Apache Country (31 page)

“I hate to intrude on your grief, Kit, but
this is—”

“It’s not that,” Kit said. “Something …
happened.”

He frowned, conscious of the seconds ticking
away. “What?”

“Wait,” Kit said. “She wants to talk to
you.”

“David? Thank God! Where are you?”

He recognized Ellen Casey’s voice
immediately. “I’ll explain everything in a minute,” he told her.
“First, I need to ask you a question. Remember you once told me if
I ever needed help I should come to you?”

“Of course I remember. How can I help?”

“I’m not a hostage, Ellen. I’m protecting a
witness who saw Joe Apodaca and another man kill your husband and
Adam. I don’t know why yet, but I do know Apodaca and Olin
McKittrick are mixed up in it. They’re trying to kill us. Shut us
up. That’s why we’re on the run.”

There was a long, long silence at the other
end of the line.

“Ellen, please,” he said. “I can’t stay on
the phone much longer.”

“I’m sorry. It’s … something else happened.
Here. Something … devastating. I didn’t … I don’t know what to
do.”

“Tell me.”

“I found … some DVDs hidden in Adam’s
closet,” she said. He could feel her disciplining herself not to
let her voice quaver, but she wasn’t being entirely successful.
“They’re … disgusting.”

Unbidden, a picture of Tom Cochrane came into
Easton’s mind, his eyes dark and brooding. Fish stinks from the
head, Dave.

“David, David, are you still there?” he heard
Ellen say.

“I’m here,” he said. “Can you tell me what
that means?”

“They’re … awful. Men … dying. Out in the
desert, like animals.”

“You mean movies?”

“Not movies, David. Real men. The real
thing.”

It didn’t make sense. Why would Adam have
videotapes of men dying? Why would he have hidden them?

“Is there anyone at the ranch beside you and
Kit?” he said, thinking rapidly.

“Only the maid,” she said. “Ralph’s in Santa
Fe.”

“Wait for me. I’ll try to get there
tomorrow.”

He heard her indrawn breath. “Is that
safe?”

“It is unless the sheriff has someone
watching the place.”

“Nobody has been here since ... a detective,
when they were asking about Adam.”

“You’ll have to tell Kit,” he said.

He did not put his concern into words but she
caught it anyway.

“Yes,” she said, and her voice was firm now
and resolute. “I’ll take care of … all that.”

“You remember where Kit and I used to meet?
Just answer yes or no.”

“Yes.”

“We’ll try to be there tomorrow.”

He broke the connection and looked up to see
Ironheel watching him expectantly.

“What was all that?” he asked.

Easton repeated what Ellen Casey had told
him. Ironheel thought about it for a moment, frowning.

“You think maybe there’s a connection?
Between these DVDs and the murders?”

“I don’t know, James,” Easton said grimly.
“But I plan to find out.”

Once again he caught that fleeting expression
of surprise on Ironheel’s face and wondered why. Then he realized
why: he had used his first name. Was it some breach of Apache
etiquette, or was it the unexpected camaraderie?

Ironheel stood up and stretched, letting out
a long exhalation of breath as if it had been inward tension.

“We need a place that chopper can’t find us,”
he said.

“Amen to that.”

“When I was a boy my father used to tell
stories about an old man, a hermit, who lived up in these
mountains,” Ironheel said. “They called him El Maricón de las
Cuevas.”

“The crazy man of the caves?”

“His name was Bob Brookshire. He was a
stone-mason, made gravestones in exchange for his keep.”

“And you know where the caves are?”

Ironheel nodded. “Round the flank of El
Marcial, there’s a big granite formation. Apache call it Chimney
Rock. The caves are just below it.”

“I never heard of them.”

Ironheel looked away, his silence saying
again what it had said before. Pind’ a’ lickoyé know what they know
and Apache know what Apache know. He stood gazing down into the
canyon below for a moment, then looked up.

“Dokáh,” Ironheel said. Let’s go.

Once again, Easton found going down the
canyon was harder on the legs and spine than going up. More than
once his feet dislodged a rock or a hummock of loose earth and he
slid a yard or two downhill, arms flailing to maintain balance.
Long shadows were already reaching out from the peaks of the
mountains as they scrambled across a rocky gully toward the upward
slope on the far side.

