Deathwatch

by Robb White

  “I’ve heard that,” he said.

  “Then you’d better give me your hat, Ben.”

  Now it was fear. Acknowledging it, recognizing it, turned all the vague apprehensions into sharp, clean fear.

  He had been stupid to let Madec get this far without facing this thing, thinking about it.

  “That isn’t going to work,” Ben said.

  “It will work. Give me your hat and your shirt, Ben. Your boots, too.”

  “If I don’t?”

  “Then you force me to make a decision which”—Madec began to smile—“of course, I’ve already made. Believe me, Ben, I don’t like doing this. It’s just something that has to be done. How it’s going to be done I’m going to leave entirely up to you.”

  Madec’s thumb moved slowly and deliberately. Ben watched the blued steel safety catch flip up.

  Madec’s forefinger went into the trigger guard and moved down to lie on the curved trigger.

  It was still difficult for Ben to realize that a man could plan a thing like this; could be so coldly deliberate about it.

  “Perhaps it will help you in your decision,” Madec said, “for you to know exactly what I plan to do.”

  “I think I know,” Ben said. “You’re going to make this look like murder. You’ve already done that”—he nodded toward the blanket—“with him. Now you’re going to make sure I can’t deny it.”

  “Good thinking,” Madec said. “Very precise. So let me tell you what my thinking on this is. Or do you care to know?”

  Ben thought about the Jeep and was disgusted with himself. But how could he have known that this insane thing was going to happen?

  On each side of the Jeep for at least a hundred yards and downhill for more than that there was nothing but open ground. No place to hide and the shale would trip him if he tried to run. The .358 would stop him before he got halfway to the Jeep.

  “I’d like to know,” Ben said.

  “It’s simply this. You’re an honest, law-abiding young man. Therefore I can’t trust you. We could make a deal here to forget the conversation about the horns. But, in court, under oath, your honesty would be put to a severe test. I can’t risk that.”

  “What you’re doing is a lot riskier.”

  “No. You see, the fact must be established that you, not I, shot this old man. The way we do it I leave entirely up to you so let’s discuss the alternatives. First, I could shoot you now. That might seem the simplest and quickest solution, but the trouble with a thing like that is it takes planning. There are a lot of details that have to be fitted very precisely. There’s always the chance in a premeditated murder to make a fatal mistake. So, unless you insist on it, let’s eliminate murder, shall we?”

  “Good idea,” Ben said.

  “The second way is for you to take off your boots, your shirt and your hat and put them on the ground. Then empty your pockets. You can keep your trousers on, but not your socks. How far is it to the nearest highway?”

  Ben looked to the west. The mountains were black now with the sun setting behind them. “About forty-five miles.”

  “Good. So, with no clothes to protect you from the sun, and no shoes to protect your feet, and with no food and no water, you’ve got a long walk.”

  “I’ll make it,” Ben said.

  “Perhaps. It really doesn’t matter. Because, if you do, the story you tell and the story I tell are going to be quite different.”

  “Madec,” Ben said quietly, “do you really think that the people in my hometown are going to believe you when you tell them I deliberately shot an old prospector I’d never seen before in my life?”

  “Perhaps they won’t,” Madec said. “But here’s the beauty of it, Ben. They certainly are not going to believe your story. Nobody will believe that a man could treat another man the way I’m going to treat you. They’ll have to doubt your story because, when you think about it a little, you’ll see how insane and illogical it will be. On the other hand, my own story will be so logical and sensible it’ll be hard not to believe it.

  “All of which,” Madec went on, “isn’t really important because I don’t think you can survive those forty-five miles, Ben. With no water? I’ll see to it that you don’t get any. As a matter of fact, I’ll harass you all the way.”

  Ben couldn’t believe any of this. And in the still, heavy heat and absolute silence he began to wonder if Madec had said any of it.

  “You’re nuts, Madec,” he said. “Come on, let’s get this old man in the Jeep.”

