At Ease with the Dead (25 page)

I glanced at Daniel Begay. He had taken off his coat and used it to prop up Peter Yazzie's feet. Yazzie was muttering softly in Navajo now. Daniel said something, put his hand on the man's forehead.

Time was skipping away. By the time I finished with Peter Yazzie's blunderbuss, an army of overweight idiots could've circled around the cabin.

Just do it
, I told myself.

I loaded all six chambers and fitted caps to all six nipples behind them. Normally, with a gun like this, you'd load only five chambers, keep an empty below the hammer. Especially if you were planning to lug it around. It had no transfer bar like a Ruger, no hammer safety like a Smith. The only safety on the gun was a pin at the rear of the cylinder that slipped into a notch on the hammer, holding the hammer between chambers so that, theoretically, the hammer wouldn't accidentally smack down on a cap.

But I wanted six shots. I needed as much armament as I could carry.

I tugged on my gloves. Time to go.

Ducking, I scurried over to Daniel Begay. His hand was still beneath the blanket, still holding that square of plastic to the mouth of the tunnel that led to Peter Yazzie's lung. I reached into my pocket, plucked out the Smith and Wesson, held it toward him.

“You know how to use this?” I asked him.

He nodded and took it in his left hand.

“You're going to have to cover the front window,” I said. “Don't show yourself, but take a shot at him now and then. Keep him busy. All right?”

He looked down at Peter Yazzie. In the pallid damp face, the eyes were closed now, the mouth was open. His breath came ragged, catching in his throat. He didn't have much time. Daniel looked back up at me. He nodded again.

Crouching, I grabbed Peter Yazzie's carry-all, dragged it across the floor to the nearest rear window, and slowly raised it up against the glass.

Nothing happened.

Keeping clear of the window, I stood up, slipped its latch, pushed it open.

The other man, Ramon or Pablo, could be out there, waiting for something more interesting than a carry-all. Waiting for me to do exactly what I was doing.

I hefted the Colt. It was heavy, five or six pounds of metal and wood. If I missed when I shot at someone, I could always throw it at him.

I turned the cylinder until its pin clicked into the hammer's notch. The loaded gun was as safe now as it was ever going to be. I unzipped my windbreaker, stuck the weapon inside, zipped up the windbreaker.

Go.

I swung away from the wall, caught the sill with my left foot, kicked myself out.

I landed on my right foot, stumbled, went down, caught the ground with the palm of my left hand, righted myself and then scrambled toward the nearest tree.

The shot came at me from off to the left.

24

T
hat stumble probably saved my life. The shot whistled through the air my head would've occupied if I'd been upright. By the time he got off his second shot, I was behind the tree.

He was about fifty yards away, using the trees for cover himself. The pistol sounded like a nine-millimeter, which meant he might have thirteen or fourteen rounds left in the clip.

He had more ammunition than I did, but at the moment we did have a few important things in common. Each of us wanted to dispose of the other, and each of us wanted to get close enough for a clear shot without, in the process, getting disposed of.

I wondered briefly what had happened to Gary Chee. Where was he and his Winchester? Why hadn't he honked his horn to warn us?

Then, off to the left, I saw a movement at the cabin. I looked back and saw Daniel Begay at the window. I waved him away. He nodded, as expressionless as always, and disappeared. A moment later, a muffled shot came from inside. Daniel, keeping the rifleman busy.

The ground sloped more steeply here. Two or three yards down to my right, a small ragged ravine ran roughly perpendicular to the contour of the hill, then veered off to follow the slope westward. If I could reach it, I should be able to get close to the shooter, come up on his left without being seen.

Keeping behind the ponderosa, I lowered myself to a crouch. I cocked the hammer of the big Colt and took a quick glance around the tree trunk.

His gun cracked and a bullet thudded into the tree. He had moved closer.

I pulled the trigger, not aiming at anything, just trying to get his head down. The big pistol boomed and flame shot from the barrel through a billow of white smoke. An impressive performance—but I was busy taking advantage of the smoke, hiding behind it as I rolled along my length down the hill toward the ravine. I heard another shot, and then I was tumbling over the edge.

Four feet down, I landed heavily on my hands and knees, banging the knuckles of the hand that held the Colt.

