Apache Country (30 page)

He had recognized the old man and his wife
the moment he walked into the cabin. For a minute or two he felt a
chill of unease, but they were so wrapped up in their own outrage
they hardly noticed him. No reason they should, really. He was just
some dumb, faceless Apache working with the cops, and the woman
made it very plain from what she said about Ironheel that she
didn’t like Apache, with the cops or otherwise. Which was just
fine: blinded by prejudice, she was less likely to recall the
circumstances of their earlier encounter.

He sat quietly to one side while the deputies
questioned the couple, plagued throughout by the gut feeling they
knew a lot more than they were telling. The woman did most of the
talking; pale and shaky, the old man looked like he was in shock.
Robbery alone wouldn’t account for that, but Kuruk couldn’t quite
get a handle on what it might be. So he did what he always did,
waited and watched.

The old woman’s story was simple enough. They
had been in the cabin. The door burst open and two men came in with
guns in their hands. The Indian – she never once used the word
Apache – held them prisoner in the living room while the other one
ransacked the place. They identified both men immediately from
their photographs.

“And you say they both had guns?” the
sergeant who’d come up with the party asked. “You’re sure about
that?”

The sergeant’s name was Sam Donaldson. He was
a tall man with a horsey face and jug ears, a thatch of thinning
red hair and very pale skin reddened by sun and wind. His uniform
hung on him like it had been made for a bigger man.

“Am I sure, am I sure?” the woman snapped, as
if he had insulted her. “Why do you keep asking me if I’m sure? Of
course they had guns.”

Donaldson looked at Kuruk as much as to say,
What the hell do I do with this woman? Kuruk gave him a stone
face.

“Might be helpful if you could tell us what
kind of guns they had,” Kuruk said. “Ma’am.”

The woman looked up quickly, as though she
was surprised he had been permitted to speak.

“I don’t know anything about guns,” she
snapped. She jerked her head toward her husband. “Ask him.”

“The Indian had a carbine, Winchester, I
think,” the old man answered creakily. “The other one had a
handgun. Automatic. Don’t know the make. They all look alike to
me.”

“Can you tell us again exactly what they
took, ma’am?” Donaldson asked her.

She made an angry sound. “Isn’t anyone
listening to a word I say? Food, I told you. Bread, cheese, some
cold meat I was saving for supper. Our cellphone. And all our
money. We had about two – four hundred dollars between us.”

“Is that all?” Kuruk asked her.

“All?” she glared. “Isn’t that enough?”

“The bow,” the old man put in, gesturing to
the spot on the wall where it had hung. “And the arrows. The Indian
took them.”

Donaldson frowned. “What kind of bow, a
crossbow?”

“No, just some old Indian thing,” the woman
said quickly. “A souvenir. We bought it on one of the reservations
years ago.”

Donaldson’s look of puzzlement deepened.

“What the Sam Hill’d they want to take a
thing like that for?” he wondered aloud. Kuruk didn’t attempt to
enlighten him. No pinda’lick’oye would understand the significance
of Ironheel’s action. Or the implicit message from him to Kuruk
that was embodied in the theft.

“Look what he did to my guitar,” the old man
said. “Cut the strings off with his knife.”

It was apparent the old man’s non sequitur
didn’t make any more sense to Donaldson than the question of why,
if Easton was a hostage, Ironheel was letting him carry a gun, but
it did to Kuruk. He knew exactly why Ironheel had done what he had
done. The fugitives had to eat. But they couldn’t use a gun to hunt
because it would lead the pursuit straight to them. With a bow and
arrow, however, Ironheel could kill silently. But the string of the
bow he had taken from the wall would be slack and useless. Guitar
strings – he hadn’t asked, but they had to be catgut or Ironheel
wouldn’t have taken them – would provide a new one, makeshift but
perfectly serviceable.

“You quite certain about them both having
guns, ma’am?” he heard Donaldson ask again.

“Heaven’s sake, how many times do I have to
tell you?” the woman said, her voice shrill. “They robbed us.
Threatened to kill us. Stole our money and then ran off down the
trail. Why don’t you do something about it, instead of all these
damfool questions?”

