Hillerman, Tony (14 page)

The ground here was deep with aspen leaves, a sunny yellow carpet. Across the valley, between the stark white trunks of the aspens, the first of the clouds was crossing the top of Broke Off Mountain—dragging its bottom across the eleven-thousand-foot crest and leaving behind ragtag fragments of mist in the treetops. Half aloud, Cotton said, “God. Help me. I don’t want to die. Not today.”

Adams was threading his way carefully through the marsh now—avoiding the half-hidden pothole springs which fed it. Cotton watched Adams stop at the pool where only minutes before he had been fishing, watched as the hunter moved carefully to the bank where Cotton had splashed through the pool. Adams stood there, examining the place where Cotton had climbed the opposite bank. Cotton realized, with first shock and then anger, that Adams was smiling. And then the hunter turned downstream, moving at an unhurried walk. He was looking for a place to cross without getting his feet wet. The casualness of it, the arrogant certainty of the hunter, outraged Cotton.

Cotton moved abruptly, trotting back through the trees, conscious for the first time that he was still carrying his flyrod. His first thought was to drop it there, but why? It weighed almost nothing, didn’t slow him down. Instead, he snapped it apart and tied the three pieces with a quick loop of the fly line, thinking what Adams would do. The man must know he would be in this mixed patch of spruce, fir and aspen. Most likely he would move downstream far enough to make certain Cotton couldn’t get past him southward toward the car. Then he would ford the stream, walk up into the north edge of the timber. He would work it about the way he would stalk a mule deer hiding in a patch like this. Cotton put himself in Adams’s place. He would try to make the animal break cover. But he would try to keep close enough to the open grass which surrounded the woods to make sure that if the animal broke across the open he’d have a clear shot before it reached the ridgeline or the stream. A mule deer, Cotton thought, would have maybe a fifty-fifty chance if it made the break in the right direction when the hunter was in the wrong place. But a mule deer was swift. A running man wasn’t. He rated his own chance at zero. Apparently, judging from his deliberateness, so did Adams.

Cotton decided almost instantly what he would do. He would do what he thought Adams would least expect him to do. He wouldn’t hide near the south edge of the timber, running toward his car when Adams passed his hiding place. That Adams would expect. Nor would he try to keep away from Adams in the timber. Hide-and-seek in the woods might keep him alive an hour but it wouldn’t keep him alive until dark. There were no more than twenty-five or thirty acres of timber—an island bypassed by the old fire. There wasn’t enough cover for hiding.

Cotton trotted through the woods, moving northward. At the north end of this timber, the growth of young trees extended to within a hundred yards of the stream. If he could reach the stream without being seen, he might put a substantial distance between himself and the hunter before Adams realized he was gone. At the edge of the timber, where the young spruce were not much higher than his head, he stopped and looked carefully behind him. He could see nothing. If he had guessed correctly, Adams should be in the south end of the timber patch by now. Abruptly, hope returned. And with it fear. He looked toward the tangle of willows which marked the course of the stream. It would take him maybe fifteen seconds to cross it and regain cover. If Adams was where he could see him, Cotton would make a perfect target. He drew a deep breath and ran.

He ran desperately and as silently as he could, trying to avoid loose rocks and the old debris of the forest fire. And then he was at the bank, ducking to the left to avoid dead brush, feeling a surge of wild, joyous exhilaration of escape. At that moment the shot came.

The bullet snapped past him through the brush he had swerved to avoid and then there was a cracking sound of the muzzle blast. Cotton fell, slid against a boulder at the edge of the stream. He lay, gasping for breath, feeling the burning pain in his left forearm. The exhilaration had died with the sound of the shot. Adams had outguessed him, had guessed that he might try doubling back to the stream, and had come within a second of ending this mismatched game. The shot must have been hurried—snapped off just as Cotton reached the bank and, judging from the sound, from at least five hundred yards. But it had barely missed.

A second shot came a moment later, the rifle slug kicking up a spurt of dirt and dead leaves at the crest of the bank and whining over his head. Cotton ducked and then began running up the stream, moving as fast as he could, splashing through the shallows. A limb whipped across his face. He felt little pain. All he could do now was delay it. Postpone the inevitable moment when Adams would run him down and shoot him. What was Adams doing? Racing across the open ground to head him off? Maybe. More likely merely following—closing the gap gradually with a minimum of exertion. There was no place Cotton could go except up the stream. If he left its cover, this chase would be over in the time it took Adams to catch him in the rifle sights and pull the trigger.

