Apache Country (29 page)

They came down the side of the canyon in the
late afternoon, quartering across the pack trail in a continuous
zigzag so they were never on it for more than a few yards at any
one time. It was cool and silent beneath the trees, the shade a
welcome respite from the hard heat higher up. Ironheel’s stride
lengthened.

“Lots of bear up here in the Marcials,”
Easton panted. “What do we do if we run into one?”

Ironheel didn’t even break stride. “Hope he
isn’t hungry,” he said.

Lower down where the canyon widened, the
trail became a clearly-defined tire-track road. Still further down
they passed by weekend cabins half-hidden in the trees; all of them
unoccupied. Ahead, the trail leveled off in a grassy clearing of
maybe half an acre, on the far side of which stood another cabin.
It looked new: the timber was still yellow, the window sashes and
shingles unweathered. Smoke curled from the chimney. A tan Dodge
pickup was parked to one side under the trees. The front door stood
ajar. The smell of frying bacon made Easton’s mouth water. He
looked a question at Ironheel, who gave an almost imperceptible
shrug.

“No sign of kids,” he said quietly.

“Want to give it a shot?”

Ironheel looked dubious. “Ngodzid,” he said.
“Risky.”

“Someone’s got to see us down here.”

“N’ zhoo,” Ironheel said, letting out his
breath in a long exhalation that combined unease and fatalistic
agreement.

They stepped out of concealment and headed
across the meadow. As they approached the cabin, a middle-aged
woman appeared in the doorway drying her hands on a white cotton
towel. She wore a dark blue smock dress with a linen apron over it.
Short, plump, rosy-cheeked, she looked like every sweet old granny
in a retirement home ad you ever saw. But there was a jittery look
in her eyes and Easton wondered why.

“Afternoon, ma’am,” he said.

She gave them a pasty smile. “Howdy.
Hikin’?”

“Been out all day,” Easton said. “Pretty
rough up there. Ma’am, any chance we could use your phone? Be glad
to pay.”

“Sorry,” she said, avoiding eye contact. “We
don’t have one. That’s why we come up here, to get away from all
that stuff.”

“Staying long?” Ironheel asked.

She tilted her head to one side, like a bad
actress: Look, I’m thinking.

“Few more days, I guess. ’less it starts in
raining.”

“Family with you?”

Their questions appeared to be making her
nervous. She smoothed her apron, ran a hand through her short gray
hair, threaded the towel between her hands.

“Just me and m’husband,” she said breathily.
“He’s out in back.”

As she spoke they heard the brittle snap of a
dry stick behind them, and turned around. Facing them was a short,
stocky man with silver hair, wearing tan twill pants and a cord
vest worn over a red check hunting shirt. In his hand he had an old
M1911 Colt .45 automatic that looked big enough to blow a hole in a
Baldwin locomotive.

“Don’t neither you fellers move now!” he
shouted, his voice cracking with nervous tension. “Y’hear?”

It was clear from his blink-rate that the old
man was rabbit-shit scared. Ironheel glanced at Easton, who gave
him a minimal shake of the head. If either of them so much as took
a step toward him, the old man would empty the gun before he even
realized he’d pulled the trigger.

“There’s no need for this, sir,” Easton said,
putting injury into his voice. “We’re not here to harm you.”

“Don’t listen to ’m, Joe!” his wife shrilled.
“It’s them all right!”

“Ah know it,” the old man cackled, showing
yellowing teeth. “Ah know it. Heared about you fellers on the TV.
They got a ree-ward out on you. Yes sir, one thousand dollars.”

He pointed the automatic at Ironheel, waggled
it up and down. “Now you, Injun, you just lay that there gun down
on the ground and move away from it.”

“Sir, listen, there’s no need for this,
mister—” Ironheel said.

“Shut up!” the man shouted, his voice shrill.
“Do whut Ah tell you! Now!”

Ironheel held up a hand, palm out, and
stooped to lay down the gun. He stepped back from it, looked at
Easton. What now? his expression said.

Good question, Easton thought.

The old man and his wife had seen them
coming. Maybe they had field glasses. Look, it’s them two fellers
we saw on the TV. The ones there’s a reward for. See, they got no
backpacks. It must be them. And the old man had grabbed his cannon,
dodged out the back door and circled around behind them, figuring
he could take them by surprise, hold them till the cops came, pick
up the reward and get his name in the papers.

