It wasn’t clear whether there had been four men or five. The company guards who rode the armored truck and its two convoy cars had instructions to stay near the bank in case of trouble and they had developed the habit of playing dime-quarter poker in the mud room in the back of the bank where employees hung their coats and boots on winter days. The bandits had known that; at least two of them had rushed in through the back door and squirted a chemical from spray cans-probably Mace, a disabling gas. It had affected the guards’ vision, disoriented them, made them violently nauseous. Whatever it was, it had taken the eight guards out immediately and silently and none of them was able to give more than a sketchy description of their attackers. The bandits had relieved them of their side arms and locked them in the mud room. When Watchman talked to them the Tally Ho cards and coins were still scattered all over the room.
One man had entered the bank proper from the rear and two others had walked in the front door. They wore stocking masks and carried two double shotguns and an automatic pistol. About eight customers had been in the bank along with Whipple and seven employees. Another robber had waited outside at the wheel of the car. It was possible a fifth man had remained posted by the mud room to make sure the guards didn’t break through the locked door.
In the bank the robbers had told everybody to remove their trousers and get down on the floor. Two of them had leaped over the low fence and gone into the vault, carrying military duffel bags which they stuffed with loot. The third man, with a shotgun, had waited just inside the front door. The bank guard, Jasper Simalie, had sneezed and stirred or had not stirred-there were conflicting eyewitness reports-and in either case the nervous bandit had fired. The shotgun charge had blasted Jasper Simalie back against the tellers’ counter and he had slid down and fallen over on his face, leaving behind a red smear on the face of the counter.
The head cashier, Terrell, had pressed the alarm button under the lip of his desk very shortly after the bandits had entered the place, and the alarm had sounded in the police shack four blocks away. Jace Cunningham had been in the office with one of his patrolmen and he had told the patrolman to get through to the Sheriff and the Highway Patrol; Cunningham himself had grabbed a rifle off the rack and sprinted for the bank. But by the time Cunningham arrived the bandits had fled; he got a glimpse of their car speeding by, heading west.
The entire operation had taken no more than four minutes.
7
“They must have cut the phone and telegraph wires at both ends of town,” Cunningham said. “Everything’s dead except the radio. They had everything figured out-it took a lot of planning. This was no amateur job.”
“But they’re on the main highway,” Buck Stevens said. “They’re on the main road because there aren’t any secondary roads. We can nail them easy. Maybe those Nevada cars have got them by now.”
Watchman looked at his watch. They had been here twelve or fifteen minutes. He said to Cunningham, “Did you get a make on the car?”
“Not really. The play went around the other end. It was an old car-maybe an Olds, Buick, something like that.”
“Anybody get a look at the driver?”
No answer.
Whipple said nervously, “I did notice one thing. One of them had an ugly scar on his wrist-here, like this.”
Watchman’s eyes locked on Stevens’ and Stevens nodded emphatically.
Watchman took Cunningham by the arm and walked him toward the front door, talking while he moved. “They’d have known what the highway situation is around here. They must have allowed for it. I wouldn’t be surprised if they hadn’t doubled back and taken cover somewhere right here in town. You’d better get all your men looking for them.”
“What about you two?”
“We’ll head west, try to catch them in a pincer between us and those Nevada cruisers. If we don’t find them we’ll have to assume they doubled back. I’ll get on the radio and have another Highway Patrol car dispatched from Fredonia to block off the road west of here-we didn’t pass them coming in but they may have tried to get back that way while we’ve been inside here jawing. Now get moving, Jace.”
Cunningham stiffened a little: he didn’t like taking orders from Sam Watchman and in fact he was under no obligation to do so but it was obvious that Watchman was right and Cunningham was enough of a cop to know that. In the end he nodded and swung away and Watchman got into the car and reached for the radio mike.