For the second climb, Easton blanked out his
mind again and did it, progressing what often seemed no more than a
foot at a time, sweating, sliding, fighting the steep incline. When
they reached the top he collapsed in a weary heap, dirty,
exhausted, his sweat-soaked shirt sticking to his back. Ironheel
squatted by his side, looking back down the rocky slope they had
just climbed. His skin glistened with perspiration and his dark
hair was plastered to his skull.

“Bitch of a hill,” he said, one opponent
respectfully acknowledging another.

After resting a while they moved on through
the steadily lengthening shadows, no longer taking the trouble to
erase their sign. At night not even Mose Kuruk could follow it. Up
ahead to the right they could see the darkened hulk of El Marcial.
It was becoming more and more difficult to see the trail.

“We going to make it before dark?” Easton
said.

“We better,” Ironheel replied.

As they passed through a dense stand of
trees, Ironheel stopped and crouched down to examine some animal
droppings. He crumbled them between his fingers, smelled them.

“Biih,” he said. “Deer. Looks like they come
here pretty regularly.” He squinted up at the darkening sky.
“N’juh.”

Breaking a three-foot switch from a nearby
tree, he stripped off its leaves. Then he tore a small strip of
cloth from the tail of his shirt, tied it with a knot at the whippy
end of the switch, and handed it to Easton.

“Go hide over there,” he said, pointing at a
thick stand of four foot-high piñon bushes. “Hold this so the rag
is clear of the top of the bushes. Keep very still. When you hear
the deer coming, twitch the rag. Very gently, understand?”

Easton put on a puzzled face. “You want to
tell me how I’m supposed to hear deer coming?”

Ironheel made an impatient sound.
“Ch’í’intiih ninatsekeesí,” he said. “Open your mind. Listen.”

No questions, no arguments, Easton again
reminded himself. He shrugged and went over to the spot Ironheel
had indicated, behind the bushes. When he looked around Ironheel
was gone. The great silence of the mountains descended on and
enveloped him, the way mist surrounds a headland. He closed his
eyes and thought about the eons it had taken to form these mighty
upheavals of granite. He pictured dinosaurs foraging across the
empty land, Tyrannosaurus Rex, triceratops and pterodactyl, long
before the first hunter-gatherers came south from the tundra.

Ch’í’intiih ninatsekeesí. Open your mind.

He let out his breath in a long exhalation,
thinking nothing, concentrating on the next inhalation, letting go
of his thoughts. And very gradually he became conscious of the
presence and subtle sounds of the millions of small things
constantly moving around him, the twitter of unseen birds, the
steady hum of bees, the tiny skitter of a kangaroo rat, the pale
whir of a dragonfly’s flight, and the soft, shifting whisper of the
leaves stirring on the trees.

It was like being in a state of suspended
animation, detached from and yet in harmony with everything. The
longer he kept his eyes closed the sharper his hearing seemed to
become. He heard the deer approaching long before he opened his
eyes and saw them. They came hesitantly into sight, noses testing
the wind, ears pricked for the slightest hint of danger. They were
mule deer: a buck, three does, a fawn.

Very gently he twitched the rod and the
little rag pennant on top jiggled. The buck’s head came up, ears
perked forward, poised for flight. The does stopped, dark eyes
fixed on the moving rag. The little fawn came nearer then stopped,
apparently as fascinated by the moving lure as were its elders.
Amazed, hardly daring to breathe, Easton waited, watched, listened.
The deer stood unafraid in the open clearing. Everything was
still.

And then it happened.

Easton had always scoffed at cops who claimed
to have actually seen bullets leave the muzzle of a gun and burn
through the air, yet even in this poor light he quite clearly saw
the arrow coming through the leaves, heard its simmering hiss,
watched its flickering flight from left to right, saw it drive into
the body of the buck deer just behind its left shoulder, as another
came and then another, thwacking solidly into the animal’s body and
dropping it to its knees as the does and the fawn scattered in
panic.

As they vanished, Ironheel came out of the
shadows at a fast run, and Easton saw him throw himself on the
thrashing buck and with one long looping sweep of his arm, slit its
throat. He skipped nimbly back and away from the spurting arc of
blood that leapt from the arteries and stood watching impassively
as the life emptied out of the twitching animal.

