Relentless (18 page)

Watchman wasn't going to argue: he needed another pair of eyes, another gun.

Watchman put the kitchen match between his teeth and went around to the front of Viewers' truck. Lifted the hood, felt around for the distributor, unsnapped it and lifted out the rotor. He removed the power wagon's rotor as well, closed both hoods and went to his horse, shoving the rotors in his pocket. They bunched up against the little velvet case that contained Lisa's ring.

He gathered the reins in quick synchronization with his rise to the saddle and took the wooden match in his hand.

Vickers said, “Why the woodpile?”

“I didn't have any neon signs handy.”

“For what?”

“To keep our friends up there from feeling too lonesome.” Watchman turned his horse along the slope just below the woodpile. “I don't want you pitched off when the fire starts. You two ride up there a little. I'll catch up.”

“Old Inyun trick,” Stevens said solemnly. “You betchum.”

“First you disable the trucks,” Vickers said, “and then you build a bonfire big enough to be seen from the moon. I don't see your point.”

Watchman explained it for him because Vickers would be more help with his mind cleared of distracting mysteries. “I'm gambling the blizzard will hit them before they get to the top. When they're hurting enough they'll remember they saw these trucks down here and they'll remember they saw us ride away from them. They'll start to think about doubling back—circling down past us and getting to the trucks ahead of us.”

“So you're sending out an invitation.”

“That's about it.” Watchman waited for the two of them to gig their horses into the scrub oak. When they had ridden two hundred yards and almost been absorbed into the night he snugged a tight saddle grip with knees and left hand and said a few quiet words to the horse and scratched the wooden match across the steel saddlehorn.

It cracked alight and was still fizzing when he tossed it down into the little runnel of gasoline that had trickled downslope from the woodpile.

The spark caught with a sedate
whump
of sound and burst into a pale yellow-blue flame that ran uphill instantly into the pile of brush and logs. There was a louder thud of noise and Watchman kept one eye closed, the other slitted, guarding against night-blindness in the face of the sudden high daylight blaze, while the horse bunched itself and whickered in fear and went three feet straight up into the air and came down running.

He kept his seat. Clamped his free hand down on the pommel and fought the horse down to a semblance of control: reined down from dead run to gallop to canter and went crashing into the scrub, branches whipping at his legs.

Down to a trot by the time he caught up with the others. Behind them the fire was a magnificent beacon, showing up the two silent trucks in hard silhouette. Even at this distance the heat touched the back of his neck and his own shadow on horseback splashed out across the trees and earth ahead.

There was a little streak of grey-pink on the eastern horizon; opposite, toward the storm, the sky was dark and wild. Watchman tugged his hat down and pointed the horse toward the high country.

CHAPTER

6

1

They rode across a tilted clearing dusted with threadbare snow. At the upper end Walker hipped around in his saddle to look back. He could still see the glow of the bonfire but it was slowly being overwhelmed by the spreading sunrise.

At the head of the column the Major looked back. “Come on—come on. Keep it closed up.”

“Just looking to see if they're still following us.”

“Of course they are. What difference does it make? Three yokel cops with their noses to the ground. Come on, Captain.”

They moved on. The woman on the sorrel gave Walker a brief glance and then turned her face away; her heavy rope of hair swung forward and masked her.

The storm was starting to move. He could feel it, it made him hunch his neck into the collar of his coat; he could see it, higher mountain peaks being absorbed into its scudding blackness as he watched. The wind began to whip little flurries of powder snow off the surface of the ground. Walker's blue could feel it too: he had to hold in the nervous prancing horse.

All the vibrations were bad, he thought. When you found yourself absurdly and unexpectedly on horseback in a stormy wilderness you began to think in simplistic truisms and it occurred to him for the first time that he was one of the Bad Guys. He hadn't thought badly of himself until that moment back at the farm when Baraclough had stayed behind, inside the house with the doomed deputy, and Walker knowing what was going on had not lifted a finger to stop it. That was the point at which it had all crumpled. Up till then, even though they were things he was doing himself, they seemed more like things that had been happening to him—the preparations, the caper, the escape—as if he had been in an audience watching himself, an actor in a movie, acting out events that had no reality. But now it was real enough and the reality was pain. They were the real Bad Guys and in the end the Bad Guys always got killed by the Good Guys. In these chilly mountains he convinced himself that he was about to die.

Once you started thinking about your own death it was hard to stop thinking about it. He kept seeing himself on a mountain rock somewhere with the blood draining out of him, going cold and without life.

The wind dropped. They crossed a bare slope and penetrated the pine forest. The big trees shut out a great deal of light. The wind died altogether; the horse laid its ears back along its head and hoofs crunched softly in the silent pine needles. Goosebumps ran along Walker's arms; the flesh of his chest quivered. Jingle of bit chains, squeak of saddle leather—the gray air hung cold and motionless.

Back in these mountains it felt as if civilization was a thousand miles and a thousand years away. The heaped-up summits loomed vast above them, timber and boulders and loose shale slides. They climbed the side of a long S-curving ridge and stopped briefly while the Major got out the topographical map and held it up with both arms wide, glancing up from it at intervals to check his bearings. The temperature was dropping sharply all the time now: the horses' breath had begun to steam. The air was getting thicker, more gray, and it was getting noticeably more difficult to make out the outlines of the peaks against the sky. But the still silence persisted.

The Major checked his pocket compass and snapped it shut and turned around to look them over. Eight horses, six riders. The Major's heavy beard stubble had grown perceptibly overnight.

