Threepersons Hunt (13 page)

The cigarette tip dimmed when she took it away from her mouth; she waved it around with abandon. “It couldn't have been any part of the deal for him to escape the way he did. They'd have to know it was going to make the police come up here and start asking a lot of questions. They wouldn't want that.”

“All right,” he said. “That gets us to the grit. Who's they?”

“If I knew that,” Angelina answered, “I think I'd have killed them myself.”

8.

Three Apaches emerged from the roadhouse and two of them glanced toward the Volvo. Angelina averted her face and held the glowing cigarette down below the dash. The three men crowded into the cab of a Dodge three-quarter-ton and drove out toward the road. When they made the turn their headlights swept across the Volvo and made Watchman squint.

She said, “I'm a little bit scared if you want to know the truth.”

“Then why do you stay around here?”

She had to think about it. “Well I got married once.”

“To a white man. I heard it didn't take.”

“It wasn't quite like that. I took to it fine. He didn't.”

“I was going with a white girl for quite a while.” He looked at his dark knuckles on the wheel and wondered why he'd said that.

“And who broke it up? You or her?”

“She did,” he said.

“Anglos.”

“Dirty rotten savages,” he said, and they both smiled.

“I guess I had that coming,” she answered. “Well you get stung and then you go home for comforting. I guess that's what happened to me. I never went back to secretarial school. I never wanted to do much after that. I had a big thing for him, you know.”

“I know how it is.”

“Anyway I never had any real reason to stay here except inertia. But then I never had any reason to feel scared. Not until the other day.”

“You could leave now.”

“No. For the first time I've got a reason to stay.”

“Stubborn,” he said.

“That's got nothing to do with it. If I'm pushed I run, that's the way I am. But suppose Joe's around here now and he needs help?”

“So you hang around in case he comes to you.”

“Yes.”

He said, “In your subtle way you're trying to convince me you don't know where he is.”

“I don't give a damn what you believe. In fact as soon as I heard Joe had escaped, I assumed you'd put a tail on me right away.”

“I wish we had the manpower for that.”

“It's the first thing that occurred to me. It's probably the first thing that occurred to my brother.”

“But he could have got a message to you.”

“He could have but he didn't. I give you my word.”

As a rule Indians weren't liars but Angelina had assimilated a lot; she talked white and behaved white. He had no way of telling if she was playing poker against him.

He said, “Maria had a frequent visitor. We think it was Tom Victorio. Do you think he's involved in the escape?”

“I have no idea. He hates Joe, I can't think why he'd want to help him.”

“Hating Joe, is that entirely on accout of Joe marrying Maria?”

“I think so. They liked each other well enough before that.”

“If you were Joe where would you be right now?”

She shook her head. The cigarette was out. She dropped it in the ashtray and slid it shut, and he heard the click when she lifted the door handle. “I wish I could help. I really do. If I hear from him I'll let you know, I'll call the Highway Patrol. I think he'd be safer with you than he is now, wherever he is. They want to kill him.”

“What makes you so sure of that?”

“They've got to make sure he keeps quiet, don't they? They had Maria before. They had Joe Junior. God he was a hell of a nice little kid, my nephew. But they haven't got any hostages to keep him quiet any more.”

Watchman said quickly, “Just one more question. If you're telling me the truth I don't understand why Joe wouldn't have come to us with the story.”

“Would anybody have believed him?”

She got out of the car and chunked the door shut. He watched her walk away toward the roadhouse. He saw now what was peculiar about her stride: she was afraid. Uncertain whether she'd get to complete each step.

Halfway to the roadhouse she turned around and came back to the car. Watchman had the engine running; he shifted the stick to neutral.

She said, “Have you got a place to stay?”

“I thought I'd hole up in Showlow.”

“Why don't you use my house. It's not much of a place but—look the truth is I'd appreciate the company tonight.”

