Relentless (24 page)

A brittle thin sheet of ice clung to the shadowed side of a rock near Baraclough's shoulder. It cracked like a rifle shot and Hanratty almost jumped out of his skin.

“Oh Jesus. I can't stand any more of this cocksucking waiting. My balls are froze.” Hanratty's voice sounded unhinged. When Baraclough looked over his shoulder he saw Hanratty starting to get up.

He rolled over, crashed into Hanratty's knees, knocked Hanratty down.

Hanratty uttered a little cry. Eddie Burt said, “You God damned fool, Jack. Stay off the skyline.”

Baraclough flicked a glance toward the Major and the Major nodded slowly; the Major looked at Hanratty and said with icy contempt, “It was my mistake to trust a civilian. I won't make it again.”

Hanratty's eyes were pouched. He looked at the Major and he looked at Baraclough and his head skewed back; he understood the unspoken order that the Major had issued to Baraclough.

Pulsebeat drummed in Baraclough's temples. His scalp contracted; he felt the familiar anticipatory knot in his groin.

Hanratty turned to stare at the Major. “Look, I didn't mean—”

Baraclough caught him from behind, clamped a hand around his face. Jerked Hanratty's head back and chopped his free hand across Hanratty's throat. The bladed chop to the larynx snapped Hanratty's hyoid and when Baraclough let him drop to the ground Hanratty was dead.

Baraclough's breathing was just a little unsteady; his eyes grew heavy and he rolled over in the snow and reached for the field glasses.

4

After half an hour more the Major stirred. “They're doing a good job of keeping out of sight.”

“They've got to be somewhere in this district.”

“Granted. But we're not locating them this way. I think we'll move to that peak.” The Major pointed with his finger. The peak was about a mile due east of them, a little lower than the one on which they lay.

Eddie Burt said, “What about Jack? Leave him here?”

“No. We'll throw him across his horse and bring him along. I think he'll be useful.”

5

Shards of sunlight began to stream through apertures in the clouds. On the uphill slope little trickles ran down past them, cutting through the snow. There was a smell of pine resin and the woods echoed with the tiny cracklings of breaking ice.

When they stopped and dismounted Baraclough made a methodical inspection of the money sacks to make sure they had not worked loose of their packsaddle lashings. “Walker did a good job tying these down.”

Eddie Burt said, “I wonder if he's still alive.”

“Not a chance,” Baraclough said.

They wormed to the top and made a slow circuit of the perimeter on their bellies, scouting the surrounding slopes a sector at a time with the Zeiss glasses the Major had liberated from the ranch house forty hours ago.

Baraclough took his turn and let the lenses ride slowly up and down, covering the district in a checkerboard sweep. Abruptly the binoculars steadied in his grip and he fixed the point in his vision and handed the glasses to the Major. “That little patch of open snow between the pine groves. Eleven o'clock—down a little lower now. Got it?”

“Yes. It could be their tracks. You've got good eyes, Steve—I missed that.”

Baraclough took pride in the Major's compliment: he smiled a little.

Burt said, “Okay, what do we do?”

The Major looked at Baraclough. “How many grenades have we got?”

“Two.”

“That should be enough. We're going to set up an ambush a fly couldn't get through.”

They went back down toward the horses. Burt said, “What do we use
him
for?” He meant Hanratty's corpse, belly-down across the saddle.

“Bait,” the Major said, and mounted his horse.

Baraclough smiled.

6

At about three o'clock the sun came out. Baraclough had been squinting across the snow for hours and the added brightness was painful against his grainy eyes.

Up ahead the Major made a turn to the left and threaded the pines downhill. In places the storm had left deep drifts of feathery-loose snow in timber shadows where the day had not begun to melt it; the horses floundered through belly-deep, plunging, splashing up clouds of white powder.

“This will do.” The Major dismounted just inside the edge of the forest

The trees ended at the lip of a loose shale rockslide that covered a ten-or fifteen-acre slope, very steep, all the way to the creek at the bottom. The forest enclosed the rockslide on three sides and there was a thick line of aspens and sycamores along the opposite bank of the creek. Beyond that the ground flattened out, a scrub-covered plateau that stretched south at least half a mile to the foot of another pine-timbered mountain.

In the past two hours they had spotted tracks twice, both times to the east of them, both times heading north. Once they had established that much the Major had made up his mind and they had pushed directly north with all the speed they could get out of the horses, staying within the trees on west-facing slopes with a high ridge or two between them and the pursuit. It was the Major's aim to get at least a mile ahead of the cops and they had probably achieved that margin by now because the cops would be doing a good deal of backing and filling to scout side-canyons and discover ambushes.

It was a fair bet the cops would come down that slope beyond the brushy flat, sometime within the next half hour, and when they got that far they would have a clear view of this shale rockslide. That was what the Major wanted—a spot in plain sight.

“Roll him down,” the Major said.

Eddie Burt helped Baraclough unstrap Hanratty's corpse and lift it off the horse. They carried it to the lip of the shale slide and laid Hanratty down between the trees. Hanratty's joints had stiffened up and his face had swollen and turned a very deep crimson color in post-mortem lividity because his head had been hanging down by the stirrup.

The Major was using his glasses and when he was done he passed them to Baraclough and Baraclough did a confirming sweep. “Nothing. But they'll be along.”

“Most likely,” the Major agreed, and said again, “Roll him down.”

Baraclough got down on his knees behind Hanratty, as if the corpse were a barricade from which he intended to shoot. He hooked his hands under a shoulder and a buttock and heaved.

