Apache Country (22 page)

“Can they – ?”

“Doo dahilts’ag da!” Ironheel hissed, and
laid a hand across his sister’s lips before she could complete the
whispered question. Easton felt her move her head in a nod,
signaling her comprehension. They must be absolutely silent,
completely still. If indeed there were ultra-sensitive listening
devices on the aircraft, even a whisper could betray them. He
touched the butt of the Glock in his waistband. Nine shots against
whatever firepower the hunters might be able to muster. Not
reassuring.

For what seemed a long time the chopper
quartered above them, then its engine again made its distinctive
change of pitch from hover to drive, and like the rolling thunder
that follows a storm path, the dark menacing sound began to recede.
After a while the forest was silent again. Ironheel stirred.

“Give it a bit longer,” Easton whispered.

They waited. There was no sound other than
the sibilant rise and fall of their own breathing. Easton checked
his watch: they had been under the log stack for nearly two hours.
He nudged Ironheel, who grunted agreement, and they wormed warily
out of their hiding place. After the warmth of their closeness, the
night air felt chill. A billion stars looked near enough to
touch.

“Gone,” Ironheel said.

“For now,” Easton replied.

Even if the hunters had given up this time,
they would be back. They had to get as far away from this area as
possible. But there was something else they needed to do first.

“We need to check on John,” he said.

“If he’s not dead, he’ll be long gone,”
Ironheel said flatly. “If he’s dead, there’s no point going back
there,”

“I thought he was a friend of yours,” Easton
said.

Ironheel looked away, his expression speaking
his thoughts. You know what you know and I know what I know, it
said. It was like he was doing it to get under Easton’s skin, but
Easton was equally determined not to let him.

“He’s right,” Joanna Ironheel told her
brother. He shrugged.

If you insist.

“It will be a hard climb,” she told Easton.
“Can you do it?”

Give her the benefit of the doubt and put it
down to genuine concern, even if you don’t altogether believe it,
he told himself. He looked up the hill at the steep slope. The
wound in his side wasn’t hurting any more, just throbbing dully. He
put his hand inside his shirt and checked the dressing. It was dry.
Luck, be a lady.

“I’m good,” he said, with a lot more
confidence than he felt.

“Helasá ahiidléh,” Ironheel grunted. “Let’s
go.”

He moved off up the hill on soundless feet.
It was almost as if he was becoming progressively more Apache,
Easton thought, as though the longer he was in the wilderness the
more affinity he found with it.

“How far is it to Mescalero from where we
left the car?” he asked, pitching his voice just low enough for
Ironheel to hear.

“Fifteen miles, maybe,” he said.

“First thing we do when get up the hill is
put your sister in the pickup and send her down to the Agency.
She’ll be safe there.”

“Daiaá daabini’” Ironheel said. “Agreed.”

Joanna Ironheel nodded her acquiescence.
“What about you?”

“There’s only one place I can be sure of
getting help,” Easton said. “Riverside.”

Ironheel made a sound somewhere between
disbelief and disdain.

“My inbuilt sixth sense tells me you have a
question,” Easton said.

“Damn right,” Ironheel said. “You crazy or
what?”

“What,” Easton said, holding on to his temper
again. “As in, what’s your problem?”

“You, thinking you can get to Riverside
cross-country. Listen to yourself.”

They stopped on the slope, glaring at each
other. Easton could hear his own breathing. It sounded like the
bellows in an old smithy. Touché, he thought. Ironheel was right,
but he was damned if he was going to admit it.

“Then you’ll have to teach me how to do it.
How to survive.”

Ironheel shook his head. “Doo bigonedzaa do!”
he said. “Can’t be done.”

“God dammit, Ironheel, the reason I’m in the
middle of this mess is because you were in trouble and I stuck out
my neck for you. Now it’s your turn. I call your name, Ironheel. Do
this for me!”

His outburst appeared to make no impression
on Ironheel. His face remained like a rock, without emotion,
implacable. Then, unexpectedly, his sister spoke.

“Atéé dábik’eh,” she said quietly. “It is
appropriate.”

For a moment Ironheel’s own anger showed
through, then he shrugged again. The guy had more damn shrugs than
a Frenchman, Easton thought.

