Relentless

by Brian Garfield

  Vickers had gone over to the rocks and Watchman backed toward him slowly, paying the rope out. It was a fifty-foot lasso and he went back into the rocks with the end of it. “Duck down behind that rock now,” he said, and Vickers finally got the idea and took cover.

  Watchman pulled the rope around back of a boulder and kept pulling until he heard the door latch begin to scrape in its slotted guides. It looked as if they hadn’t booby-trapped it after all, but he didn’t regret taking the time to be sure… And then the rope met resistance, he gave it a brief final tug, and a blast of explosives blew the cabin door out.

  6

  Just inside the doorway the explosion had dug a little crater in the dirt floor. Vickers picked up a small piece of metal and dropped it quickly because it was still hot. “Shrapnel. It was a fragmentation grenade.”

  Watchman nodded. He fingered the charred end of the dangling piece of wire by the door frame. They had wired the grenade to the post and hooked the tripwire around the latch, to pull the pin when the door was opened.

  “Now that raises an interesting question,” Watchman said.

  “Such as?”

  “Just how many more of these handy little goodies do you suppose they’re carrying?”

  7

  He felt the potbelly stove-still warm. They hadn’t been gone very long.

  He made a quick search. The explosion had littered the front of the room with wooden debris and it had knocked a few shrapnel holes in the walls. But the fugitives didn’t seem to have left anything behind except for a few discarded empty tin cans. Well, they’d had an extra horse-the one Walker had left behind; they had plenty of space to pack everything they wanted.

  He went back to the jagged-edged doorway and stepped across the remains of the door. Vickers was coming out behind him and Buck Stevens brought up the horses. Watchman could see vaguely the shapes of lower summits down the north slope.

  Vickers said, “They can’t have got far. Look at those tracks. What would you say, half an hour ahead of us?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Let’s go, then.”

  “Take it easy a minute,” Watchman said.

  “What for? Four men, seven horses-they can’t travel in this snow without leaving tracks. We’ve got them now.”

  “Or maybe they’ve got us.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “They may have heard the racket up here. They know we’re close behind them. They can’t count on wiping all of us out with one grenade so they’ve got to figure they’ve still got some of us on their trail. And like you said, they know they can’t hide their tracks.”

  “So?”

  “So put yourself in their shoes. They’re going to do two things. First they’re going to set themselves up in a place where they get a good long view down their own backtrail so they can count us on their fingers when we come in sight. Then when they know how many we are they’ll go on down the mountain a little way, lay some nice tracks for us to follow, and they’ll double back around their own tracks and set up a fine little crossfire for us to walk into.”

  A crimson flush suffused Vickers’ cheeks. He got busy lighting a cigarette.

  Buck Stevens said in his matter-of-fact voice, “How do you want to work it, Sam?”

  “No point in playing the game by their rules. I think we’ll cut over east a little way. Go down behind that ridge line and ride north.”

  “You mean try to get around in front of them.”

  “It’s worth a try,” Watchman said, squinting across the mountains.

  Vickers said, “You’re talking as if you can anticipate which way they’re going. It’s all very well for us to go on ahead of them and try to ambush them, but what if they don’t walk into it? What if they go another way entirely?”

  “Then we’ll just have to send them an invitation, won’t we?” Watchman walked past him and mounted his horse. “Of course you can go right on after them if you want. I don’t much recommend it but you can please yourself.” He nodded to Buck Stevens and led the way down off the summit, splitting wide away from the dimpled tracks the fugitives had left in the snow.

  Behind them Vickers climbed onto his horse and gigged it nervously. When Watchman looked back Vickers was coming right along after him. Watchman smiled a little and turned to face front.

  CHAPTER 8

  1

  The napalm burn on Baraclough’s wrist was supposed to be dead scar flesh but it had a way of itching sometimes. He scratched it viciously, enjoying the pain.

  Eddie Burt said, “I don’t think they’re coming.”

  “They’re not stupid,” Major Hargit conceded. They’d seen three men start down off the skyline by the cabin. Three men had left the bonfire by those two trucks down on the flats night before last, and if it could be assumed these were the same three men then none of them had been hurt by the booby-trap grenade in the cabin. If they were smart enough to avoid that one they were pretty good.

  But it had been a good twenty minutes since the three horsemen had disappeared over the summit half a mile above, and they should have showed up long before now if they were following the tracks.

  Hanratty took it badly. He dragged his gloved palm down across his face with an abrasive rasp of stubble and began to shake. He had shaken like that an hour ago, coming down into this timbered cut, when the Major had halted the group and said, “The pack only chases a prey that runs. We’ll turn and face them.”

  Now Baraclough said, “I guess they want to flank us.”

  Eddie Burt grinned. “They ain’t bad for country cops.”

  Major Hargit nodded. “They’re not bad, Sergeant, but they’re no A-team. Their friends will be taking the three of them down off this mountain in canvas bags. All right, gentlemen, let’s go find them.”

