Apache Country (34 page)

“Ha’ah,” Ironheel replied, as if nothing else
needed to be said. If there was more to the story, it was quite
clear he wasn’t going to tell it now. If ever.

They heard a sound and saw two men clambering
up out of the gully. They came apprehensively across the scree,
their hands raised fearfully in front of them as if they expected
to be shot.

“Kuruk’s men,” Ironheel murmured.

Easton kept the duo covered with the
Winchester but it was obvious there wasn’t an ounce of fight in
either of them. One was short and stocky, dark haired and Latin
looking. He had on a black leather jacket and tan pants. The other
was thinner and taller, with receding sandy hair. He had an
apologetic, shamefaced look, like a housewife caught
shoplifting.

“Look, listen, you guys,” he gabbled
nervously, “it’s over, okay, you got our guns, we don’t want any
trouble, okay?”

“Well, you’ve got it, you goddamn apology for
a human being!” Easton said angrily. “This is the second time
you’ve tried to kill us.”

“Second time?” the man said, frowning. “What
in the hell you talkin’ about, mister?”

“I’m talking about Whitetail, mister!” Easton
said angrily. “Or have you forgotten trying to wipe us out a couple
of nights ago?”

“You got the wrong sow by the ear, friend,”
the Latin-looking one said, spreading his hands in what he clearly
hoped was a placating gesture. “This the first time we ever laid
eyes on you people, and that’s the truth.”

“You wouldn’t know the truth if it bit you in
the ass,” Easton retorted scornfully. “And I’m not your
friend.”

“Look, listen, we didn’t want any part of
this,” the other man whined. “All we signed up for was to find you
guys. But Kuruk threatened to kill us if we didn’t help him. We had
to do what he said.”

“Not any more you don’t,” Easton said and
stepped aside so they could see Kuruk lying face down on the
ground, the arrow sticking through his throat, the blackening blood
seeping into the heedless dust.

“Jesus H. Christ,” the stocky one whispered
faintly, staring hypnotized at the still figure on the ground. His
lanky partner’s eyes rolled up in his head and his eyelids
fluttered. He looked like he was going to faint.

“Aw, shit,” he said, his Adam’s apple
working. “Aw, shit.”

Ignoring them, Ironheel went over to where
Kuruk lay. He knelt beside the dead man, took off the belt-pack and
tossed it to one side. Sliding Kuruk’s knife from its sheath, he
jammed the blade between two rocks, snapping it with a metallic
twang. He lifted the automatic pistol out of its holster, ejected
the magazine, and hurled both away into the scrub. Then he stood
up, swinging the pump-rifle over his head and smashing it against a
boulder until the stock broke off and the barrel was bent almost
double.

“What the fuck is he doing?” the thin airman
whispered to Easton

“He’s making sure Kuruk never reaches the
Happy Place,” Easton told him. The man stared at him blankly, as if
he’d spoken Arabic.

Now, Ironheel set the Apache bow over his
knee, bent it until it snapped, then tossed it on to the recumbent
body. One by one he took the arrows from the quiver, touched
Kuruk’s body with them, then snapped them and threw them on the
ground beside him. Then, reaching beneath the body, he tore off
Kuruk’s painted buckskin medicine bag, scattering its contents over
the body before throwing it into the rocks. Finally, he grabbed
Kuruk’s feet and turned the body until it lay face down with the
head pointing east.

“N’zhoo,” he said, as much to himself as
anyone else. “Aal begonyáá. It is done.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” the stocky one said
again.

Ironheel looked over at Easton and then up at
El Marcial. The message needed no words: the sun was up high now
and it was time to go.

“Which of you two is the pilot?” he asked the
two men. They were both still staring at Kuruk’s body as if somehow
they expected it to come back to life. The stocky one turned slowly
around.

“Me,” he said. “Name’s Frank Dixon. This here
is Allan Alvares.”

“You say you weren’t flying this machine a
couple of nights ago over Whitetail?”

“That’s right, mister. We only got this
assignment yesterday.”

“Who hired you? Kuruk?”

“Ahuh.”

“You know who was flying it two nights
ago?”

Dixon shrugged. Alvares shook his head.
“Could have been anyone.”

“Who owns it?”

Dixon shrugged again. “No idea.”