“All right,” Ironheel said. “But it’s my way
or no way. Comprende?”

“Do I have a choice?” Easton said, and as he
spoke he heard an echo of Ironheel asking the same question as they
were leaving the jail in Riverside. Ironheel remembered it, too,
and a dour grin touched his lips.

“No,” he said, savoring the moment. “You
don’t.”

By the time they got back to where they had
first been attacked, Easton’s eyes had become so completely attuned
to the darkness that as they came out of the trees he could see the
dark bulk of Joanna Ironheel’s pickup beside the track, and beyond
it John Gallerito’s beaten-up old Mercury, its doors still open.
There was an uncanny stillness about the place, as if night was
holding its breath.

“John’s gone,” Ironheel announced in a
told-you-so voice. He quartered across the ground between the
vehicles and the trees, head down, moving slowly but purposefully.
All at once he stopped and squatted, touched the grass with a
finger then touched the finger to his tongue.

“Bidil,” he called out softly.

“His blood,” Joanna Ironheel translated for
Easton.

“Can he really see blood in the dark?” Easton
wondered.

“Yilchi,” she said impatiently, as if it were
a stupid question. He smells it.

Easton started over toward where Ironheel was
squatting, but the Apache held up his right hand in a ‘stay back’
signal. He knelt down with the side of his head almost touching the
ground. He made a sound of satisfaction.

“Bech’igót’I’yu,” he said, and pointed.

“The way he went,” his sister echoed.

From where he was standing Easton could see
no sign of footprints or tracks, but Ironheel was already moving in
a diagonal line uphill toward the trees lining the trail. Apache
can trail birds through the air, fish up a river. He’d said it
sardonically that night in the jail. Maybe it was true.

As Ironheel melted into the darkness, Easton
checked the Mercury, stifling a curse when he looked inside and saw
the guns and ammunition were gone. As he got out of the vehicle,
Ironheel materialized soundlessly out of the darkness, making him
jump. He thought he saw a faint smile on the Apache’s face but it
was difficult to be sure. It was probably the kind of thing he’d
find amusing.

“Looks like John went home,” Ironheel said.
“Tracks lead southwest through the woods. No more blood. So
probably not hurt bad.”

Easton went back across to the Mercury,
noticing this time that the hood was unlocked. It gave a metallic
squawk as he lifted it up and peered inside. The distributor leads
had been ripped out.

“Check the pickup,” he said.

Ironheel crossed over to the other vehicle.
He lifted the hood and Easton heard him growl an imprecation.

“Leads gone?” he said.

“Ha’ah.”

“They took the guns, too,” Easton said. “And
the ammunition.”

“Baa nagóldi’,” Ironheel said sourly. Tell me
about it.

Easton looked at his watch. Three thirty a.m.
It would be dawn in an hour or so, and with daylight the hunters
might well return. Once again he wondered who they were. One thing
was certain: they weren’t the law. Legitimate cops didn’t
machine-gun fugitives. This was someone else, someone intent on
finding them before the law did. That was why they had sabotaged
the vehicles: so their quarry couldn’t get too far from where they
had lost them. They sure as hell wouldn’t lose us in daylight,
Easton thought.

“Let’s get your sister down to the Agency
where she’ll be safe,” he said to Ironheel. “Then you and I can get
the hell out of here.”

Ironheel vetoed that with a headshake. “We
can’t walk that far, it would take too long.”

“So we do what?”

Ironheel thought about it for a moment.
“There are a few families living over at Whitetail. Three, maybe
four miles.”

“Nothing nearer?”

“No.”

“What about Mose Kuruk?” Joanna Ironheel
said. “He’s got a place up here somewhere, doesn’t he?”

“Paul’s Canyon,” her brother confirmed.
“About a mile from here.”

“You know him?” Easton asked.

Again Ironheel took his time replying, as if
he was reluctant to say anything.

“Everyone knows Mose,” he said. “He hires out
as a tracker. Good one, too. He used to be a cop. Tribal
Police.”

“Used to be?”

“Ni’ádadiikani,” Ironheel said. “He’s
mean.”

“What kind of mean?”

“You name it,” Ironheel said, looking at his
sister. Easton sensed a tension between them, but there wasn’t time
to go into that now.