Easton stood up and walked over to his side.
Ironheel was muttering in Apache. When he was finished he cut the
arrows out of the body and laid them to one side. He cut the skin
down the neck, along the centre of the body inside the front legs
and then the back. When he had peeled the skin back off the carcass
he cut the flesh along the sides, then broke the ribs and removed
the entrails, laying them to one side. As they lay steaming in the
cooling evening air he chanted something in Apache, atonal,
raw.

After severing the left hind quarter,
Ironheel cut off the animal’s hoofs and horns and laid them aside,
still intoning guttural vocables beneath his breath and making what
appeared to be ritual gestures.

“What are you doing?” Easton asked, unable
any longer to contain his curiosity.

“Giving thanks to Yusn,” he said. “Paying
tribute.”

Easton gestured at the entrails lying to one
side. “That?”

“For Crow. If I leave good food for him he
will make me lucky.”

Crow, Easton thought. Don’t ask. “The haunch
is for us?”

“Ha’ah.”

“And the hoofs?”

“It is usual to take the head home. We cannot
do that. So we take the horns and hoofs. Then we will have luck
again next time we hunt.”

“What about the rest of the carcass?”

Ironheel shrugged. “If I had yucca leaf
strings I would hang it in a tree so the animals can’t get to it.
But we have no time, so I will cover it with the hide and say to
the animals, ‘This belongs to Yusn. Leave it alone.’”

He folded the peeled pelt back over the
remainder of the carcass and stood up, stretching his arms wide and
chanting in Apache the words he had just spoken. Then, squinting up
at the sky, he moved the dead deer around until its head was
pointing east.

“Baa ihe’danzigo,” he said to the sky, giving
thanks.

The ceremony of the kill, Easton thought, the
head pointing east, where the sun rises, where the Apache pray to
Yusn every morning. Somehow, up here in the wilderness, it all
seemed fitting.

“We’ll need cedar wood to cook the meat,”
Ironheel said.

“Because it tastes better,” Easton said, with
a little smile.

Ironheel looked surprised. “How did you know
that?”

“I didn’t,” Easton said. “But I knew if I
asked, that’s what you’d answer.”

Ironheel grunted something that sounded
uncomplimentary and moved off through the trees, the deer haunch on
his shoulder. Easton followed along, belly rumbling at the prospect
of fresh meat.

~*~

Night enveloped the mountains like a shroud.
Inside the cave, it was dry and cool, the floor sandy and level.
Outside, they could hear the sounds of small creatures skittering
through the undergrowth, and once, the gentle whirr of an owl’s
wings whispered past in the darkness. The entrance to the cave was
like a low tunnel that made a half turn to the right and opened up
into a domed vault in which a man could stand comfortably
upright.

As they fumbled their way in, Easton thought
he heard a soft slither of movement, and felt a chill of disquiet.
Rattlesnakes love cool caves.

“Any snakes in here?” he whispered, aware of
the tension in his voice.

Ironheel made an impatient gesture. “Snakes
don’t like you any more than you like them. Don’t put your hands or
your feet anyplace you can’t see them and you’ll be fine.”

If that was supposed to be reassurance,
Easton thought, it fell some distance short of target.

“We need light. A fire,” he said.

“Help me with this first,” Ironheel grunted,
leaning hard against a big round boulder that stood to one side of
the entrance to the cave. As he did Easton felt, rather than saw it
move, and when he added his own weight to Ironheel’s the boulder
shifted again, tilting to the right.

“Again,” Ironheel said. This time the rock
moved through about fifteen degrees to the right, partially
blocking the entrance. It had obviously been used for this purpose
before. Easton stood back and looked at it.

“If that old man rigged that thing, he was no
maricon,” he said.

Ironheel nodded. “Keeps light in, cold out,”
he said.

A match scraped, limning Ironheel’s features
in the flickering flame. Before the day faded they had gathered
kindling and dry cedar wood to start a fire. The important thing to
remember, Ironheel told him as they piled twigs and small sticks on
to the growing blaze, was that you only needed a little fire to
keep the chill out of the night air. Of course, a big fire kept you
warm, too – running around looking for wood to keep it burning.