He felt sorry for them and angry, too. Just
what the hell was this old man doing waving a Colt .45 automatic
around, anyway? It was one of the most notoriously inaccurate
weapons ever made. It was a shame to burst his bubble.

“Tell me something, Pop,” he said, making his
tone conversational. “Can you use that cannon?”

The old man looked puzzled. “Use it? Damn
right I can.”

Easton nodded. “Then which of us you going to
kill first?”

The old man’s mouth went slack. “Whuh ...
whassat?”

“Simple enough question, Pop,” Easton said,
making his voice abruptly harsh. “Even for someone as stupid as
you. We’ve both got guns. You shoot him, I’ll kill you. Shoot me,
he’ll do it. Either way, you’re a dead man.”

Bewilderment filled the old man’s eyes. This
wasn’t going the way it was supposed to. They were supposed to do
what he said, like on TV. His rheumy eyes flickered and the barrel
of the Colt drooped.

It was finished. The worm was in his
brain.

“Give me the gun, Pop,” Easton said, gently,
and stepped confidently forward, hand extended. “Come on, give it
to me.”

The old man’s scrawny throat tightened and
his Adam’s apple went up and down a couple of times. He looked
deflated, like he had collapsed inside. As Easton took the weapon
from his nerveless fingers he sank to his knees on the ground, his
whole body shaking, an old man made brutally aware of the fragility
of his own existence.

“Rena,” he called, making a vague movement
with his hand. His wife ignored his plea, watching pitilessly as he
got unsteadily to his feet.

“You damn fool,” she hissed. “I told you what
to do. I told you. You stupid old fool.”

“Rena,” he said weakly.

He stood swaying slightly, his eyes
unfocussed. His wife made no move to help him. She didn’t look like
the sweet old granny in the ad any more. Her eyes were full of
hate. Easton took the magazine clip out of the butt of the
automatic and put it in his pocket, then tossed the weapon over arm
into the trees. It made small snapping sounds as it bounced off
branches and a soft thud as it hit the ground.

“If you’re smart you’ll leave it out there,”
Easton told the old man. “But I don’t guess you will.”

The old man said nothing. He looked wrecked.
Ironheel picked up the Winchester and gestured with it toward the
cabin.

“Inside,” he said sharply.

The woman glared at him, as if she was
considering resistance, then went in. The old man followed her
hesitantly, like a truant child who doesn’t know what punishment to
expect. They crossed the room like zombies and sat down in matching
steel-framed leather sling chairs on each side of the stone
fireplace.

They were in their early seventies, Easton
guessed. Maybe the old man had taken early retirement, or been a
victim of downsizing, and they’d used his severance pay to buy this
mountain hideaway. They’d have a neat little house someplace, nice
neighborhood, just your standard everyday ordinary folks. Why would
they risk their lives for a thousand dollars they surely didn’t
need?

The sad answer was that behind that Mom and
Pop facade lurked the awful canker that has found a home in the
American soul, the conviction that no matter how much you have, you
deserve more. Not better, not finer. Just … more. He wondered if
they realized that if he and Ironheel had really been armed
thieves, they would be dead now. Probably not.

“Watch them,” he said to Ironheel, and went
into the kitchen, savoring the bacon smell he had noticed earlier.
There were dishes and flatware in a plastic bowl in the sink, a
still-warm skillet on the stove. Just missed lunch, he thought.

Lying on the worktop was a mobile phone.
Sticking it into one of the outside pockets of a backpack he found
in a closet in the neat bedroom, he went back into the living area,
and handed it to Ironheel, who looked a question.

“Food,” Easton said. “Cheese, bread, anything
you can find. And if there’s water in the fridge, fill the
canteens.”

The old man was slumped in his chair. He was
still shaking. His breathing sounded bad. His skin was the color of
old documents. The woman was sitting bolt upright, her face twisted
in suppressed rage.

“I think it might be a good idea if you got
your husband into bed, ma’am” Easton said to her. “He doesn’t look
at all well.”

