Relentless

by Brian Garfield

  After a moment Walker heard the distinctive click of Baraclough’s Zippo lighter and saw it explode into flame like a little bonfire.

  They were crowded into a dirt-floored shed. Burt, near the shelves tacked to the far wall, reached up and got down a long cardboard box. “Candles.”

  The flame was transferred from the Zippo to half a dozen candles which Baraclough and Burt placed on the two-by-four crossspieces between the exposed joists.

  “See if you can get that stove going, Steve.”

  It was an old potbelly stove on claw legs with a black pipe chimney that went up the wall. Behind the stove the corner of the room was stacked with short-cut chunks of firewood.

  Walker hooked his arm over the saddle and sagged against the horse. Oh Jesus God.

  6

  “Watch those candles. We don’t want to burn the place down.”

  Burt started moving around, obeying. The woman was just standing there with her head down, raking fingers through her hair to get the ice out of it. Hanratty and Baraclough had got the stove going and sat down beside it. The wind banged and screamed around the place. Icicles hung from the horses’ flanks and fetlocks and their coats were frosted white; snowballs had formed on their tails where they had dragged through soft whirling drifts.

  Things were starting to get thawed out and the room was beginning to smell rancid. The breath no longer poured from the horses’ nostrils like steam. Walker stripped off his gloves and held his palms toward the stove. He watched the Major make his way between horses to the foot of the ladder that went up the side wall to a trap door in the ceiling. This had to be the ranger station and the ladder had to go on up to the fire-lookout tower.

  The Major said, “Steve.”

  “All right. I’ll check it out.” Baraclough hadn’t removed any clothes yet. He got up and climbed the ladder and pushed at the trap door. The wind got a finger inside and blew out all the candles and Baraclough said mildly, “All right, all right. I’ll close it in a minute.”

  The wind got louder and began to blow around inside the room: that meant the trap door was wide open. Then it slammed shut again. Walker thought Baraclough had climbed up through it and so it surprised him to hear Baraclough’s voice: “Forget it. If there’s a ranger up there he’s not coming down that ladder before this lets up.”

  “Good enough,” the Major said.

  Burt went around lighting the candles. The Major went to the stove and began to shoulder out of his coat. “Get out of your boots and put them by the stove. Hanratty, put together something for us to eat. We may as well eat our fill and get some sleep. Sergeant, you’ll take the first watch. Be ready to pack up quickly and move out of here the instant the wind drops.”

  7

  Walker came awake and the first thing that drew his attention was the aching stiffness in all his joints. He was saddlesore, his feet hurt, he felt as if he had arthritis in his knees and charleyhorses in the tendons of his ankles and calves. And he was still cold. Not frozen numb as he had been before, but chattering painful cold.

  He was lying on his back wrapped in two blankets with his sock feet toward the stove. The shack was thick with a steamy moisture that came off the drying hides of the horses and smelled foul.

  Probably there were a lot of things to think about but his mind wasn’t tracking well. He lay on his back and rolled his head slowly from side to side to look around and see how things looked. The inside walls looked flimsy and there was no insulation but the wind wasn’t getting inside; it was probably a split-log cabin, well chinked on the outside. He could hear occasional brittle cracks outside against the steady drumming of the wind-icicles breaking off. Well there probably wasn’t any ranger up in the tower. From what he had seen of forest watchtowers they weren’t anything but six-foot-square platforms surrounded by plate glass. They had probably recalled the ranger when they knew there was a big blow coming.

  The potbelly stove had a flat top with a handle sticking out of it. That was where the ranger did his cooking. One narrow bunk built against a wall-the Major was asleep on it now, his face poking out of the blankets. A sheet-metal enclosure in one corner beyond the stove flue-that would be the plumbing, one of those portable shower-toilet-sink arrangements, probably brought in by helicopter. There would be a water tank outside. They didn’t equip these places for winter use; firewatching was a summer-fall job.