Leda’ilchoo, Kuruk thought. They are lying.
He wondered why. He wondered what had really happened here, tried
to make a movie of it inside his head. The two of them coming down
the hill, the old man and the woman in the cabin …

“Do you have a gun, sir?” he asked.

The old man looked startled. “Uh … we … it
…”

“Of course he doesn’t have a gun!” his wife
snapped. “What would we need a gun for?”

Lying again, Kuruk thought. They stank of it.
Why, why, why?

“You’re quite sure they went down the trail?”
he said to the woman. “You saw them go?”

He felt the chill of her antipathy. “Don’t
you understand English?” she snapped.

Racist bitch, he thought. She resented being
questioned by an Apache. Is it any wonder we hate you and all your
kind? He bit back on his anger and stood up.

“I’ll wait outside,” he told Donaldson. “You
sent for the choppers?”

“Should be here anytime now,” Donaldson
confirmed.

Kuruk’s frown of concentration deepened. If
Easton was half the cop they said he was, he would have anticipated
the blocking off of every route leading to the highway. Even if he
and Ironheel managed to evade the roadblocks and the waiting
deputies, it was still more than fifty miles to Riverside across
open country. So why rob an elderly couple, knowing it would give
away their position and intent?

Unless, of course, there never was any
robbery at all.

That made a lot more sense.

It meant the question now was how much of
what the old couple said was true. Maybe they took food, water, he
could believe that. And the bow. Not money. They wouldn’t be
interested in money. That was just godich’i’, old woman greed.

They said Ironheel and Easton had gone down
the hill. No reason for them to lie about that. If that was what
Ironheel wanted them to think, it was a blind. So where were they
really going?

Think like the enemy.

To the west lay the little town of Marcial,
and miles beyond it, Junta and then the malpais. All around, the
empty plains of the Dolorosa basin. Nothing for them there but
trouble. So it must be east. Somewhere to the east.

What did they need? They had food. Next came
shelter. They must know the hunter-killer helicopter would come
roaring up the mountainside again when night fell. But where was
there a place they could safely hide from its electronic eyes?
Kuruk called up a mental picture of the mountains to the west,
examining it like a 3-D image on a computer, checking off feature
after feature. Not there. Nor there.

Then where? Where? Ironheel would try to
avoid confrontation until he was on ground of his own choosing.
Where was there such a place?

He heard a footfall and looked up to see Sam
Donaldson coming toward him.

“We’re about done here,” Donaldson said. “You
ready to move on?”

“Count me out,” Kuruk said. “I got other fish
to fry.”

Donaldson’s face twisted with anger. “What
the hell is this, Mose?” he said. “You were deputized. We need you
up here. You can’t back out of this now.”

“Bet?” Kuruk said.

“I’m warning you, Mose. You do this, it goes
straight into my report. You know what that means far as working
with the police is concerned.”

Kuruk spat on the ground.

“Put that in your report,” he said. “And make
sure you spell it right.”

Donaldson looked at him impotently, then
turned away flexing his hands, anger in every line of his body.

“Well goddamn it all to hell,” he said to
nobody in particular. “Goddamn it all to hell.”

“Aw, save your breath, Sam,” Frank Cahill
said, hitching up his gunbelt. “He wants out, let him go. Everyone
knows you can’t rely on no damn Mescalero, anyways.”

Cahill was the youngest of the trio, probably
no more than twenty two or three, skinny, callow and immature.
Kuruk stood up.

“How was that again, sonny?” he said
softly.

“Hey, Mose, come on, the kid didn’t mean no
harm,” Donaldson said hastily, stepping between them. Kuruk said
nothing but he didn’t take his eyes off Cahill.

“Jeez, Mose, chill out,” the kid said,
backing away edgily. “All I meant was, up to now you was hot to
catch those guys.”

“Sure that was all you meant,” Kuruk said,
not taking his eyes off him.

“Come on, Sarge, this ain’t getting us no
place,” the third deputy said. “Let’s move out. Sooner we run them
assholes down, sooner we all go home.”

He was about thirty, dark and compactly
built. Of the three he was the only one who hadn’t bitched about
the pace Kuruk was setting as they came up the mountain. His name
was Charlie Fourtino. Kuruk figured he had Navajo blood, even if
Fourtino didn’t know it himself.

