Relentless (26 page)

1

The last ribbon of twilight faded out of the sky behind Baraclough's right shoulder and Eddie Burt said in a distressed whisper, “What the fuck are the bastards doing?”

They had seen them—shadowy movements in the aspens down below. Once one of them had come tantalizingly close to Hanratty's body. But they had never offered a clear shot, they had never come out of the trees.

The Major said, “The sensible thing is to stay put. Stay here. Let them come to us—we'll hear their movements. I want this finished tonight.”

Baraclough turned his head and looked down through the pines. The tracks they had deliberately left there were easy to see for a distance of at least two hundred feet, even in the dusk, but it was evident now that the pursuers weren't going to fall for that.

Burt said, “Christ, the damned finish line keeps moving, don't it? These ain't no regular hick cops, not the way they keep one think ahead of us.”

The Major's jaw muscles stood out like cables. “I underestimated them. I accept the responsibility for that. But remember who we are, Sergeant. We're graduates of the finest guerrilla training academy in the world. They've given us a little trouble because we didn't anticipate their intelligence—I take the blame fully for that—but just remember they don't have a chance. Now let's get ourselves spread out and wait for them. No more talking.”

“Yes, sir,” Burt said, and moved away, fifty feet downhill through the pines, slithering on his belly like an eel.

Baraclough remained a moment before he moved away. “We're using up a lot of time here. Maybe they're not coming in after us at all. Maybe they know we're in here and they just figure to bottle us up until they get reinforcements.”

“If that's the case we'll move out by dawn. But we'll have a try at them first. We can't move freely with them this close to us, you see that.”

“I do. But I wouldn't mind moving out right now, Major.”

“No,” the Major said. “We'll wait. Get to your post now.”

2

Baraclough burrowed into a snowdrift like a child digging himself into beach sand; he left nothing showing except his head and arms. Wrapped in waterproof boots and an oilskin rain slicker he had no worry about getting frostbitten; the cold was uncomfortable but he had always enjoyed discomfort.

He could see the Major and, just barely, Burt down below; they had always made it a practice to set up in such a way as to afford one another protective fire. The mechanics of it were cut and dried, old hat to them all, but what troubled him was a sense that something was out of place. They had consistently misjudged the quality of the men who pursued them: no matter what they did, the pursuers always seemed to have got there just ahead of them—Burt had been right about that and it was hard to explain it to himself. But when he thought about it he saw the Major was right about waiting it out. Whoever the pursuers were, breaking out of here now wouldn't get rid of them. Other cops, maybe, but not these three. It was a hell of a handicap not knowing who they were, not knowing anything about them; but of course that wasn't altogether true. Baraclough did know several things about them, the main item of which was the fact that these three cops were good. Very good.

A searchlight caught him right in the face and he blinked in momentary panic before he realized it was the moon, rising past the peaks to the east. The temperature had dropped fast since the sun had gone and he saw the breath steam down from his face, white and hazy in the sudden moonlight.

3

Watchman had crossed the stream before the moon came up and posted himself on horseback in the lower fringe of pines about forty feet downstream from Buck Stevens. If Hargit's bunch was here at all it was most likely dug in somewhere along this flank of the horseshoe perimeter because only on this side would they have an easy back door to escape through. If they were here they were somewhere in the two-hundred-yard stretch of woods above him.

His first thought had been to pick a position with a good field of fire and wait for Hargit to open up. The sound and spark-flash of gunfire would give away Hargit's position and give Watchman a target to shoot at. But then he had vetoed the idea. It would have been playing the game by Hargit's rules. To Hargit this was a military exercise and in military exercises the objective was to annihilate the enemy: keep shooting at one another until only the winners survived. But that was warfare, not police work, and it wasn't Watchman's job to indulge in pocket battles. The highway patrolman's oath said “apprehend and arrest”; it didn't say “kill.”