  2

  The wind had just about died but it was still quite cold and Baraclough had stripped down to his windbreaker because he took a kind of pleasure from the discomfort. They followed the Major along a steep hillside, keeping under the pines where the snow hadn’t drifted very deep. The Major checked his compass at intervals and finally turned his horse straight up the northeast face of the mountain and they clung to their saddles, leaning far forward to balance the horses. Hoofs scrabbled in the loose footing and the horses lunged and heaved their way toward the top.

  At the military crest they tied the horses to trees and crawled to the top. Baraclough waited for the Major to hand him the field glasses. The Major completed a sweep and handed them over. Baraclough lifted them to his eyes and said, “See anything?”

  “No. Your try.”

  But Baraclough saw nothing either.

  Hanratty said, “Jesus, let’s don’t just lie here. I’m fixing to freeze my ass off.”

  “We’ll wait,” the Major said.

  3

  Half an hour drifted by. Baraclough was mildly offended by the rank smell of his own wet clothes. The temperature had risen considerably since dawn; the wind seemed cold but everything was melting around him. Snowflakes drifted lazily through the air but they were thin enough to cause no problem of visibility; he could see one peak, east along the range, that must have been eight or ten miles away. The sky beyond it was dark and wild where the storm had gone, but overhead now little salmon streaks of color showed through where the clouds were thinning and beginning to break up. Baraclough suspected they’d have sunshine before the end of the day.

  A brittle thin sheet of ice clung to the shadowed side of a rock near Baraclough’s shoulder. It cracked like a rifle shot and Hanratty almost jumped out of his skin.

  “Oh Jesus. I can’t stand any more of this cocksucking waiting. My balls are froze.” Hanratty’s voice sounded unhinged. When Baraclough looked over his shoulder he saw Hanratty starting to get up.

  He rolled over, crashed into Hanratty’s knees, knocked Hanratty down.

  Hanratty uttered a little cry. Eddie Burt said, “You God damned fool, Jack. Stay off the sky
line.”

  Baraclough flicked a glance toward the Major and the Major nodded slowly; the Major looked at Hanratty and said with icy contempt, “It was my mistake to trust a civilian. I won’t make it again.”

  Hanratty’s eyes were pouched. He looked at the Major and he looked at Baraclough and his head skewed back; he understood the unspoken order that the Major had issued to Baraclough.

  Pulsebeat drummed in Baraclough’s temples. His scalp contracted; he felt the familiar anticipatory knot in his groin.

  Hanratty turned to stare at the Major. “Look, I didn’t mean-”

  Baraclough caught him from behind, clamped a hand around his face. Jerked Hanratty’s head back and chopped his free hand across Hanratty’s throat. The bladed chop to the larynx snapped Hanratty’s hyoid and when Baraclough let him drop to the ground Hanratty was dead.

  Baraclough’s breathing was just a little unsteady; his eyes grew heavy and he rolled over in the snow and reached for the field glasses.

  4

  After half an hour more the Major stirred. “They’re doing a good job of keeping out of sight.”

  “They’ve got to be somewhere in this district.”

  “Granted. But we’re not locating them this way. I think we’ll move to that peak.” The Major pointed with his finger. The peak was about a mile due east of them, a little lower than the one on which they lay.

  Eddie Burt said, “What about Jack? Leave him here?”

  “No. We’ll throw him across his horse and bring him along. I think he’ll be useful.”

  5

  Shards of sunlight began to stream through apertures in the clouds. On the uphill slope little trickles ran down past them, cutting through the snow. There was a smell of pine resin and the woods echoed with the tiny cracklings of breaking ice.

  When they stopped and dismounted Baraclough made a methodical inspection of the money sacks to make sure they had not worked loose of their packsaddle lashings. “Walker did a good job tying these down.”

  Eddie Burt said, “I wonder if he’s still alive.”

  “Not a chance,” Baraclough said.

  They wormed to the top and made a slow circuit of the perimeter on their bellies, scouting the surrounding slopes a sector at a time with the Zeiss glasses the Major had liberated from the ranch house forty hours ago.

  Baraclough took his turn and let the lenses ride slowly up and down, covering the district in a checkerboard sweep. Abruptly the binoculars steadied in his grip and he fixed the point in his vision and handed the glasses to the Major. “That little patch of open snow between the pine groves. Eleven o’clock-down a little lower now. Got it?”

  “Yes. It could be their tracks. You’ve got good eyes, Steve-I missed that.”

  Baraclough took pride in the Major’s compliment: he smiled a little.

  Burt said, “Okay, what do we do?”

  The Major looked at Baraclough. “How many grenades have we got?”

  “Two.”

  “That should be enough. We’re going to set up an ambush a fly couldn’t get through.”

  They went back down toward the horses. Burt said, “What do we use him for?” He meant Hanratty’s corpse, belly-down across the saddle.

  “Bait,” the Major said, and mounted his horse.

  Baraclough smiled.

  6

  At about three o’clock the sun came out. Baraclough had been squinting across the snow for hours and the added brightness was painful against his grainy eyes.