“Meat ain’t meat till it’s in the pan,
Charlie,” Kuruk said. “You watch your ass down there, case them two
double around behind you.”

“Why in hell would they do that?” Donaldson
frowned.

Clearly he found the thought unsettling and
Kuruk was perversely pleased. White men had no stomach for fighting
in the dark shadows of an unfriendly forest where the enemy might
materialize without warning and kill you without a sound. Apache
had always known that.

“Guy like Ironheel, you never know what he’ll
do,” Kuruk said, piling it on. “Apache don’t fight like white men.
He’s liable to cut your balls off as not. You boys keep a good
lookout.”

He could see Donaldson wanted to tell him to
shut up, but didn’t dare. The deputy settled for a sour look and
turned away.

“Okay, you guys, less move out,” he snapped,
putting on a show of authority. Kuruk went back to his rock and
watched Donaldson lead his men down the hill until they were out of
sight.

Good riddance.

He had his own agenda and it didn’t include
cops. The only reason he had accepted this assignment in the first
place was so he would be on the ground when the fugitives were
sighted. They were close, he sensed that. He could see them clearly
in his mind’s eye, shadows among the trees. Tonight, when he called
the big bird up the hill, it would find them. And he would make the
kill.

After a while he stood up, hefting his rifle
in his hand. Then he moved off up the flank of the slope behind the
cabin, heading for the ridge. The sun was still hard and hot.
Ignoring the steep angle of the incline ahead of him, he climbed at
a steady, ground-eating pace. Behind him helicopters buzzed noisily
up and down the canyon, the sound of their engines fading as he
moved away from them, heading east toward the summit of the
ridge.

By the time he reached it, the sun was
beginning to move down the side of the sky. If they didn’t find
Ironheel and Easton before dark – and they wouldn’t – the cops
would stake out the lower canyons and phase the operation down
until morning. He smiled, satisfied.

Tl’é’yú. It was going to be a night hunt.

On the crest of the second ridge they stopped
in a small clearing to drink some water. It had been another
exhausting climb, rising fifteen hundred feet in a mile. Easton’s
shirt was wet with sweat and he could feel the now-familiar long
ache in his wounded side. But there was satisfaction, too;
Peachtree Canyon now lay below and behind. One more descent to
negotiate, one more ridge to climb.

All around cicadas droned soporifically. A
tanager flew past, a flicker of red, yellow and black, making its
hoarse call: pit-ik, pit-ik. Sitting with his back against a tree,
he took the cellphone from the cabin out of his pocket and looked
at it for a moment, weighing the risks. Ironheel waited watchfully.
It wasn’t difficult to guess what he was thinking.

“Who you going to call?” he said finally.

“Kit Twitchell. Robert Casey’s daughter.”

Ironheel said nothing. He could make a point
pretty well without saying a word.

“We can’t stay in these mountains forever,”
Easton reasoned. “And Kit is the only one near enough I can
trust.”

“That’s what you meant about getting help in
Pacheco?”

“Right.”

“Won’t Apodaca expect you to contact
her?”

“It might occur to him. But he’d feel pretty
sure she wouldn’t help the man who killed her father.”

Ironheel didn’t offer any argument but Easton
sensed his lingering doubt. Hell, if truth were told, he shared it.
He hadn’t so much as talked to Kit for two, maybe even three years.
She might just tell him to go to hell. Or call Apodaca the minute
he put down the phone. He dialed the number.

“Señora Twitchell, por favor,” he told the
maid who answered.

“May I tell her who is calling?” the girl
asked in Spanish.

“It’s a surprise.”

“Momentito, por favor,” she said.

He waited a moment and Kit came on the line.
“Hello?”

“Kit,” he said. “It’s David Easton.”

“David? David?” she said, and he could hear
the astonishment in her voice. “How on earth … You’ve been all over
the news. Where are you?”

“Kit, don’t talk, just listen,” Easton said
urgently. If her phone was tapped, he needed to minimize the time
any monitor would have to pinpoint his location. “I want you to ask
your mother to come up to the ranch tomorrow.”

She was silent.

“Kit, please, trust me. I have to talk to
Ellen.”

“She’s here now,” Kit said. “She’s been ...
very upset.”