He had discussed it with Stevens: “They'll be spread out a little and one of them's bound to be closer to us than the others. I want you to keep the other two pinned down while I take out the first one.”

Stevens had given him a lot of arguments, some of them unarguably logical, but a crazy notion had lodged itself in Watchman's head and he had turned Stevens' objections aside. Now he removed his gloves and checked to see that the flap of his service-revolver holster was within easy reach but he didn't lift his rifle out of its scabbard; he removed his left foot from the stirrup and locked his fists down in tight handholds on the saddle and got ready to make his run.

4

The explosion took Eddie Burt unawares. He wasn't looking in that direction, which was a good thing because it didn't night-blind him. He picked it up in the corner of his vision—the flash came an instant before the noise. Instinctively he swung his rifle toward the creek and then in the darkness that followed the explosion he saw a man break out of the trees, running toward Hanratty's corpse. A spasm peeled Burt's lips back and he laid his cheek along the rifle stock and steadied the sights with the speed of long practice and squeezed his shot, but he saw just as he fired that the running man had dived off to the left. Burt worked the bolt, threw a fresh cartridge into the chamber, fired again at the moving shadow in the woods. Baraclough was firing and the Major's gun barked once, and Burt chambered a new round and sought his target.

5

When Vickers made his run and Hargit's bunch started shooting Watchman slammed the horse up into the trees, not caring about the noise because Hargit's men wouldn't hear anything for a little while after firing rifles close by their own ears.

He slipped his leg over the back of the saddle and hung there on one side of the horse with all his weight on a crook'd leg in one stirrup, fist locked around the saddle horn, and twigs and branches raked his shoulders and head with wicked stings. The noise had excited the horse and it rammed up through the pines on the dead run.

6

The target had disappeared and Eddie Burt turned his head to scan the shadows, suddenly afraid.

A rifle started talking in hard echoes down toward the creek, inside the pines somewhere, and the Major was up on one knee, rifle lifted, answering that fire. Burt could hear Baraclough's rifle above him and he swung his own weapon toward the gun by the creek but then he caught a tail-of-the-eye movement imperfectly and wheeled.

It was a horse. Riderless, whipping erratically through the pines.

A decoy, Burt decided instantly. The stupid cops had driven the horse toward them to draw their fire. He wasn't going to fall for that one.

He held his fire and switched his attention back to the bottom of the hill. The rifle had moved down there; it spoke again, three times quickly—or was that another rifle? Probably; it was too far to the right, the first man couldn't have moved that far in these few seconds. All right, two of them down there. Where was the third one? Burt waited for one of the rifles to speak again, to give him a target. He kept the running horse in the edge of his vision. It was beginning to lose momentum, starting to drift; it wandered forward on a tangent that would take it past him, behind him.

In the pines below him a rifle barked and Burt put the horse out of his mind, steadied his aim and squeezed a shot. The buttplate jarred his shoulder and he had the satisfaction of hearing a man's brief cry: he had scored a hit.

The riderless horse had turned and was bearing down on him. Burt chambered a shell and threw an irritated glance at the horse. If the damned animal got in his way he'd have to shoot it. Then the rifle by the creek opened up again: either there were two of them down there or he hadn't hit the guy very badly. He shouldered his weapon again and fired another one.

Then the horse was wheeling right past him and he looked up in time to see a shadow drop free of the stirrup—right on top of him.

7

The man was trying to work his rifle bolt but Watchman was too close. He dropped on the man and when the rifle went off its muzzle was up in the air somewhere, harmless.

The man had the body of a heavy-duty shock absorber and Watchman felt the muscles twist and tense under him when he rolled for purchase: the man was flexing his arm like an expert who'd had plenty of practice on bricks and two-inch pine boards and Watchman had no liking for that kind of contest. When the man stabbed at his eyes with spread rigid fingers Watchman whammed his fist against the man's plunging wrist to deflect it and let himself fall across the man with his forearm against the man's Adam's apple; he jammed two fingers into the man's mouth and clenched them down against the mandibular nerve under the tongue. His father had taught him that: it was an unbearably painful grip, it paralyzed the mouth and jaw so that the man couldn't bite his fingers, it made the man go limp with agony. On the reservation his father had subdued belligerent drunks effortlessly with it. Watchman lifted the service revolver in his free hand and showed it to the man and held it against the man's throat while he took his fingers out of the man's mouth and got his handcuffs.

