of planning. This was no amateur job.”

“But they're on the main highway,” Buck Stevens said. “They're on the main road because there aren't any secondary roads. We can nail them easy. Maybe those Nevada cars have got them by now.”

Watchman looked at his watch. They had been here twelve or fifteen minutes. He said to Cunningham, “Did you get a make on the car?”

“Not really. The play went around the other end. It was an old car—maybe an Olds, Buick, something like that.”

“Anybody get a look at the driver?”

No answer.

Whipple said nervously, “I did notice one thing. One of them had an ugly scar on his wrist—here, like this.”

Watchman's eyes locked on Stevens' and Stevens nodded emphatically.

Watchman took Cunningham by the arm and walked him toward the front door, talking while he moved. “They'd have known what the highway situation is around here. They must have allowed for it. I wouldn't be surprised if they hadn't doubled back and taken cover somewhere right here in town. You'd better get all your men looking for them.”