  There was one comfortable reading chair, lightweight but well cushioned. Eddie Burt was in it, fast asleep, his chin down on his chest.

  Half a dozen shelves above the stove with tins of food. A little office-size refrigerator behind Burt’s chair. Probably a diesel generator outside somewhere: there were electric light fixtures hanging from the rafters but the current wasn’t on now. The windows were boarded up from the outside: possibly the ranger had closed up for the winter.

  On the floor just inside the front door lay a broken padlock and that explained how the Major had got in.

  Someone-Baraclough-had run the nylon rope around two of the upright roof-supports and anchored them to windowsill coat hooks to make an enclosure that kept the horses in their area. Their area took up three quarters of the floor space. There was left only the L-shaped sector from the stove to the lavatory to the bunk. Hanratty lay on the floor at the foot of the bunk, snoring with his mouth open. Baraclough sat on the floor with a rifle across his knees, smoking. Mrs. Lansford was sitting with her back against the lavatory wall, arms wrapped around her knees, brooding toward the stove.

  Walker rolled his head, still not getting up, and looked at the horses. The cinches had been loosened but they had been left saddled. There was nothing to feed them. They were docile, asleep on their feet; probably thankful to be in out of the wind, too exhausted to feel their hunger.

  He looked over at Mrs. Lansford and then at Baraclough. Baraclough had turned his head: he was staring at the woman, eyes hooded and erotic and amorally detached-amused, yet reflecting vicious thoughts. That cold stare of Baraclough’s could mesmerize you.

  If Mrs. Lansford was aware of Baraclough’s stare she gave no sign of it. She sat with her forehead against her drawn-up knees. Her hair hung damp and heavy against her cheeks, hiding her face.

  Baraclough flicked a cigarette against the back of his hand; yawned and patted his lips.

  The blizzard made a great battering racket against the cabin. It muffled the occasional stirrings of the horses. Walker kept his eyes slitted and pretended to be asleep; he had Baraclough and the woman in the narrowed range of his vision and now his brain began to work.

  There were hunters and there were killers. Sometimes one man could be both but the qualities were separate and Baraclough was a killer: he took pleasure in it, it gave him something like a sexual relief. Walker had seen it when Baraclough had come out of the ranch house and left the cop dead inside.

  This whole thing had gone sour. Walker’s tongue sucked his sore tooth and he saw the way Baraclough’s hands rested on the rifle in his lap, and it was obvious that when the time came to murder Mrs. Lansford it would be Baraclough who would do it.

  There hadn’t ever been any doubt in his mind that she was going to be killed. It was possible that by now the cops had put some kind of tracer on them and begun to get clues to their identities, but they’d all been pretty careful about that and most likely the cops still didn’t know who they were chasing. That was what would make it possible for them to separate in Utah and melt into the itinerant traffic that flowed endlessly toward California. They had to safeguard their anonymity and now Mrs. Lansford was the only outsider who could identify them. Obviously the Major wasn’t going to turn her loose to talk.

  He probably wasn’t going to turn Hanratty loose either. The spine had melted out of Hanratty a long time ago and if you found the right button and pushed it Hanratty would spill out everything he knew like a computer spilling out reels of programed tape.

  And Walker. Walker wasn’t one of the inner circle either. The three of them, the
Major and Baraclough and “Sergeant” Burt, had their plans all neatly worked out to go someplace in South Africa or Latin America and use their share of the loot to finance the mobilization of a private army so that they could go out into chickenshit little countries and play little war games. That was fine, but it wouldn’t work out that way if anybody remained behind who could finger them for the American law, because there weren’t many countries in the world that wouldn’t cooperate in their extradition when it turned out they were wanted for multiple murders and assorted federal crimes. Hargit and Baraclough were deliberate, methodical, careful; they didn’t take unnecessary risks, they didn’t leave loose ends lying around to be picked up, and at bottom they didn’t trust anybody except themselves.