It wasn't a bedroom invitation, it was fear. She saw him thinking it over; she said, “I've got a phone there. If you didn't already know that.”

“Why would I know that?”

“I thought maybe you'd tapped it by now. In case Joe tried to call me.”

“We're not the FBI,” he said. “Where do I find the place?”

“Take a left and head toward the mission.”

“Then what?”

“There's a dirt road.…” She stopped and threw a glance at the roadhouse. “Never mind, hell. That's my car over there, the Rambler. I'll lead the way. I don't feel like going back in there.”

“Won't they miss you?”

“I come and go,” she said vaguely. “I don't think I could stand the place any more tonight.”

It wasn't far. He followed the red lights of the old Rambler up the road half a mile until she turned off the highway. He steered behind her into a pair of ruts that carried the Volvo uncomfortably up a brushy slope and through a notch between two low hills.

Behind one of the hills stood a cubicle of stucco and wood. A naked light burned above the front door. When the girl stopped the Rambler he saw it had a crumpled front fender.

He was still fifty yards behind her, making a final turn toward the house, when he heard the crack of the rifle.

9.

His hands hit the ignition and headlight switches and extinguished them both and then he let himself fall out of the seat. When he hit belly-flat he kicked the car door shut to cut off the interior dome light. He edged under the side of the car fumbling inside the back of his shirt to get at the automatic.

A long time passed before he got it into his hands and worked the slide to jack a cartridge into the breech. Ahead of him the Rambler squatted motionless; the headlights still burned, lighting up the front of the house and one side of it where the porch light didn't reach. He couldn't see Angelina's head in the car but he saw the slight lurch of the car when the girl inside it moved, probably getting herself down as low as she could.

“Stay put,” he called to her, and searched the starlit hillside. The ripping echo of the gunshot hung in his ears and adrenaline pumped a tremor into all his fibers.

He'd been shot at before in his life and knew the sound. It was not a whiz or a zip or a whisper or a fanning sound; it was a sharp loud crack like a small thunderclap and it was caused by the sonic boom of the passing bullet.

This time he was looking in the right quadrant and the side of his vision picked up the wink of the muzzle-flash. Smokeless powder and it wasn't a big lance of flame, just a flicker; but he saw it and two-handed the automatic up with both elbows on the ground and he let go five quick ones in the direction of the visual echo his eyes retained. It left him two in the magazine; he was a cop, he always knew how many he had left in the gun, and he wasn't about to shoot it empty unless it was unavoidable.

His palm stung a little from the recoil and his ears were no good now because they'd been deafened by the noise of his own shooting. But his eyes were all right, adjusting to the darkness. He saw the quick movement maybe two hundred yards up the hill and he aimed at a point well above it and squeezed his hand until the pistol discharged with a petulant bark.

No pocket automatic was going to hit anything at that range but it must have been close enough to unnerve the rifleman; the moving shadow started to zigzag and became lower and thicker because the man was running bent-over now. Watchman saw him disappear over the horizon of the hill, crouched very low against the skyline.

He sprinted to the Rambler. “Angelina?”

“Are you all right?”

“Are you?”

“I'm fine.”

He heard her giggle, probably at the inanity of the words. Watchman returned his eyes to the hillside while he refilled the magazine and thrust it into the pistol grip. “Nothing on the other side of that hill except the road, is there? No houses or anything?”

“Nothing that I know of.”

The hills weren't altogether barren but it was mainly a studding of piñon and scrub oak and dry brush. The hardpan wouldn't hold footprints, not the kind you could trace in the dark. Still there wasn't much to hide behind.…

He got up on one knee and froze. Nothing. Stood up, stood bolt still for the instant it might take a rifleman to take aim, then ran dodging to the base of the hill.

His move drew no fire. He called over his shoulder: “Stay on the floor. I'll be back.”

“Where are you going?”

The note was plaintive but he didn't answer her; he went up the hill fast with his boots scraping and slithering dislodging loose clots and pebbles; careless of the noise he swarmed all the way to the crest and stopped to get his breath while he eased up the last few feet until he could see across to the far side.