Hanratty was butt-heavy, hard to roll over, but Baraclough got the body over the lip of the slide and then it was rolling down the snow-carpeted rock like a chunky log. It made some noise, not much, and started a few loose bits of shale tumbling. The disturbance threw a cloud of snow into the air and the corpse half rolled, half slid down the mountainside, picking up a coating of white like a rolling snowball. Little avalanches of rock and snow were triggered by Hanratty's violent passage and the corpse left a deep rumpled groove in its wake, a gouged-out trench that a half-blind observer couldn't miss from across the valley.

The shale slide was so steep that there was no chance Hanratty would stop rolling and sliding before he hit bottom. He went right into the creek, clattering some rocks together, breaking up a thin rime of ice. The water was accustomed to avalanche debris; it made a path around the corpse and continued to flow.

Baraclough went back to his horse and they got mounted. The Major turned and they stayed inside the trees, making a circuit around the edge of the rockslide, keeping to cover all the way down to the creek. Horseshoes clattered on the rocks when they crossed the creek; they turned in the aspens and rode upstream.

The Major wanted to set it up himself. Baraclough gave him the grenade. He stayed on his horse and watched the Major walk over to the bank of the stream beside Hanratty and squat down on his heels.

The long tumble had ripped Hanratty's clothes and pulped his face pretty badly. The Major dragged the corpse closer to the bank and positioned the dead arms and legs with the body half in the water, half on the bank, as if Hanratty had fallen that way naturally. Face down: that was important, because when the cops found him they would want to know what he looked like. If you left him face up they might not disturb the body right away.

The Major took his time bracing the grenade under the dead man's breastplate, making certain the grenade was lodged firmly between corpse and rock. Then he pulled the pin from the grenade gingerly, using both hands, and removed his hands slowly and carefully. Now the corpse's weight held the grenade's handle down against its spring pressure and when the corpse was moved the handle would fly off and the grenade would explode.

The Major motioned to Baraclough and Burt to dismount. “We've got two spare horses now.” Walker's and Hanratty's. “Let's turn them loose—it'll give our friends something else to worry about.”

Horses were gregarious animals and it was not all that easy to persuade the two beasts to go away by themselves but after Baraclough had led them a hundred yards upstream and whipped them harshly across the flanks with his rifle butt they trotted away snorting and kept going out onto the scrub flats, heading south. He had removed the bridle bits and reins to keep them from snagging and he knew that if the horses weren't caught soon they would find their way back over the mountains to the ranch they had come from. That would help confuse the pursuit, but the important thing right now was that the three cops up there were likely to come in sight of this plateau at any moment now and they would spot the two horses right away. That was what the Major wanted.

Baraclough walked back to the creek and the Major said, “We'll post ourselves in the pines. Up there. When they come along they'll take their time and take pains not to expose themselves, but sooner or later they'll have a look at Hanratty. I want to be up there with a bead on them. If the grenade doesn't take them out we'll do it with rifles. All set? Let's go, then.”

Baraclough let Burt go ahead of him, leading the pack animals. He stayed behind a few moments to look it over and it looked good. A lot of tracks coming in and out—that would whet the cops' interest and make them nervous. Hanratty's corpse, like an open honey jar, with the armed grenade under the breastbone. The creek exposed fully to enfilading fire from the pines above, along the edge of the rockslide. It was a fine ambush: but then the Major always set up fine ambushes. That was why the three of them were still alive after four tours of combat duty.

He went along after the others, forded the creek and rode up the steep pitch of the hillside. Tied his horse back in the trees with the others' and carried his rifle along to the edge of the rockslide.

The Major had made himself comfortable with his rifle balanced across a fallen log. Like a bench-rest shooter. The distance from here to Hanratty's corpse was no more than two hundred yards. It would be just about impossible to miss.

They waited no more than twenty minutes. Clouds drifted across the sun, their shadows riding quickly along the mountains. Out on the half-mile flat beyond the stream Baraclough could see the two riderless horses browsing their way indolently toward the mountain beyond. And then the Major, peering through his field glasses, said in his businesslike voice, “Here they come.”

CHAPTER

9

1

“Damn it,
some
thing fell down that mountain,” the FBI agent argued. “Suppose it was one of their pack horses. It got away from them and they let Walker's horse go too, they didn't have any more use for it. The two horses got together out here. It makes sense.”

“Then where's the pack saddle?” Buck Stevens asked. He leaned over to pat one of the horses.

The two animals had trotted up amiably when Watchman had led the party out onto the flats. Watchman had taken a look at them and taken a harder look at their tracks, which led back toward the aspens at the foot of the shale slide, and that had drawn their attention to the long raw trench something had gouged out of the snow down the length of the slide.

The abandoned horses were a bay and a blue roan and they both had Lansford's brand on them. One of them had an empty rifle boot strapped to the saddle.

Vickers was going through the saddle pockets but he didn't come up with anything that looked like a clue. Watchman sat with his hands folded across the saddle horn, squinting toward the shale slide seven or eight hundred yards away.

Vickers got mounted in his ungainly way and fumbled for a cigarette. “I suppose the next step is to go in and see what it is. Whatever fell down that hill is probably still there.”

Watchman, still thinking, did not reply. Buck Stevens whipped off his hat and chased the two riderless horses off to the south, driving them along like a cowboy with a lot of whooping and slapping of his hat against his thigh, until the two horses ran into the pines. Then Stevens trotted back to rejoin them. “They'd have tagged along otherwise. We can always pick them up on the way back for Walker and Mrs. Lansford.” His face changed: “If we come back.”