  They were going to kill him. He had tried to talk himself out of the notion, tried to chalk it up to fear and paranoia and the general sinister portentousness and unreality of the past twenty-four hours; but when he looked at it with cold logic it always came back to the same thing: they weren’t going to leave him behind because he might slip up, he might get caught, he might for any number of reasons decide to spill his guts to the cops, and if there was even a remote chance of that happening they would plug the hole.

  They weren’t going to do it now. Not now and not here in this place. It was still possible the cops would catch up, in which case they would need their hostage alive and they would need all the guns they could muster. All right then, they weren’t going to kill him in the next ten minutes or probably the next ten hours. But sooner or later, before they got out of these mountains, they were going to do it.

  And he didn’t see any point in hanging around obediently waiting for it.

  8

  The woman sat with her knees against her breasts and her head tipped to one side on her folded arms. He realized she was watching him. Looking right at him.

  He let his eyes open a little wider.

  When she knew she had his attention she sat up and began to do something with her hair: pulled it back from her face on both sides and tied it in a horsetail knot at the back of her head. He could see tautness and pain ground into the lines across her eyes and mouth. She kept darting glances at Baraclough and the others: she had the look of a boxed in animal trying to watch five converging wolves at once. It was clear she was near the perilous edge of breaking, keeping herself rigidly under control.

  Baraclough stood up, leaned his rifle against the wall, stretched, and bent forward a little to massage his thighs. His thin face glowed in the chilly air and his cynical eyebrows arched when he looked at the woman.

  Walker watched him as he might have watched a barracuda.

  His gut ached. He looked at the woman again and saw in her bloodless face the knowledge of what was going to happen to her. He suspected she’d known all along-she wasn’t stupid-but she’d probably found some way, just as he had, to keep herself from believing it. Until now. Now the defenses were down and she knew. Looking at Baraclough she knew.

  It was like a hunk of concrete in Walker’s stomach: fear.

  His slitted eyes moved and locked on the woman’s. Her face turned until it was no longer in Baraclough’s view but she held Walker’s eyes with her own and now her expression changed and they had between them that same unspoken shared understanding he had felt in the ranch yard, a sudden impact of communication and contact: and her eyes went wide, full of silent pleading, desperate need, a voiceless cry for help.

  Almost imperceptibly Walker nodded. It was more in the drooping of eyelids than in any movement of his head but he was sure she caught it and understood it; she almost smiled.

  It wasn’t important that she trusted him. What was important-in a way he sensed but did not really comprehend-was that she thought she knew him well enough to trust him. Something he had said, something he had done, something in the way he had looked at her: he had revealed enough of himself to give her that idea. And if he let her down now it wouldn’t just spoil her picture of him, it would spoil his own picture of himself. He didn’t have much self-respect left to his name but what was left he cherished.

  So he knew he was going to try.

  9

  He sat up without hurry. Yawned, scratched his face. Tugged his boots on, got to his feet as if still groggy and extended his arms; stretching, he heard the crackling of his own musculature.

  He felt his face color under Baraclough’s stare but he managed a short meaningless smile, shrugged for no particular reason except that it seemed a disarming sort of thing to do, and turned to the shelves on the wall to run his eyes over the canned-food labels. He still had the heavy coat on; he thrust his hand under it, down the sleeve of his leather flight jacket, and extracted a cigarette from the bicep pocket. He lit the cigarette, inhaled, choked, recovered, took down a can of stew and set it on the stove. During all this he never once looked at the woman.

  Burt and Hanratty snored away. The Major was deeply asleep as well: the trek had been hardest, most exhausting, for him.

  Baraclough must have had a few hours’ sleep and then relieved Burt on watch. He looked a little droopy but not likely to fall asleep.

  Power of suggestion, Walker thought: he went into the sheet-metal lavatory and urinated into the john. The cubicle was no bigger than an airliner’s rest room.

  He flushed the toilet but the noise was almost obscured by the steady roar of the blizzard against the log walls.