Okay. He couldn't see me now. But I couldn't see him, either.

Move.

Still on my hands and knees, I scuttled forward between the rocks. Despite the cold that turned my breath to vapor, sweat was prickling down my side.

After three or four awkward yards, I cocked the Colt's hammer again and poked my head and the gun barrel over the lip of the ravine.

A good thing I did. He was thirty feet away and he was running directly toward me through the trees. He was a big man, and getting bigger, and he wore a shiny black leather jacket and carried a fat black automatic pistol in his right hand. I don't know why he didn't go for the ground when he saw me, or swerve for cover behind a tree. Maybe he couldn't check the momentum of his run. Maybe he'd seen the white smoke and realized that I was outgunned. Maybe he just wanted to get this over with.

But he did see me and, still at a run, he raised the pistol and the barrel spouted fire as he started shooting. Chips of rock raked my cheek.

I aimed the Colt at his middle—no time to line up the sights—and pulled the trigger. The gun jumped in my hand and instantly the cloud of smoke obscured him. I fired through it twice more, blasting away at the spot where I thought he'd be.

When the smoke cleared, I saw that he was down.

I climbed up from the ravine and approached him, the Walker cocked in my hand. Two rounds left.

He was on his back, both arms outstretched. His pistol, a Beretta, lay on the brown pine needles a few feet from his right hand.

There was no mustache above his lip, so presumably this was Ramon. I'd hit him twice, once in the stomach and once—a fluke shot, one of the two I'd sent into the smoke—directly through the heart. He was dead. He looked very surprised about that.

I was surprised too, and something like molten lead lay at the pit of my stomach.

I took a deep breath, told myself that later I could be as sick as I wanted to be. Right now there was work to do.

I picked up the Beretta, tucked the Colt under my left arm. I thumbed the automatic's magazine release and the clip popped into my hand. Eight rounds left, and one in the chamber. I snapped the magazine back into the butt, bent over, and checked Ramon for an extra clip. Found it in the left pocket of his jacket. Shoved it in my windbreaker pocket. I put the big Colt down on the ground beside Ramon. I wouldn't need it now.

I looked back at the cabin. Daniel Begay stood at the far window watching me. I nodded to him and he nodded back. Then I set off through the trees, uphill, toward the rifle. Overhead, beyond the tangle of branches, the sky had gone from gray to pale opalescent blue.

Twenty yards from the cabin, taking cover behind a tree, I waited and watched until Pablo fired again.

There.

He and his rifle were up the mountainside about a hundred and twenty yards away, hidden behind a jumble of gray boulders at the far end of a small scraggly clearing in the pines.

To reach him, I made a wide swing around to the right, coming at him slowly and cautiously through the trees. The big ponderosas were widely spaced, their trunks as thick and straight as Doric columns. There was very little underbrush here—the branches overhead had choked off the sunlight, leaving only a slippery brown blanket of pine needles along the uneven slope. And there were no animals, no flittering birds, no capering squirrels. Except for the intermittent crack of rifle fire and, twice, a dull distant pop as Daniel Begay used the Smith and Wesson, the shadowy forest was as hushed as an empty cathedral.

I was perhaps a hundred feet away when I first saw him, a figure in a red windbreaker hunkered over the rifle.

I began to move even more slowly then, Natty Bumpo in the tall timber, listening to my own movements around the whisper of my own breath. Watching out for loose twigs and branches among the brown needles. Placing the ball of each foot against the ground first, and then, gently and firmly, the heel. By now, Pablo would be wondering what had happened to Ramon. If he were smart, he'd be worried. So far, I had every reason to believe that he was smart.

But I got to within thirty feet of him. Close enough, I decided. And then, as I watched him, I saw the thick shoulders suddenly tense beneath the windbreaker, tautening the red fabric, and I knew that he realized he was no longer alone. I knew he was getting ready, preparing himself for the swing to the left. A simple matter: bringing up the rifle, firing as he turned. The rifle was a scoped Mini-14, semiautomatic, no bolt, no lever, all he had to do was keep pulling the trigger.…

Holding the pistol in both hands, sighting down along the barrel, I stepped away from the tree. “I hope so,” I said. “I really do hope you try it.”