Baraclough finished field-stripping the stub of his menthol cigarette and put the butt filter in his pocket, not for neatness but for security.

Eddie Burt's thick waxy face was upturned as if to pray: Burt was watching the sky.

Jack Hanratty's pitted face was averted, pointed meaninglessly toward the trees to the left: Hanratty wanted to avoid meeting anyone's eyes for fear of what he would find there.

The Major said, “Captain, let's have the clothesline.”

Walker dismounted, holding the blue by the reins, walked back to the pack animals and hunted for the coil of nylon line. He had forgotten where he'd put it and it took a while to find it.

The Major said, “Run the line through the bridle bits.”

“All of them?”

“All eight horses.”

“What for?”

“In a little while you won't be able to see the horse in front of you, Captain.”

Walker's eyes jerked toward the sky. Most of it was a seething obscurity.

The Major said, “Now we'll have a little lecture in survival. Pay attention. You've all been up for twenty-four hours and you're tired. That's too bad. Fall asleep in this weather and you're dead. Think about that and remember it. When you feel yourself starting to fall asleep, or when you begin to feel a funnybone tingle in your feet, get off your horse and walk. Stamp your feet when you walk, keep the circulation going. I recommend you tie your horse's reins to your wrist with a slipknot so that if you happen to trip and fall you won't get lost. If you haven't seen mountain weather you may find it hard to credit this, but take my word for it you won't be able to see your hand in front of your face at noon today. Just hang onto your horse and let the horse lead you. I'll be at the point, breaking trail, and I'll have a rappel rope running from my belt to the saddle horn on my horse, so if I happen to walk over any cliffs you won't lose me.”

Walker said, “If we're traveling that blind how will you know where you're going?” He was threading the line through Mrs. Lansford's bridle and he caught the edge of the woman's bleak glance before it whipped away.

“Dead reckoning,” the Major said. “I've got a compass.”

Eddie Burt said, “Don't fret it none. The Major's never got lost in his life.”

Walker ran the nylon through Baraclough's bridle and handed the free end up to the Major, who threaded it through his bridle bit and ran a double hitch around his saddle horn; he had about a dozen feet of slack left over and he let most of it go, coiling it and hanging the coil over his saddle horn, tying the butt end through the belt-loops of his trousers and knotting it around his hips. It was a three-eighths-inch nylon clothesline from the Lansford barn and it probably would test out at five hundred pounds or more.

Walker didn't go back to his horse just yet. He stood beside the Major's horse and tried to sound calm. “I wouldn't mind knowing what our plans are, Major.”

Eddie Burt snapped at him from the rear of the line: “The Major's kept you alive this far.”

“Nobody said he hasn't.” But Walker kept his eyes on the Major, as stubbornly as he could.

“You have a right to know.” Major Hargit's hatbrim lifted: he had everyone's attention. “We'll keep moving as long as we can, and then we'll keep moving a while longer. The map shows a ranger station on that peak up there—a fire-lookout tower. I'd like to get at least that far but if it becomes impossible we'll just have to rig shelter and wait it out. At least the pursuit won't be gaining on us—they'll be stalled in their tracks. If those are ordinary hick cops back there they won't have enough woodcraft among the three of them to build a Boy Scout fire—maybe they'll die out there. Maybe they won't. Whatever they do they'll be too busy staying alive to worry about catching us for a while.”

Walker's mouth twisted.

“As soon as this lifts,” the Major went on, “we'll cross the range. The storm will have covered our tracks and if the weather clears enough to permit aerial search sweeps they won't see us as long as we've got the sense to stay under the trees. By the way forget those trucks we saw back there. That's a trap.

“Once we've crossed into Utah we've got four or five roads to choose from. There'll be roadblocks. We'll raid one of them, confiscate their patrol cars, make our way into one of the villages over there. We'll have plenty of opportunities to mail the bank money to ourselves in a series of small first-class packages, after which we'll separate and find our way individually to Reno. The police are looking for five men and several hundred pounds of loot—if we travel separately without large quantities of cash we ought to be able to survive a few stop-and-search checkpoints. Bear in mind that the secret of a successful escape operation is not to hide but to blend into your surroundings. We'll become ranch workers, itinerant mechanics, café dishwashers for a few days if we have to—by the time we get down there we'll look disheveled enough.

“But first we've got to get there. Steve, you might tie the lady's hands together and leash her to her horse. Then let's get moving.”

2

Walker felt the numbness of his ears and nose and hands and feet. The wind almost tore the hat from his head and he tied it down around his chin with a ripped-off concho thong. The wind was a swirl of snowflakes and foaming mist; he batted his gloved hands together.

The wind was a sound now, he could hear it frothing through the pines, beating the branches together. It wasn't yet carrying very much snow; most of it had vaporized into a whirling chalk-dust fog. Walker's flesh trembled inside the coat: he tried to hunch himself down inside it for warmth.

Burt and the packhorses trailed him on the nylon rope; the woman was in front of him—then Baraclough, then Hanratty, finally the Major in the lead. He could barely make out the Major's grayish shape swaying in the mist.

The Major had assigned the order of placement and it was easy to see why. It put Hanratty between the Major and Baraclough; it put the woman between Baraclough and Walker; it put Walker between Burt and, at one remove, Baraclough. All the unreliable ones accounted for—and Walker right behind the woman, responsible for her: the Major had told him in a mild voice,
Anything that happens to her happens to you. Bear that in mind. It she tries to break for it you had better bring her back. If she gets away from you don't bother to return—you can forget your share of the money
.