  He stepped out of the cubicle zipping up his trousers and went back to the stove to test the temperature of the can of stew; left the can on the stove and sat down against the wall, midway between the stove and the woman. Baraclough sat beyond the woman, smoking; he had left the rifle leaning against the wall.

  For a moment Walker thought it wasn’t going to work. But then Baraclough stood up, caught Walker’s eye, nodded toward the girl as if to say “Watch her,” and went into the lavatory. Baraclough was the kind of man to whom superficial manners were important: he probably killed politely. Walker had counted on that: Baraclough closed the door.

  The moment the lavatory door was shut Walker scooped up his hat and mittens and crossed the room. Past the woman, moving swiftly and without sound. He picked up the rifle Baraclough had left tilted against the wall, and turned to sweep the rest of the room with a wary inspection.

  Nobody woke up.

  The woman was on her feet without a word, coming after him.

  He had one mitten on. He put the other one in his coat pocket to keep his hand free on the rifle. Ducked under the nylon rope and walked between the horses to the front of the shed.

  The woman’s face was upturned, alive, expectant. He pointed to the horse nearest the door and when the woman reached for its reins Walker made a signal with a jerk of his head to indicate that she should go first. With his mittened left hand he reached out and gathered up the trailing reins of the blue roan. Then he backed up against the front door and collected the lead-rope of one of the packhorses and wrapped that in his left hand along with the blue’s reins. Finally he nodded to the woman, braced the rifle across the crook of his elbow and slid the wooden crossbar back out of its slot. And shoved the door open with his boot.

  The wind slammed in, banged the door back against the outside wall; the candles guttered out and he felt the woman go by, urging her horse through the doorway. The horse didn’t want to go out into that. Walker whacked it with the rifle-whacked where he thought the horse was, and seemed to hit it because it jumped and went rushing past him, almost knocking him over.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Jesus…”

  “ What’s going on?”

  The lavatory door slammed open with a tinny clank. If there were other sounds they were swallowed in the rock-crushing growl of wind.

  Walker was through the door, outside, head bowed against the blast. Pulling the blue’s reins and the packhorse.

  But something got stuck. He couldn’t see but it had to be that the two horses had wedged together in the narrow door. One of
them screamed, a high whickering neigh; he felt the leather reins slide out through his mitten. Trying to grab for them with his right hand he dropped the rifle. And missed the reins.

  Now all he had was the packhorse’s lead-rope and somebody inside the cabin started shooting.

  Shooting at the door because they thought they were being invaded.

  Walker dropped flat on his belly and rolled out of the line of fire.

  He’d lost the rifle and he’d lost both horses. What he rolled into was a deep bank of loose snow that the wind had piled against the side of the shed. The gale had packed it semi-firm but the flakes were quite dry and didn’t adhere to one another, so that his body penetrated the drift and a small avalanche tumbled down over him. A sense of burial, of drowning, of being sucked under: impossible to get his breath.

  He swam out of it and crawled on his hands and knees, shaking himself like a wet dog. His knuckles banged into something solid and when he felt for it he found the corner of the cabin: he crawled around into the lee of it and got to his feet.

  Somebody fired two or three more gunshots and he heard a fellow bellow-the Major? — and the shooting stopped.

  It occurred to him he could go back inside. They hadn’t seen anything; they’d never know he had tried to get away. But he had let the woman go and they would kill him for that.

  Then he felt a thud and heard the slam as if from a far distance, and knew he no longer had the choice of going back inside: they had shut the door and now they would be lighting candles, counting heads.

  He was behind the cabin; the woman had gone in the opposite direction. He had to find her. He had no horse, no blanket, no gun, no food. She had all those things except a gun.

  He reached the corner and stepped into the shrieking wind. There was a little light, it was gray rather than black, but the grayness was opaque. He had to feel his way forward along the side of the cabin and when he reached the front corner he hesitated, half expecting the front door to slam open and the others to come charging out with guns. He stood paralyzed by that fear until the realization crept into him that they weren’t going to come out after him: they couldn’t see any better than he could out here.