“I’m not interested in his manners,” he said.
“The question is, will he help us?”

Ironheel squared his shoulders. “We can give
it a try. But let me do all the talking. Mose doesn’t like white
men much. You get on his wrong side he’s liable to go apeshit.”

“I’ll show him my badge,” Easton said. “Maybe
that’ll calm him down.”

The trail down was little more than a twin
wheel track winding between dark stands of timber. Once in a while
they would hear movement in the undergrowth and Ironheel would hold
up a hand, stop. They would freeze, and listen warily. After a
moment he would say biih, a deer, or ba’nteelé, a badger.

As they trudged through the silent darkness
Easton returned to the question repeating itself inside his head.
Who would send a high-end helicopter out to kill them? He knew for
sure no one in Baca County owned such a machine. RPD had a
two-seater unaffectionately known as The Buzzer, but it was
strictly for rapid transit. Most of the others operating in the
valley were used for hospital transfers, inter-city commuting or
crop-dusting. Neither Joe Apodaca or Olin McKittrick even had a
flying license, let alone the kind of money it took to put a
track-and-kill chopper into the sky.

Then who? And more particularly, why?

As far as the media and public were concerned
Ironheel, now a mankiller and hostage taker, was guilty as hell.
Even if anyone agreed to listen to his side of the story – and it
would need to be backed up with a lot more evidence than they had
right now – it would still be the word of a ‘known’ murderer
against that of ‘clean’ law-enforcement. So on the face of it,
there was no apparent need to kill him. Yet someone was trying to.
Which meant there must be some other reason. But what was it?

Plenty of questions. Not a single answer.

Paul’s Canyon dropped off to the left of the
trail, a long, narrowing cleft maybe a quarter mile across,
bordered by low hills crowned with trees now visible in the
deceptive predawn light. Easton trudged on, concentrating dumbly on
matching Ironheel’s tireless pace and trying to show any sign of
the persistent throb of pain from the wound in his side. Give
Ironheel an excuse to head off into the hills alone and he’d be
gone. No way was he going to let that happen.

The steep rutted track led them down toward
what looked like the sort of ramshackle shed a money-strapped
rancher might keep work animals in. Nearer, Easton realized that
what he had thought a makeshift barn was in fact a single story
shack with a sagging roof from which at least half the shingles
appeared to be missing. Several of the windows were smashed,
covered with sacking or in one case, a square of peeled
plywood.

Below the cabin was a small mountain of trash
– discarded mattresses, tires, broken wooden crates, a sizable
mound of cans and beer bottles. Off to one side squatted the
rusting hulk of an old Cadillac convertible, and a little further
over, what was left of a red Mach 2 Ford Mustang. An insistent,
fecal smell somewhere between backed-up drains and rotten eggs,
hung over the place. Just another lovely corner of the Land of
Enchantment.

The first faint salmony tinges of dawn
steadily lightened the sky, prompting the sleepy early twitter of
awakening birds. Then suddenly, as they reached the open space in
front of the cabin, a huge black Rottweiler exploded off the porch
and bounded toward them flat out, baying ferally, maybe a hundred
and twenty pounds of gristle and bone with eyes that shone red in
the morning half-light. All at once it hit the end of the tether by
which it was lashed to the wall and was yanked to its haunches,
bellowing with rage, lunging again and again against the restraint
as it tried to get at the intruders, who had frozen in their
tracks. Easton found he had his automatic in his hand. He had
absolutely no recollection of having drawn it.

“Madre,” Ironheel muttered, as the dog lunged
and bayed and lunged again. “That rope better hold.”

From your lips to God’s ears, Easton thought,
every muscle in his body tense and ready. If that monster got loose
it would be shoot or shit. In that same moment he detected a
movement, a glint of half-light on metal at a carefully opening
window to the right of the door. A chill touched his spine as he
realized he was looking straight into the twin muzzles of what
looked like a pump action Browning. Get on his wrong side he’s
liable to go apeshit.

“Who’s out there?” The voice was harsh, deep
and angry, a match for the dog’s. “Who the fuck is it?”

The sound of the man’s voice seemed to drive
the dog into further paroxysms of rage. Easton had visions of the
rope snapping, and wondered whether a 9mm bullet would stop the
beast before it got to them.