  It was as though the small rock his right foot was on had suddenly been hit by a sledgehammer. The blow numbed his foot halfway up his leg and from there on sent sharp tingles of pain all the way into his stomach.

  Ben looked down at the hole in the ground where the rock had been and, as though remembering it, heard the explosion of the .358.

  He lowered his numb foot, watching to see when it was back on the ground and then looked over at Madec.

  “What’s your decision, Ben?” Madec asked quietly, shoving the bolt home on a fresh cartridge.

  Ben stood without moving, studying him. Suddenly the feeling of helplessness, the confusion, even the fear were gone. Oddly, he felt nothing about Madec—no hatred, not even dislike. The man had ceased to exist except as part of this problem he now had to handle.

  Ben realized that he had no choice at all. To make any sort of move toward the gun or toward escape would only get him killed.

  He flipped his hat over at Madec’s feet and then peeled off his shirt. Standing first on one leg and then the other, he took off his boots and socks and dropped them on the ground. Then he emptied his pockets, turning each one out as he did so. When he was stripped to the waist, barefoot and bareheaded, he looked at Madec. “Okay?”

  Madec said, pleasantly, “I’ve changed my mind, Ben.”

  “Now you’re making sense,” Ben said.

  “Take off your trousers, too. You can keep your shorts on. And off with the sunglasses.”

  Ben started to unbuckle his belt and then stopped. “Can you kill a person just to keep from answering a few questions? Just to keep from maybe going to jail for a few months?”

  “Who are you?” Madec asked, his voice still pleasant. “Are you real smart in school? Are you a genius, or something?”

  It felt strange to Ben to be thinking at this time of the B’s and a few A’s he had made. “I’m not a genius.”

  “You’re just a young kid. Twenty-two. I asked about you before I hired you. Nice kid, hard working, wants to be a geologist. No parents. No wife. Lots of girls but no real girl friend. During the last three days out here with you I’ve found out a lot more about you. You’re a nobody, Ben. And you’ll never be anything but a nobody. You’re a loser, Ben. The world is already too full of men like you.”

  “There’s one too many of you, too,” Ben said.

  “Some people agree with you,” Madec said quietly. “But who am I? I’m president and sole owner of a corporation in California. Not a huge thing like General Motors, but I employ about six hundred people. I’m married, and I’ve got two wonderful children. Now all of these people, my six hundred employees, my wife, my children, depend on me for the food they eat, for their shelter—for their lives. I’m important to all those people and, in my business, it would be absolutely ruinous for me to be put in jail on any charge at all for any time at all, even a day. You see, I’m looking out not only for myself but for all those other people. I’m balancing them against you, and you lose.”

  He held out his hand and Ben dropped his trousers and stepped out of them and then dropped his sunglasses down on them.

  “All right,” Madec said. “Go. But remember this, Ben. I’ll be watching you every step of the way. You’re not going to make it.”

  Ben looked at him once more and then walked away across the flat top of the ridge. The smooth stone was hot under his feet, and he could feel the heat of the dying sun on his bare skin.

  As he walked,
the muscles of his back cringed, waiting for the first touch of that heavy .358 slug. He could feel his flesh puckering in anticipation.

  The slope down from the ridge was not as steep on this side as the one they had climbed, and he walked slowly, picking his way through loose, sharp rocks.

  There was not a sound anywhere.

  The open area ended in a jumble of boulders, and he moved in among them, hurrying a little now, for he wanted the feel of thick stone between his back and the gun.

  Beyond the boulders was a narrow arroyo, and he dropped down into it and went along it until he was sure he was out of sight of the ridge.

  Then he turned around and, crouching, went back upward, moving carefully and slowly among the water-washed stones as he followed the trench of the arroyo back toward Madec.

  When the arroyo became too shallow for good concealment he stopped and very slowly raised his head until he could see through a narrow crack where two boulders lay together.

  Madec was not there.

  It was a small satisfaction, but as Ben studied the ridge he thought, Okay, Madec, now you’ve made your first mistake.