“Don’t shit me!” Easton rounded on him
harshly. “You’re driving a high spec whirlybird worth what, coupla
million bucks? You expect me to believe you don’t know who it
belongs to?”

“On my mother’s grave, it’s the truth,” Dixon
insisted shrilly. “Look, listen, I’ll tell you exactly what
happened. I’m in my office, I get a call from Kuruk. Go down to El
Paso, pick up the bird, fly it up here, do surveillance. He was
offering good money, so I think, why not?”

“You just turned up at the airport, got in,
and took off, is that what you’re telling me? Nobody talked to you,
nobody gave you keys, no flight plan, no paperwork?”

Dixon shook his head. “I was told to wait in
the airport lounge, someone would contact me. I went, I waited.
Finally this guy comes in, has the flight plan, paperwork, whole
thing ready to go.”

“Okay, this man you met in El Paso. Was he a
big guy, German accent, looks like a bodybuilder?” Easton
asked.

Dixon looked surprised. “Hey, yeah, how’d you
know that?”

“He have a name?” Ironheel asked.

“He said his name was Carl. That was it.”

“You got a number for him?” Easton said.
“Address? Anything?”

Dixon shook his head again.

“Who was Kuruk working for?”

“He never said. We figured law enforcement.
Sounded like that was who he was talking to.”

“But you didn’t ask who?”

“Listen, mister,” Dixon said. “If Mose Kuruk
says don’t ask questions, you don’t ask questions.”

“What was he paying you?”

“Five hundred a night.”

“Try and collect it now,” Easton said.

He looked across at Ironheel, who had gone
back to stand looking down at his dead enemy. He hadn’t heard
Easton’s conversation with Dixon. Probably hadn’t been interested,
Easton thought. He walked over to stand beside him. Kuruk’s bum bag
lay where he had tossed it. He knelt down and opened it up. It held
a cellphone and a box of ammunition with the words Extreme Shock on
each vertical side. Inside were six cartridges that looked much the
same as the 5.56 NATO round, but were in fact very different in
many deadly ways.

“Jesus,” Easton murmured. “So that was what
he was using.”

Manufactured in Nevada, and selling for
something like five dollars a shot, the Extreme Shock 30-06 High
Velocity round was probably the most destructive anti-personnel
ammunition on the market. Delivering 2747 foot-pounds traveling at
2714 feet per second, it could slice through anything it
encountered en route to target and still deliver a devastating
disintegration on body-contact.

He shivered. If it could put a hole the size
of a fist in a metal fuselage, God alone knew what it might do to a
man’s body. Without knowing quite why, he put the six-pack in his
pocket. Removing the SIM from the cellphone, he tossed it aside and
stood up.

“Ready?” he said to Ironheel.

“T’alkodá,” Ironheel nodded.

Dixon realized they were about to be left
behind. “Hey, wait a minute,” he protested. “How we supposed to get
out of here?”

“Nanohwinltl’ogí,” Ironheel said coldly.
“Your problem.”

“Listen, whatever your name is,” Dixon said
desperately, gesturing toward Kuruk’s sprawled body, “All this is
serious shit, man. You can’t just walk away from it.”

“If that’s a bet,” Ironheel said, “you
lose.”

He turned away and Easton matched his pace as
they started down the long gully on the far side of the saddle that
led to the trail below. When they were about halfway down, he
looked back. The two men had come to the edge of the saddle and
were standing there, watching their descent. They looked forlorn,
like dogs left out in the rain.

The rocky trace – more watercourse than track
– that led down from El Marcial to the head of Pancho Canyon
dropped twenty three hundred feet in three miles. It would have
been a tough hike even if they had made it, but Ironheel declared
it too open, too visible from the air. Off-trail – no trail at all,
in fact – their progress was taxing, hazardous, and painfully slow.
As they made their way down, yard by punishing and often dangerous
yard, Easton formulated a new maxim: anyone who tells you coming
down a mountain is easier than climbing up has never done
either.

After leaving the comforting canopy of the
tall timber, they found themselves among undulating hills stippled
with scatters of sagebrush, scrub oak, greasewood and stunted
piñon, as vulnerable as two bugs on a tablecloth. Two damned hungry
bug, Easton thought; apart from the last few strips of cold deer
meat and some stale cheese, they hadn’t eaten since sunup and were
pretty well out of water.