8
The cruiser surged along the highway. Beyond the San Miguel hills there was a long stretch of level flat pavement, thirty-seven miles without a single turning. Watchman was brisk: he had the situation securely in his mind and he barked terse commentary into the transmitter, sealing the net. The last thing the dispatcher said to him in reply was, somewhat drily, “Looks like we’ve got some federal stuff horning in, Sam-FBI special agent heading up your way by Lear jet. I guess the G-men want to hog some credit.”
He was doing eighty but he had his eyes alertly on the road and he saw the pinpoint glitters in the road just ahead: he hit the brakes hard but he saw he didn’t have room to stop so he released the brake and steered off the highway, bumping violently across the shoulder and crashing through the bits and pieces of sagebrush and stunt growth. Stevens was holding on tight: “What the fuck?”
“Guerrilla spikes on the road.”
There was a hundred-foot patch of them-twisted nails welded into little grappling-hook shapes to impale tires and blow them out.
Watchman got out and walked over to the road. He didn’t waste time looking at the spikes; what he was looking for was tracks in the dirt alongside the road. He didn’t find any. He walked back to the car, got in and started forward, pulling back onto the pavement beyond the patch of spikes.
Stevens said, “What was that all about?”
“They went by here fast and they dropped those things behind them to slow down anybody coming after them. So they wanted to buy a little time-what for?”
“I don’t get it.”
“And they didn’t come back this way. There’s no sign of the car detouring around that patch. The only tracks were the ones we left. They’re still out ahead of us.”
“Then they’ve run into those Nevada cars by now.” Stevens looked at his watch. “In fact we ought to intercept them ourselves any time now.”
Way out ahead, several miles, the sun winked on something that might be an approaching car. Watchman swept both sides of the unrolling highway with close attention. His knuckles on the steering wheel began to ache: he was thinking of Jasper Simalie-upright, forthright, downright, a sweet old man and no gunslinger; Jasper would have had trouble hitting the ground with his hat and Jasper hadn’t been one for empty heroics. It was impossible to believe he had been trying to get to his gun when the bandit had shotgunned him. No; it had been cold-blooded, casual, unnecessary murder.
Stevens was talking into the radio: “Driver’s license in the name of Steven D. Baraclough, Seven-Niner-Niner South Steward Avenue, Tucson. Vehicle is yellow and green nineteen fifty-seven Buick fordor, Arizona license plates Bravo X ray One Four One Three Five Charlie. Registered to John P. Sweeney, Fredonia. Repeat, Steven D. Baraclough, B-a-r-a-c-l-o-u-g-h…”
The money was of no special concern to Watchman but because of Jasper Simalie he had a personal stake in this. They were going to pay for that.
Hold on now. Let’s just don’t fill the air with bullets, Tsosie. Sure, a little good old-fashioned Innun-style retribution-let’s start a massacre, folks.
His knuckles eased on the wheel and he made a face.
Stevens was still on the radio: “… patch of nails on the highway eight miles west of San Miguel. Better send somebody out there with a broom and get it swept off.”
The approaching vehicle winked in the distant sunlight and Watchman’s eyes kept scanning both sides of the road. When he saw the downed phone cables he pulled over and stopped. The roof-top flasher was still revolving like a red lighthouse beacon and he left it on w
hen he got out of the car.
The telephone-telegraph poles ran along quite close beside the road here and that must have been why they had chosen this spot to cut the wires. Stevens said, “Piece of rope over there, see it?”
Watchman walked over and got down on one knee to examine it. Stevens came crunching along and Watchman said, “They slung one end of the rope over the wires and tied both ends of the rope to the back bumper of the car. Pulled the cables down. They must have done the same thing beyond the other end of town.”
“Cute,” Stevens said with a sour downturn of his mouth.