Just upstream the ridge bulged down into the valley, forcing the West Fork into a deep, narrow bed pinched between higher banks. Cotton ducked under the trunk of a dead ponderosa which had fallen here. He squatted a moment under this natural bridge—desperate for a plan. The trunk, he noticed, had been used as a path by animals and summer fishermen. But the path would only lead him out for an open shot. No plan formed. Cotton felt panic for a moment and then hard, hot anger. He moved upstream, trying to hurry over water-smooth boulders. He slipped into the current, soaking his legs to the hips. He squatted a moment, trying to control the trembling in his aching leg muscles. As he did, the plan came to him.

The flyrod, still incongruously clutched in his right hand, started the chain of thoughts. He hadn’t dropped it because there had been no reason to. It was as natural in his hand as a cane in the hand of a blind man. But now he should abandon it in favor of something that would serve as a weapon. He looked at the fiberglass pole, remembering as he did the sudden tug of the trout pulling him off balance at the pool downstream. And then he had his plan.

He worked his way back downstream toward the tree-trunk bridge and ducked under it. Now he kept in the water, feeling his feet turn numb with the cold but leaving no fresh wet tracks on the rocks. A dozen yards below the fallen tree he pushed his way under the willow brush and squatted behind a streamside boulder—his feet still in the water.

The plan wasn’t good. It simply was better than no plan at all. It depended on Adams’s demonstrated aversion to wet feet and on luck, and on Cotton’s own skill, and on more luck. He fished his spool of nylon leader out of the creel pocket, spun off ten feet, doubled it and redoubled it, then tied on the heaviest of his spoons—a green metal shape dangling two sets of triple snelled hooks. Then he knotted the leader to the tip of the tapered line.

There was nothing to do but wait. Wait and hope he was guessing right—that Adams had not splashed across the stream somewhere behind him, that Adams would follow the easy going up the west bank and then, when the ridge crowded out the walking space, see the path and know—as any hunter or fisherman would be sure to know—that here it must lead to an easy fording spot. Common sense said Adams would want to cross—to follow the stream along the open ground to east instead of being forced away from the waterway by the ridge. But Cotton felt a sick foreboding. Adams had outguessed him once. He should, he decided, drop this crazy scheme and run again. No. There was no place to run.

A shadow suddenly darkened the boulders. The cloud drifting westward from Broke Off Mountain was blocking off the sun. With the shadow, the breeze came to life again, breathing faintly through the willow brush and setting up a distant murmuring in the ridgetop spruce. And then it died away. Cotton was conscious of the aching numbness of his ankles, of his beating heart. He could hear absolutely nothing except the stream. And then he heard footsteps.

They came at a fast, steady walk. A soft, regular thudding. Behind Cotton at first and then on the bank above him and to his left. Cotton tensed. He found himself willing, with every fiber of his mind, the hunter to keep walking. Not to stop here to part the brush and look for a hiding man. The footsteps—a barely audible sound—continued past him. And again Cotton heard nothing.

He strained his eyes through the brush, staring at the tree trunk. Adams, too, was probably looking at it now, making his decision. Long seconds dragged past. Red became visible at the west end of the tree trunk. Motionless. Adams was looking, Cotton guessed, upstream and downstream.

“Let him see my wet footprints on the rocks,” Cotton prayed. “Let him think I’m upstream.”

The hunter walked out on the fallen log and Cotton moved with him. He had already assured his footing under the current. Now he simply placed his feet and stood, swaying away from the willows, pulling line from the reel as he swung the rod tip back for the cast. Any sound he made was covered by the splashing of the current and Adams was still looking upstream. The hunter walked slowly on the log, balancing himself with the rifle. But, as Cotton flashed the rod forward, Adams glanced around.

The hunter was incredibly fast—even on the narrow, rounded surface of the trunk. He had shifted his feet and spun toward Cotton as the spoon reached him. He was raising the rifle as Cotton snapped back the rod to sink the hooks. The snelled hooks caught on the shoulder of Adams’s jacket. Adams jerked back the rifle, fighting to keep his precarious balance, lost the battle against the steady pull of the fly line, and jumped.