“There are farms at Agua Azul,” he suggested,
but Ironheel shook his head.

“Better wait.”

He was right, of course, but it didn’t take
the hunger away. They pushed on, fighting through the unfriendly
scrub, moving steadily downhill. Around mid-morning they swung
east, always on guard because there was another danger now: unlike
the old days, a lot of the land in this part of the country was
fenced-off, and the last thing they needed was for some irate
farmer with a shotgun to mistake them for rustlers.

Heading to their left now Easton could see
the conical tip of Pacheco Mountain. As there was no trail worth
the name he gladly left the navigation to Ironheel, who seemed to
have a built-in compass in his head. They climbed a long rise and
came down the other side into a deep-cut dry watercourse with
ragged clusters of buckthorn along its banks. Ironheel Stopping
under a gnarled old black walnut overhanging the cut, Ironheel
lifted an arm.

“Shiba’ síndaa,” he said, “wait for me
here.”

“Yassuh, boss,” Easton muttered, and sprawled
not ungratefully in the shade of the tree. The unceasing buzz of
the cicadas was soothing. A light south wind moved majestic banks
of cloud across the sky in slow and stately procession. A lizard
flickered into sight, froze on a rock, vanished.

He looked at the cellphone they had taken
from the cabin in Peachtree Canyon, wishing now he had allowed
himself to call Grita and talk to Jessye. He saw her in his mind’s
eye, the slender, dark-eyed freckle-faced child who would one day
ask him questions for which he had no answers. He imagined her
sitting, elbows on the table, chin propped on her hands. Where did
Daddy go, Grita? When is he coming home?

Soon, baby, soon, he promised her
silently.

He must have dozed. A shadow fell across his
legs and alarm surged through him like electricity. He looked up to
see Ironheel standing over him, his reappearance as silent as his
departure.

“You have to keep doing that?” Easton said,
unable not to sound peevish. Ironheel ignored him and emptied maybe
a pint of small round brown pellets out of his shirt on the ground.
They looked like animal droppings.

“Eat some,” he said. “They’ll give you
strength.”

“What is it?”

“Ni’yú be’ísts’óz. Ground beans.”

“Where did you find them?”

He waved an arm. “Prairie vole dens.”

All Easton knew about prairie voles was they
were small rodents that lived in holes in the ground. He decided
not to let his imagination dwell on how they collected and stored
the beans, just put a couple in his mouth and chewed. They tasted
of nothing much, but Ironheel was right, food was food. He glanced
at Ironheel, squatting on his haunches and munching away like he
was eating truffles. Maybe ground beans were an Apache
delicacy.

Easton glanced at his watch: 2:34.

“How long do you reckon it will take us to
get down to the Brio?” he asked.

Ironheel stuck out his lower lip and thought.
“From here? Two hours.”

“We have till six,” Easton said. “Tell me
about the bow.”

It was direct and unequivocal, the way he
meant it to be; he knew now that subtlety was a waste of time.
Ironheel was silent for a long moment, looking away. He might have
been carefully considering exactly how to tell the story. Or
whether to tell it at all, Easton thought. There was no way of
knowing.

“You married, Easton?”

“Was,” Easton said, puzzled a little by the
non sequitur. “My wife died.”

Ironheel nodded thoughtfully but made no
expression of sympathy. It was as if he had at some point chosen
not to subscribe to convention. For instance: in all the time they
had been together, Ironheel had never, as far as he could recall,
used the personal pronoun. It was as if he was acting as an
observer of his own life.

“Kids?” he asked.

“A daughter. Her name is Jessye.”

“She like her mother?”

“Sometimes.”

Sometimes she could break his heart with just
a single look, a turn of the head, a smile, and suddenly there was
Susan. Yes, sometimes.

“You know Apache customs?” Ironheel
asked.

“Some,” Easton said, “but not many.” It was a
white lie, but he wanted Ironheel to open up in his own way and in
his own time.

“When he gets married Apache leaves his own
home and goes to live with his wife’s people. Ní’ítsaakaii. He
becomes like a son to his new family, with all the responsibilities
of a son. Even if his wife dies, he still belongs to them.”

“You were married?”

“Her name was Irene,” Ironheel said, a
faraway look in his eyes. “She was eighteen when we got married. We
had nothing, no money, no place of our own.