Relentless

“Trooper, one shout from me and we’ll drive you down into the ground like a tent peg.”

“Do that. And then explain it to the Bureau after you come up with nothing in your hands but Mrs. Lansford’s corpse.”

“You are wrong.”

“Maybe I am. If I’m wrong I’m wrong. If you’re wrong you’re dead wrong. You’ve got a stupid way of figuring up odds, Vickers. If I was taking bets on you I wouldn’t even bother laying them off.” Watchman opened the door and climbed up into the cab.

Vickers stepped back. He didn’t say anything more. His hooded eyes pushed at Watchman.

Watchman triggered the starter and the engine caught and began to rumble. He reached for the headlight switch and then the passenger door opened and Buck Stevens climbed in. “Weren’t you going to wait for your faithful white companion?”

“You don’t have to make this run, Buck.”

“Who says?”

“If I make a mistake up there he’ll have my head in a basket. If you’re with me he’ll have yours too. I’m not going to ask you to stick your neck out.”

Stevens pulled the door shut. “Okay, you didn’t ask me.”

8

When he jammed the levers into four-wheel drive the transmission made a harsh whining growl. Watchman flicked on the high beams and they stabbed the hills, swinging wildly like searchlight beacons. Jouncing along high up in the cab of the old power wagon he had no trouble following the tracks of the eight horses: nobody could conceal evidence of that much traffic on this soft clay.

“Kemo sabe, maybe I’m a wet blanket but what if they look back and see our lights?”

“I hope they do.”

“You do.”

“Can’t hurt to keep them nervous.”

The borrowed jacket was tight across his shoulders. He cracked a window against the heater’s stuffy warmth. The hoofprints angled up into higher foothills and the truck engine strained on the grade against the weight of the horse trailer. Half-past three in the morning: it would be dawn soon, if the blizzard held. Along the hilltops here the wind was bending the scrub and an occasional snowflake drifted against the windshield but the edge of the storm was holding still, circling, a visible black-on-black wall eight or ten miles to the west. He had known storms to sit still like that until they blew themselves out. He had also known them to sit still like that until they had gathered maximum centrifugal strength and then burst forward like nuclear explosions, ripping out trees, peeling roofs off houses, overturning trucks, shoveling livestock into steep canyons by the ton. Two years ago they’d had an early fall blizzard in the high country that had stranded ten thousand Navajos and wiped out half their sheep; and the other half had been saved only by massive air drops of feed.

It was the kind of night on which you wanted to be home snug in bed. In bed with a healthy firm-haunched young Lisa lying warmly against you, idle talk or long easy silences until she felt stirred to make love again. The nerve-ends of his hands and lips remembered the textures of her. Right now she would be asleep but in a few hours, getting up and going downtown to open the shop, she would be ripping off a few choice words about his absence. Lisa was not your average housewife worrying about stubborn kitchen sink stains. Nor likely ever to become one.

Thinking about her unsettled him. In fact he was unsettled merely by the fact that he was thinking about her at all. Not the time and place for it.

He bestirred himself. “You put the stuff in the truck?”

“You betchum. But you sure as hell don’t plan to travel light. Snowshoes, Sterno, blankets, axes, ropes—I didn’t know we were outfitting a Polar expedition.”

“Just minding the Boy Scout motto.”

9

It began to get rocky and the power wagon pitched and skidded on the stones. They had covered eight or nine miles in an hour and that had cut the fugitives’ lead but they were going to have to abandon the truck soon. The hills were begi

He swung the grinding power wagon up a steep grade, all four wheels scrabbling at the pebbled surface. At the top the hoof tracks turned across the sand shelf into a wide thicket of scrub oak and piñon that twisted up the spine of a razorback fin toward the pine-wooded heights. Watchman set the hand brake and switched everything off. “Unload the horses and get everything packed on them.”

When he pushed the door open against the wind a blade of cold stabbed into the truck. He turned his collar up and climbed down; got the ax from the truck bed and went out into the scrub with it. Without much discrimination he hacked down a succession of three-foot bushes and dragged them into a pile on the hardpan fifty feet from the truck and downwind. He wasn’t satisfied until he had a good big stack. He whacked half a dozen thick hard scrub trees apart and scattered the logs judiciously on and inside the brushpile and when it looked satisfactory he brought both five-gallon gasoline cans from their fender-ru

Gasoline stink was raw in the wind. He was sweating from his exertions; he lifted his hat and dragged a coatsleeve across his forehead. The wind roughed up his hair. Stevens was standing by the horses, packed and ready, watching him with a long face. After a moment Watchman put his hat on and walked over to him, slipped the leather scabbard over the head of the ax, and strapped it to the saddle. “I hate a noisy silence, Buck. Say what’s on your mind.”

Deep breath in and out: Stevens put his head down, thinking. In the end he said, “The truth is I don’t like the odds all that much.”

“You can stay here. You can go back.”

“No. But it would help to know what we’re trying to do, kemo sabe.”

“Trying to keep Mrs. Lansford alive, mostly.”

“How?”

“Keep pressure on them.”

“You said something like that before. I don’t follow.”

“If they thought they had a long lead and a good chance to get out clean then they’d have no reason to keep her alive. They took her for a hostage but you only need a hostage when somebody’s pushing you.”

“I see. You want them to know we’re pushing them. But I still don’t see where that gets us.”

“Maybe with a little luck it gets us in close enough to get her away from them.”

“That’ll take a lot more than luck, kemo sabe.”

“Now that depends on the weather, doesn’t it.”

“I see that. But it’s still two against five. I don’t see why you figure it’s up to you and me to tackle it by ourselves. Like the FBI man said it’s not our responsibility, it’s his.”

“Well you need to have some reason to get up in the morning, Buck.”

“I’ll put that in your obituary.”

“I’ll tell you the way I was thinking. I was thinking suppose I was that poor son of a bitch Ben Lansford and the woman they took was Lisa.”

Stevens’ head lifted and Watchman caught the swift cut of his eyes. “You don’t really think you’re going to get her back from them alive.”

“I think I’d like to try.”

Stevens’ head nodded up and down slowly. “I may not be much good except to hold your coat but I’d like to watch you try. If I don’t get killed I might learn a thing or two.”

10

“One more thing I don’t understand,” Stevens said when he reached for the reins. “Why’d Vickers get so upset about it?”

“Because he was wrong.” Watchman took off a glove to dig for his matches. “Those guys aren’t used to having anybody tell them they’re wrong. Most folks seem to think of them the same way they think of Motherhood and the Flag and God. Of course nowadays none of those items drag down the kind of veneration they used to, but the Bureau just chalks that up to an epidemic of Commies and radic-libs.”

Stevens smiled with slow wickedness. “Maybe when he turns in his report you’ll turn out to be the first un-American Indian in history, kemo sabe.”