In all, it took perhaps three seconds. Time enough for Cotton to know that if Adams landed on his feet John Cotton would die. He hauled back on the flyrod with full strength of his shoulders. It was enough.

Adams, with his upper body pulled forward by the jerk, dropped the rifle, flailed his arms frantically, and crashed chest first into the stream.

Cotton was leaping toward Adams even as the hunter fell. But he checked himself after three clumsy, splashing steps. Adams was pushing himself up from the boulders where he had landed—his right arm apparently useless and blood flooding down from his forehead. He was fumbling with his left hand inside his jacket.

Cotton scrambled back behind the willow brush and over the embankment. And then he ran. Behind him he heard the pop of what was probably a small-caliber pistol—an angry, ineffectual sound.

He covered the two miles to his car in less than thirty minutes, running at first and then—when there was no sign that Adams was following—lapsing into a fast walk. The hunter almost certainly had a broken right arm, as well as other injuries. Whatever the case, there was little chance he would be able to follow fast enough for a rifle shot. Cotton paused at the pickup truck parked under the pines near where he had left his car. He plunged his fishing knife through three of the truck’s tires. And then he drove away. And while he drove he made his plans.

>15<

T
he seventeenth photograph was of a high, balding forehead, close-set eyes and a long, cleft chin. The eighteenth was of a round-face man glowering at the camera. The nineteenth was Adams—looking younger than he had looked across the aisle on the airliner. But the eyes were the same, and the mouth. And the expression was familiar—open, warm, friendly, even when facing a police identification camera. Cotton found himself wondering how badly Adams had been hurt in his plunge onto the boulders in the Brazos, wondering how much trouble he had had making it out to the highway, thinking that if he had needed help there were deer hunters along the road who would have helped him.

“That one look familiar?”

Captain Whan was straightening the stack of police identification photographs with his fingertips, his eyes on Cotton’s face.

“This is him,” Cotton said.

Whan took the photograph and put it back in its file folder.

“Randolph Harge,” Whan said. “That tells us something. You sure this is him?”

“I’m sure, but what does it tell us?”

“I’ll read it to you. ‘Harge, Randolph Allen: Born, Okeene, Oklahoma, March 11, 1930. Sentenced indeterminate term McAlester Penitentiary, May 3, 1946, auto theft. Sentenced, indeterminate term, El Reno Federal Reformatory, July 13, 1949, interstate transportation stolen motor vehicle. Indicted February 9, 1952, armed robbery-assault with intent to kill, acquitted. Sentenced three to ten, Lansing State Prison, May 27, 1954, extortion, assault with intent to kill. . . .” He looked up. “A hard case.”

“But it doesn’t say why he was coming after me,” Cotton said.

“There’s more. A charge of murder in Miami. That didn’t stick. And held for investigation in a Chicago homicide case, and a kidnapping-extortion charge in Milwaukee in 1969. That one didn’t stick either.” Whan closed the folder. “The point is these last three felonies were connected to the rackets. Harge worked for the Organization in Chicago. I imagine he still does.”

From down the hallway in the Municipal Police Building there came the sound of someone laughing. Captain Whan was straightening the stack of criminal identification folders with his fingertips. Cotton examined his expression. There seemed to be nothing to read, neither hostility nor warmth. Only blank neutrality. How much could he trust Whan? He had decided on the long drive back to Santa Fe to work with him. He had remembered Whan’s suspicions of Robbins’s death, remembered Whan’s suggestion that he—and not Robbins—might have been the target of the accident which sent his car plunging into the river—the accident which was not an accident. Remembering that, he had placed a long-distance call from Santa Fe, reached the captain at his home and told him what had happened. But on the night flight east from Albuquerque the doubts returned. He remembered then how easily the line between police and criminal can be erased by corruption. Waiting for his flight out of Kansas City, he crossed the bridge again. He thought of the burglary ring which had operated in the Denver Police Department, of the involvement of Florida police in the murder of a judge, of the shooting of a West Texas district attorney by Borger police, of rackets flourishing in Chicago, and in Jersey, and elsewhere, under police protection. And when Whan met him at the capital terminal he had told the captain that he had also called Ernie Danilov from Santa Fe and that the managing editor knew Whan was meeting his flight. He had put it bluntly but Whan had simply laughed. “If you’re nervous about me, it’s a good sign,” Whan had said. “Stay nervous about everybody for a little while and maybe we can get this sorted out.”