  He could not see the old man from where he was but, as he settled down to wait, he remembered the boots. Good boots and about his size.

  4

  THIS WAS A TRAP. Standing on the highest point of the little range of mountains, really only hills rising perhaps a thousand feet from the desert floor, Ben studied the trap.

  The sun was now well behind the western range, those distant and, he knew, difficult mountains, black as coal against the dying sky. Beyond that range, forty-five miles by crow flight from where he stood, there was a highway and, fifteen miles farther on, a town.

  A trap, an enormous bowl, the bottom of it open, rough desert, the sides mountains. Like a little pile of lettuce in the center of a salad bowl were the stubby little mountains where he stood. A Jeep could circle entirely around them in half an hour, and a man with binoculars could see anything that moved on them.

  Between Ben and the high range to the west there were thirty-five miles of open desert. Not a perfectly flat land of hard-packed, almost concrete-smooth sand, like the dry lakes around Edwards Air Force Base, but open enough for a man in a Jeep to see a man on foot trying to make his way across all those miles.

  Ben kept turning slowly, the blood on his cut feet dried hard and flaking off. Around the entire compass there was no route that did not include miles of open desert.

  Ben could not yet accept this situation. He still could not believe that anyone would deliberately kill a man just to avoid a trial which, at worst, would put him in jail for a few months. And he could not rid himself of the hope that Madec would change his mind. That, with time, he would realize that this crime he was committing could be far more dangerous than the accidental shooting of the old man.

  To make the hope real he realized now that he must give Madec time to think, time to reconsider. With the shooting so recent and this plan of Madec’s so new it would be dangerous to provoke him now.

  The trouble was that Ben had very little time to give away. He could not afford to let Madec rest and contemplate, provided with plenty of food and water and protection from the sun.

  With no water Ben’s body could stand this heat for only two days; probably less than that since he had no clothing to protect him and contain his sweat.

  If he could find a catch basin somewhere in these hills and could squeeze as much as a quart of water out of the sand, it would do him no good at all. A quart of water would not add even an hour to the forty-eight hours he could hope to live.

  Even if he were lucky and found two quarts—a half gallon of water—it would not really help, adding only an hour or so to his life.

  To survive here for as long as two and a half days would require that he find a full gallon of water. To make it for three days he would have to have more than two gallons of water. Four days—five gallons.

  And he didn’t even have two full days. He had already used up eight of his forty-eight hours, for he had not had a drink of water since before they started stalking the bighorn.

  As he turned to go down the slope, Ben saw the headlight beams of the Jeep stab out like a pale knifeblade across the stony floor of the desert.

  Ben stood where he was and watched the Jeep scurrying along the base of the mountains, then turning behind the western end of the range.

  He must think I’ve started across the desert, Ben decided.

  That’s your second mistake, Madec.

  Ben moved down the ridge, picking his way carefully, his feet now swollen and painful. He knew that he should give this problem more than just the hope that time would change Madec’s mind. He should be attacking it from every angle. Instead he could think only of small and unimportant things. He needed shoes and clothes. He needed water. He was hungry.

  It took him a long time in the dark to get back to the ridge where the old man had been shot. Ben decided that he could use the groundsheet, the rope and the blanket but not those bloody, smeared clothes. Just the boots. He could cut a poncho out of the blanket.

  Madec had moved the body back to where it had first fallen.

  The groundsheet, the rope, and the blanket were gone. The man’s old felt hat was gone. So were all his clothes.

  In the starlight the old man’s bare feet looked naked and white, with a dark line of dirty skin at the ankles.

  The voice in the darkness sounded very close, but as Ben listened, he realized that Madec was thirty or forty feet away, concealed behind a jumble of boulders.

  “I’ll put his shoes and hat and clothes back on,” Madec said, “after you don’t need them any more.”

  “Madec!” Ben cried. “This isn’t the way to do it! People are going to ask too many questions.”