She turned her head to glare at him, enough
hate in her bright blue eyes to start another war in Afghanistan.
He was glad she hadn’t been the one with the gun.

“You just get out of here,” she spat, her
anger boiling over. “And take that filth with you.”

If she could have got the venom in her voice
into his bloodstream, Ironheel would have dropped dead on the spot.
He had come in from the kitchen as she spoke, and Easton wondered
whether he had heard what she said. Nothing showed on his face.

Ironheel glanced around the living area one
more time. There were Native American artifacts everywhere: Navajo
rugs, pottery, baskets, rows of kachina dolls. A short bow
decorated with feathers and a beaded chamois quiver with four
arrows in it hung on the wall. Ironheel went over and lifted them
off the pegs.

“Where did you get this, old man?” he said,
his face set hard.

Easton sensed deep anger and was surprised by
it. Now Ironheel crossed the room to a wall montage that consisted
of an acoustic guitar, a black Spanish sombrero and a bright red
silk rose.

“You keep your hands off of that stuff!” the
woman squalled.

Ironheel ignored her. He took down the guitar
and cut off two of the strings, coiled them up and put them into
his shirt pocket

“So you’re a thief, too,” the woman hissed.
“Like all the rest of your kind.”

Ironheel regarded her coldly for a moment,
his eyes as dispassionate as a butcher looking at a carcass. Then
he turned away, shrugging the strap of the quiver over his shoulder
so that it hung behind him. Carrying the bow in his right hand, he
nodded toward the door and they went outside.

“Glad to be out of there,” Easton said. “What
was all that with the bow and arrows?”

“They don’t belong here,” Ironheel said. “The
place stinks of hate.”

He’d felt it, too, then. “They look like the
real thing,” Easton said. “Not just tourist junk.”

“Ahuh,” Ironheel said.

Easton waited, but his next words had nothing
to do with the bow.

“When Kuruk gets here, those two will tell
him everything,” Ironheel said. “What we did, what we said, which
way we went. So we need to lay more false trail down the hill, then
double back.”

“Think it’ll work?”

Ironheel shrugged. “Kuruk’s hard to fool,” he
said tersely.

They set off downhill and reached a clearing
where the twin-track trail widened into a graveled road leading
down to the highway about three miles away. From here there was no
tree cover worth the name, which meant they could go no further.
Open space was their enemy. If one of the State Police choppers
sighted them now, they would be as helpless as frogs in a plastic
bucket.

“Can we get across up there?” Easton asked
Ironheel, pointing up at the ridge rising on their right.

Ironheel looked up and nodded. Over that
ridge, as he had pointed out earlier, lay Peachtree Canyon. Beyond
it was another ridge, then another, crossing which would take them
into Copeland Canyon. By ascending Copeland, they could get back to
Pierce Canyon Pass – and around behind Kuruk.

“Tell me something,” Ironheel said, as they
started up the slope. “When you took the gun off the old man – how
did you know he wouldn’t start shooting?”

“I didn’t,” Easton said.

Shooters came in many sizes, but there were
only two main types, the ones who blasted away without any preamble
and the ones who waved guns about and made threats. That didn’t
mean you couldn’t talk yourself out of trouble with the first kind,
or that negotiating with the second kind always worked. There were
no rules. You just had to decide what you were dealing with – and
hope you got it right.

“You’re full of surprises, Easton,” Ironheel
said.

“Is that a compliment?”

The muscles around Ironheel’s mouth moved,
which was as near as Easton had ever seen him come to smiling.

“That’ll be the day,” he said.

Mose Kuruk sat on a rock near the yellow
cabin in the clearing halfway down Peachtree Canyon listening to
the excited speculations of the pilots of the two State Police
choppers working their way up toward him. The fugitives had been
spotted, one was saying. They were working their way down toward
Encierro. With road blocks on all the trails and the highway it was
only a matter of time till they were picked up and everyone could
go home.

Kuruk scowled. Dumbass cops were dreaming if
they thought they were going to take Easton and Ironheel any time
soon. He was becoming more and more convinced this whole scenario –
the flight, the “robbery,” all of it – was a smoke screen. All too
damned easy. And the last thing in the world Ironheel was going to
do was make it easy for him.

Then there was the business of the bow.