It had taken only a few seconds. The horse was drifting on past him, screening him from the two men higher on the hill. He cuffed the man's hands together behind the back and gagged the man with his own scarf. The horse was still moving and someone a few yards uphill in the snow said, “Sergeant?”

“Yessir,” Watchman whispered. His prisoner was Burt, then. He put Burt's hunting cap on his own head and pushed Burt into a drift of snow that had piled up against a tree trunk. When he came up on his knees he had Burt's rifle.

The racket of shooting had died away. The horse was going back into the woods at a frightened trot. When Watchman looked uphill he saw one man moving across his line of vision, threading the trees; he couldn't spot the second man. He flattened himself in the snow and brought the rifle up and when the man in the trees stopped to search the forest Watchman had a perfect target, range not more than thirty yards. He worked the action to load the breech and heard a voice somewhere above him to the left: “Steve? Where do you think you're going?”

It turned the man's head and that was when Watchman shot him. He aimed for the right shoulder and the spinning 180-grain plug of lead snapped the man's body around under its impact.

Watchman skittered to one side up against a tree but no one answered his fire. The tall man was sagging, cursing in an abrasive voice, and then the other one was going fast through the trees, running in deadly silence: Watchman had a glimpse and then the man was gone, absorbed into the night.

8

The one he had shot in the shoulder had slid down with his back to a tree until he was sitting on the snow. He still had his rifle, clumsily upheld in his left hand, and Watchman spoke to him from cover:

“You may as well drop that thing. I've got a bead on you.”

The man thought about it for a while and then threw the rifle down with a grunt of disgust and Watchman approached him cautiously, alert to the threat from that third man who had faded into the timber. He heard soft hoofbeats start up in the snow somewhere to the right, and he stopped and waited while the sound diminished with distance. It could be a ruse. He stood by a pine, his shadow blending into the tree, and said, “Get up on your feet.”

“I don't know if I can. I think you broke my shoulder.”

“Then roll over on your belly and stick your arms out to the sides.”

He could hear the grate of broken bone ends when the man moved, slowly, bracing himself on his left arm, lowering himself onto the snow. The left arm went out at a ninety-degree angle, cruciform; the right arm was buckled and Watchman made another sweep of the trees before he stepped forward and knelt down and patted the man for weapons. He extracted an automatic pistol and put it in his pocket and stood up. “On your feet now. You can make it. Which one are you, Hargit?”

The man sat up slowly and sneered. “Not fucking likely.”

“Baraclough then.”

“You know everything. You tell me.”

“Come on. Up.” He gave Baraclough a hand.

9

He collected Burt and prodded the two of them down the hill and let his call sing out so that Stevens wouldn't take a shot at them.

Stevens answered in a weak voice hoarsened by pain and Watchman hurried in alarm.

He found Stevens seeping blood into the snow from a hole in his hip. Stevens tried to grin but agony pulled his mouth awry. “Jesus. You took two of them alive.”

“Roll over and pull your pants down.”

“Now you're a God damn sex fiend.”

The horse stood ground-hitched in the trees and Watchman went to the saddlebags to get the first-aid kit. When he taped thick gauze bandages on the two holes in Stevens' hip he said, “Feel like any bones are broken?”

“I can't feel much of anything down there.”

“That's shock. It'll start to hurt after a while.”

“Thanks heaps,
kemo sabe
.”

Watchman was keeping one eye on the two prisoners. Baraclough sat droop-lidded, ready to pass out, but Burt's eyes were bright with venom.