The moon was rising, a thin rind not yet in its first quarter. It didn't throw much light and some of the stars in the eastern hemisphere were obscured by clouds left behind by the day's rain squalls. Past the farther hills he caught the glow of lights from Whiteriver. The intervening distance was a wavy rolling of low hills with the narrow highway two-laning across it at an oblique angle. He swept it in a square search-pattern, trying to pick up movement in the edges of his vision. If the man was lying up there'd be no way to spot him in this minimal light but if he was moving there was a chance.

Watchman gave it a full ten minutes but nothing stirred and in the end he carried his pistol back down to the car and said, “We may as well go inside.”

10.

At the door he stopped and listened and then asked Angelina for the key. She shook her head and pointed to the latch.

He thumbed it and pushed the door open but he didn't go in; he stood beside the door with the girl behind him. If anybody was waiting inside the silence would shake them up; they'd begin to wonder whether the first thing they'd see would be a human figure or a tear-gas grenade.

It was probably an unnecessary precaution but you stayed alive by avoiding unnecessary risks. After the silence had ticked by for a time Watchman eeled inside and flattened his shoulder blades against the wall to one side of the doorway.

Nothing stirred. He felt along the wall for a light switch, found one where he expected to and flipped it.

The house was a free-standing efficiency apartment with kitchen appliances along the far wall and a bathroom built into one corner. The only living thing he spotted was a house spider.

“Okay,” he said. Angelina came in and he shut the door behind her.

There was a narrow bed and not much other furniture: a bedside table with a lamp, a rickety wooden kitchen table with two chairs, a wardrobe that was half closet and half chest-of-drawers. On the walls she had taped up posters from the All-Indian Powwow and the White Mountain Rodeo and Yellow Submarine and a center-creased poster that had come inside a Janis Joplin LP album.

“Sorry it's such a mess,” she said. She sat down quickly on the bed as if she had to get off her feet before she fell. “Dear God.”

He put his gun away and crossed behind her to draw the burlap drapes.

She turned and lay across the bed in an abandoned sprawl, plucking at the drawer of the nightstand. She took out a couple of joints and offered him one.

“Not now,” he said, and went to the other window.

“Well I need one. God my nerves.”

“I wouldn't.”

“Wouldn't you,” she said dully.

“It'd be a good time to keep a clear head.”

“Even if it's going to get shot off anyway?”

“He won't shoot your head off. At that range he'd have had you cold. He missed because he wanted to—it was a warning.”

“What kind of warning?”

He didn't answer; he thought it out. There was one way it made sense and once he had it sorted out he was pretty sure of it.

She said, “I've got a bedroll. I'll camp on the floor if you want.”

“Find out if anything's missing.”

“Missing?”

“Just have a look in the cupboards, all right?”

She rolled off the bed and swayed when she was on her feet but she shook off his tentative hand. “I'll be all right. A little dizzy.” She crossed to the kitchenette cabinets and opened the bottom one. “The stereo's still here.”

It was a cabinet made for cleansers and pails but she had a portable stereo in it and a stack of albums. She closed it and looked in the shelves above the sink. “Wait a minute.”

He was watching over her shoulder. She was the kind of girl who'd have at least half a dozen cans of spaghetti and soup and roast-beef hash around because she'd have those days when cooking for herself was a drag. But he didn't see any cans at all.

“He took all the nonperishables, didn't he.”

“How did you know that?”

“Think about it a minute and you'll figure it out for yourself.”

She turned quickly; surprise and anger and speculation chased one another across her face.

“He stole your things because he knew you wouldn't report it,” Watchman said. “At least you know he's not starving to death. Look around, see if he left a message.”

“That wasn't Joe,” she protested. “Joe wouldn't shoot at me. If you think he'd do that you've got a pretty wild imagination.”