  Ben heard the shale clicking as Madec went down the slope. Going to the cliff, Ben watched him heading straight down to the Jeep.

  Ben knew it was useless, but he searched the ground all around the dead man, searched the whole area of the ridge, hoping that Madec had made the mistake of just hiding the stuff somewhere.

  He had not made that mistake.

  Ben went to the edge of the cliff again and looked down. Madec had the Coleman lantern lit, and Ben could see him moving around, cooking his supper over a campfire. He had told Ben the first night that that was more “fitting” than using the Primus stove.

  Moving until he could no longer see the old man, Ben sat down with his back against a slab of stone and waited.

  The moon seemed to hang behind the black mountains, shy and undecided, allowing only a weak glow to show that it was there at all. But, at last, it came plunging up, enormous, faintly tinged with a reddish-brown color, only a small part of its roundness still dark in the earth’s shadow.

  The moonlight was not bright enough for him to make out the old man’s tracks or even those of the bighorn, but Ben hoped that his own years in the desert would help him now.

  An old prospector like that would make a good camp. It would be in the lee of a cliff and would have a view of the desert. It wouldn’t be close enough to any water hole to scare the game away but close enough to bag a quail or a rabbit when he needed one.

  Ben got up and started picking his way carefully, the moonlight helping him keep his feet off the sharp rocks. At the same time he searched for any mark; the scrape of a boot nail on a stone, the darker earth where a foot had overturned a rock, any trace of digging where, perhaps, the metal locator had buzzed.

  What had the old man found? A beer can left by some hunter? A brass empty where someone had fired a shot? Gold? Silver? Nothing?

  Once, when Ben was a boy, an old prospector people called Hardrock showed up at his uncle’s filling station. Hardrock had once been a burro man but had given up the little burros and for a while had gone on foot. But, that night, he showed up with what they called a “mule,” an overgrown motor scooter with a big rear wheel and tire, an air-cooled engine and a beefed-up
frame.

  Broke, Hardrock had borrowed five gallons of gas from Ben’s uncle, who had also loaned him five dollars. As collateral Hardrock insisted on leaving a good, sheepskin-lined coat.

  That coat had hung in the closet in Ben’s uncle’s house for ten years, and then Hardrock, now in a pickup truck, had appeared again. He paid for the five gallons of gas, returned the five-dollar loan, and took back his coat.

  Almost at the end of the range and halfway down it Ben found the old man’s camp. He had not expected to find much. A groundsheet and blanket or, if he was a real dude, a sleeping bag. The cast-iron Dutch oven a prospector couldn’t get along without. A shovel to fry meat on. Dried apples, beef jerky, flour, salt and pepper. Depending on how long he’d been out, some cans of tomatoes, chile beans, perhaps a slab of bacon. He’d have a rifle, usually an old .30-.30, and a pan to wash gold with, a couple of changes of clothes and, always, a water bag or jerry can and a jug of vinegar to clear the water with.

  Madec had found the camp first.

  Ben felt a childish rage. This wasn’t fair! Madec was breaking the rules.

  Madec had left very little. No sleeping bag, no blanket, no groundsheet. No clothes of any sort, no shoes. No food. He had smashed the Dutch oven with a rock. If the old man had had any tools or a gun Madec had taken them.

  Ben felt like a man coming home to find his house burned to the ground.

  He was turning away, not knowing where to go, or what to do when he spotted the five-gallon water can. The old man had set it in a crevice to keep the sun off it.

  Just the sight of the can gave Ben an almost savage pleasure. He yanked it out of the crevice and unscrewed the cap.

  It was empty.

  For a moment he was too stunned and disappointed and angry to think, but as he automatically untangled the little chain attached to the cap and screwed the cap back on he realized that, at last, Madec had made a mistake. With this can, if Ben found water, he could save what he couldn’t drink.

  It pleased him. The look and feel of the can was good. It had a nice, smooth, rugged handle set flush in the top and was easy to carry.