He didn't move. He might have been carved from wood.

“Right hand in the air,” I said. “Put the rifle down with your left. Very slowly.”

He did this, leaning the rifle carefully against the rock, barrel skyward.

“Both hands in the air now. Stand up.”

Arms raised, he stood back away from the boulder.

“Turn around.”

He was about my height, six two, and a bit bulkier, outweighing me by fifteen or twenty pounds. Without the stocking mask, he was actually quite a dreamboat. Strong, handsome features: a square jaw, an aquiline nose, the innocent brown eyes of a doe. A Hispanic Tom Selleck.

He wasn't very pleased to see me. The first thing he said was, “I should've cut your balls off when I had a chance.”

“The snows of yesteryear, Pablo. Put your hands back behind your neck. Fingers locked. Now here's what's going to happen. We're going to walk down to the cabin. You're going to stay six feet ahead of me. If you make a move to the left or right, if you do anything even a little bit tricky, I'm going to shoot you in the leg. And then I'm going to kick your ass all the way down the mountain. Understand me?”

He was looking at the pistol, his eyes narrowed. “That's Ramon's gun,” he said.

“We traded toys,” I said. “Let's go. And Pablo? I saw what you did to Peter Yazzie's cousin. I'd be happy to blow your leg off.”

“Fuck you,” he sneered.

I had him properly terrorized, no doubt about it.

I nodded toward the clearing. A faint trail loped down between the scrub brush and the rocks. “Go.”

He went.

“Who sent you up here, Pablo?” I asked the back of his head. “Whose idea was it to kill Peter Yazzie?”

He turned his head slightly and said over his shoulder, “Fuck you.”

It seemed that Pablo, like his friend Luis, didn't possess much in the way of small talk.

I should've been ready for him to make a move. I should've seen it coming. I wasn't, and I didn't. Foolishly, I was looking down toward the cabin, where Daniel Begay was stepping out the front door. I was wondering if Peter Yazzie were still alive.

The trail wound past a small ponderosa at the edge of the clearing. At chest height, a branch of the pine hung over the path. As he reached it, Pablo notched the branch below his elbow, walked a few more paces with it braced against his chest, and then, in a single swift sidestep, slipped neatly away. The branch snapped up and back like a catapault and whipped across my face.

Instinctively, moving too late to protect my eyes, I raised the barrel of the Beretta. In the next instant, Pablo was on me, going for the gun.

The branch had slashed at my eyes—I couldn't see through the blur of tears. But I could feel. He had one powerful hand clamped around my right wrist, the other clamped at my throat. I sensed him shifting his weight, knew he was about to use his knee, and I swiveled to the right. His knee thumped into my hip and I brought up my left foot and knifed it down onto the spot where his instep should be.

He grunted and his leg buckled, but he didn't let go. Suddenly we were both heading for the dirt, me on top of him, my wind knocked away, and then him on top of me as we tumbled ragtag down the slope. Somewhere in the acrobatics, the gun got lost.

And then we were free of each other and I was scrambling to my feet, still blinking away tears. I didn't know where the gun was, but Pablo might, so it seemed fairly imperative to get to him before he got to it. He must've had the same idea, because the next thing I knew he threw himself at me and I went hurtling down the hill.

I hit the ground on my back and slid along the pine needles, and then Pablo was there again and his foot was coming at my ribs.

The foot smashed into my side and air whooshed from my lungs as I felt something crack, but I caught his leg in both arms and wrenched it to the side, against the knee joint, and he came down, grunting again.

I hadn't felt any real pain yet—too much adrenaline flooding the system—but just then, as I pulled myself up, a sharp precise flame went ripping along my left side. Something broken in there.

Irrelevant now. We were both on our knees and Pablo was turning to me and I put everything I had into a roundhouse left to his face. His head snapped to the side, but he kept enough presence of mind to wrap his hand around a jugged hunk of rock and then turn to me, slashing it toward my skull.

I dodged back and he followed through by hurling the rock. It whacked into my right shoulder, numbing my entire arm, and then he came to me, head lowered, and grabbed my arms and he butted me, his head snapping up and ramming my jaw. My teeth clacked together and my eyes lost focus, and then he was atop me again, arms around my throat, and what little air I had was going.