Watchman stood up and turned a slow circle on his heels. His eyes were narrowed in a thoughtful squint. The wind rubbed itself against him, cool and thin, and the clouds were building and darkening over the western quarter of the sky. About two hundred yards off the road to the right stood a clump of stunt growth-withered trees, bushes nourished by some fitfully intermittent underground stream. Up ahead by the roadside several sections of barbwire fence were down. Watchman walked back to the car and started it up and when Stevens got in, asking questions, he rolled the car forward to the break in the fence. Several sets of tire tracks went off the road here and rutted across the flats to the clump of scrub-oak and sycamore. Nothing but sagebrush flats surrounded the grove, miles of open ground beaten into pale colors out to the horizons, here and there a weathered bush.
Stevens said, “Jesus, you don’t think they’re trying to hide in there?”
The approaching car was slowing down-the Nevada cruiser. When it pulled over by Watchman the visiting trooper stuck his head out the window. “What’s happening?”
“Let’s have a look and find out.”
The Nevada cop got out of his car and Watchman said, “I guess you didn’t pass anybody.”
“A couple of pickups and a Jeep. I checked them out and let them go.”
Buck Stevens said, “Where’s your partner? They said two cars.”
“He’s back by the state line. Waiting to bottle up anybody who happened to get past me. What the hell, you mean nobody passed you guys either?”
Watchman just pointed at the tire tracks leading off toward the grove.
The Nevada cop’s face changed and he pushbuttoned his clamshell holster. When it popped open on its spring catch he lifted the service revolver out and turned to stand squarely facing the grove. “Do we go in after them or wait for reinforcements?”
Watchman suppressed a smile. “Let’s go in and have a look before we call out the troops.”
“Radio said there was four, five of them.”
“All right. But I doubt they’re in those trees.” Watchman was studying the black-rubber dashes on the road pavement-smears a car might have left if it locked its brakes trying to stop suddenly. Maybe somebody’d had a blowout; there was no telling how long that had been there; but it was all piecing together in Watchman’s mind and he didn’t bother taking out his gun when he began to walk toward the grove.
The other two trailed along gingerly and began to spread out to either side as they approached the trees. Watchman said, “Don’t get too jumpy.” The way he had it figured, all they were likely to find was an empty ’fifty-seven Buick.
9
He went in straight up because there was no point crouching and dodging. If there was anybody waiting inside those trees with a bead on him they’d nail him either way. He had a theory and he was sure enough of it to be confident he wasn’t going to draw any fire. Two of the sets of tire tracks were wide-set with narrow tread; there was a single track running down the middle, like a motorcycle spoor, and then there were three sets of tracks left by the Buick-it had come in, gone out, and come in again: therefore it was still here.
From boyhood his eyes had been trained to read signs left in the earth’s surface. You learned these things quickly when you grew up hunting strayed sheep across the broken badlands of the Window Rock country. For Buck Stevens and the Nevada trooper it wasn’t all that easy-the tire markings were a jumble of intertwining grooves, disorderly and blurred and often superimposed-but Stevens did say, “Is that a motorbike track?”
“I doubt it.” Watchman was about forty yards out now and the Nevada cop was bouncing his revolver nervously in his fist, eyes darting, trying to keep every inch of the grove covered.
The patch of scrub was crescent-shaped, perhaps eighty feet wide, with its convex face toward the road. No doubt it followed the course of an underground stream that came close enough to the surface, under artesian pressure, to support the root systems of the growth at this point. The tracks didn’t go straight into it; they went past the left-hand end and curled out of sight behind the scrub.
Watchman walked in the tracks, going around the end of the patch and sighting the gleam of sunlight reflected on metal. When he got past the obscuring branches he saw it was the chrome bumper of the Buick. They had parked it back here hard against the inside of the bend so it wouldn’t be spotted from the road.
Stevens was coming along behind him, gun lifted, and the Nevada cop had spread out to go around the far side of the grove; now he appeared beyond the Buick, face screwed up in bafflement.
Watchman walked over to the Buick and looked inside. The back seat was littered with what looked like a spilled pile of dirty laundry: nearly a dozen pairs of men’s trousers. There were five nylon stockings and four small gray-painted spray canisters, about the size of spray cans of shaving foam. The canisters had military markings in stencil.
The Nevada cop came up holstering his gun and peered inside over Watchman’s shoulder. “I just don’t get this.”
“They took everybody’s pants when they held up the bank To keep people from following them outside.”
“To hell with that. What I mean, they can’t have just disappeared into thin air.”
“That’s exactly what they did.”
Buck Stevens reached in through the open window and picked up one of the spray canisters. “Mace chemical, all right. Army issue-riot control. Maybe they got it out of an armory someplace.”
“Or maybe they had a source handy to them,” Watchman replied. “This whole thing feels like a military operation.”
The Nevada cop said, “I don’t get it. I don’t get any one bit of it.”
Watchman started to walk away. “Let’s get on that radio.”
“And tell them what?” the Nevada cop insisted, hurrying to catch up because Watchman had long legs and was using them.
Buck Stevens was hanging back to give the Buick a last glance. Soon enough there would be a crowd of technicians out here to go over it for microscopic clues but Watchman had seen all he needed to see. Mainly what had cinched it was those black dashes on the highway.
The Nevada cop said, “Maybe you ought to spell it out for us country boys.”
Buck Stevens caught up, dogtrotting, and Watchman said, “They broke a hole in the fence and hid it over there behind the brush. Baraclough came along in the Buick and picked them up, and they went into town and hit the bank, and I guess they had it all timed down to seconds. They must have worked it out how much time they needed-that’s why they scattered those guerrilla spikes on the road, to buy enough time to get back here and transfer everything out of the Buick.”
“What are you talking about? Motorcycles?”
Watchman made a face. They went through the hole in the fence and he pointed at the black dashes on the pavement. “Ever looked at the surface of an airport runway? Those are the marks a plane leaves when it lands. You’ve got thirty-seven miles of straight and level road here. It makes a good runway. They used an airplane.”
Buck Stevens said, “Smartass Inyun.”
CHAPTER 2
1
“We’ve got to go around it,” Keith Walker said.
The Major beside him said, “Negative.”
“We haven’t got oxygen. I can’t get above it-hell, it goes up forty thousand feet anyway.”
He was scowling at the wall of tumbling storm c
louds dead ahead. “We can cut around north of it.”
“We haven’t got time.”
“Nuts. You’re a long time dead.”
“You can cut it,” the Major said. “It might do you some good-prove something to yourself.”
After the number of missions Walker had flown he did not need to prove anything to anybody. What he said was, “Up yours, Major.” But he was thinking, I guess I could cut it. And then: Of course pilots always have to believe that. Christ don’t let him talk you into this one. And so he said, “Just this once we’re going to do things my way, Major.”
He gave it a little aileron and a little rudder-gingerly, because he was flying on the deck, holding less than two hundred feet above the hilltops. The mountain range ran along to starboard, parallel to his course, and he. was staying below it because of the radar at Nellis Air Force Base just outside Las Vegas.
He came around to a heading of Three Zero Five magnetic, vectoring north of Las Vegas VOR. The storm ahead of him was a black cascade, wall-to-wall violence. Under him cool air settled into gully shadows and hot air came rising explosively from the sunwhacked hilltops, and the ground turbulence kept the twin Apache bouncing around.
He had a broad-band receiver mounted below the dashboard, designed to detect radar transmissions, and he was picking up the jiggles of the flicking Nellis scanner circuit. But the mountains above him to starboard would absorb the signals and hide him in the scanner’s ground-return. They hadn’t picked him up; if they had, he would have seen a change in the interval of the signal-it would have gone to a quicker pattern, a fast localized sweep, but it wasn’t doing that. The radar didn’t worry him. The weather did. He had never been a white-knuckle flier but he had a survivor’s respect for enemy weather and he wasn’t confident of the aging Piper’s capacity for punishment.
The Major was watching him and when Walker looked at him the Major smiled very slightly with his mouth. The opaque eyes blocked all argument and inquiry, turned all objections back, as effectively as if they had been the eyes of a dead man.
Relentless Page 3