  Up ahead the Major made a turn to the left and threaded the pines downhill. In places the storm had left deep drifts of feathery-loose snow in timber shadows where the day had not begun to melt it; the horses floundered through belly-deep, plunging, splashing up clouds of white powder.

  “This will do.” The Major dismounted just inside the edge of the forest

  The trees ended at the lip of a loose shale rockslide that covered a ten-or fifteen-acre slope, very steep, all the way to the creek at the bottom. The forest enclosed the rockslide on three sides and there was a thick line of aspens and sycamores along the opposite bank of the creek. Beyond that the ground flattened out, a scrub-covered plateau that stretched south at least half a mile to the foot of another pine-timbered mountain.

  In the past two hours they had spotted tracks twice, both times to the east of them, both times heading north. Once they had established that much the Major had made up his mind and they had pushed directly north with all the speed they could get out of the horses, staying within the trees on west-facing slopes with a high ridge or two between them and the pursuit. It was the Major’s aim to get at least a mile ahead of the cops and they had probably achieved that margin by now because the cops would be doing a good deal of backing and filling to scout side-canyons and discover ambushes.

  It was a fair bet the cops would come down that slope beyond the brushy flat, sometime within the next half hour, and when they got that far they would have a clear view of this shale rockslide. That was what the Major wanted-a spot in plain sight.

  “Roll him down,” the Major said.

  Eddie Burt helped Baraclough unstrap Hanratty’s corpse and lift it off the horse. They carried it to the lip of the shale slide and laid Hanratty down between the trees. Hanratty’s joints had stiffened up and his face had swollen and turned a very deep crimson color in post-mortem lividity because his head had been hanging down by the stirrup.

  The Major was using his glasses and when he was done he passed them to Baraclough and Baraclough did a confirming sweep. “Nothing. But they’ll be along.”

  “Most likely,” the Major agreed, and said again, “Roll him down.”

  Baraclough got down on his knees behind Hanratty, as if the corpse were a barricade from which he intended to shoot. He hooked his hands under a shoulder and a buttock and heaved.

  Hanratty was butt-heavy, hard to roll over, but Baraclough got the body over the lip of the slide and then it was rolling down the snow-carpeted rock like a chunky log. It made some noise, not much, and started a few loose bits of shale tumbling. The disturbance threw a cloud of snow into the air and the corpse half rolled, half slid down the mountainside, picking up a coating of white like a rolling snowball. Little avalanches of rock and snow were triggered by Hanratty’s violent passage and the corpse left a deep rumpled groove in its wake, a gouged-out trench that a half-blind observer couldn’t miss from across the valley.

  The shale slide was so steep that there was no chance Hanratty would stop rolling and sliding before he hit bottom. He went right into the creek, clattering some rocks together, breaking up a thin rime of ice. The water was accustomed to avalanche debris; it made a path around the corpse and continued to flow.

  Baraclough went back to his horse and they got mounted. The Major turned and they stayed inside the trees, making a circuit around the edge of the rockslide, keeping to cover all the way down to the creek. Horseshoes clattered on the rocks when they crossed the creek; they turned in the aspens and rode upstream.

  The Major wanted to set it up himself. Baraclough gave him the grenade. He stayed on his horse and watched the Major walk over to the bank of the stream beside Hanratty and squat down on his heels.

  The long tumble had ripped Hanratty’s clothes and pulped his face pretty badly. The Major dragged the corpse closer to the bank and positioned the dead arms and legs with the body half in the water, half on the bank, as if Hanratty had fallen that way naturally. Face down: that was important, because when the cops found him they would want to know what he looked like. If you left him face up they might not disturb the body right away.

  The Major took his time bracing the grenade under the dead man’s breastplate, making certain the grenade was lodged firmly between corpse and rock. Then he pulled the pin from the grenade gingerly, using both hands, and removed his hands slowly and carefully. Now the corpse’s weight held the grenade’s handle down against its spring pressure and when the corpse was moved the handle would fly off and the g
renade would explode.

  The Major motioned to Baraclough and Burt to dismount. “We’ve got two spare horses now.” Walker’s and Hanratty’s. “Let’s turn them loose-it’ll give our friends something else to worry about.”

  Horses were gregarious animals and it was not all that easy to persuade the two beasts to go away by themselves but after Baraclough had led them a hundred yards upstream and whipped them harshly across the flanks with his rifle butt they trotted away snorting and kept going out onto the scrub flats, heading south. He had removed the bridle bits and reins to keep them from snagging and he knew that if the horses weren’t caught soon they would find their way back over the mountains to the ranch they had come from. That would help confuse the pursuit, but the important thing right now was that the three cops up there were likely to come in sight of this plateau at any moment now and they would spot the two horses right away. That was what the Major wanted.

  Baraclough walked back to the creek and the Major said, “We’ll post ourselves in the pines. Up there. When they come along they’ll take their time and take pains not to expose themselves, but sooner or later they’ll have a look at Hanratty. I want to be up there with a bead on them. If the grenade doesn’t take them out we’ll do it with rifles. All set? Let’s go, then.”

  Baraclough let Burt go ahead of him, leading the pack animals. He stayed behind a few moments to look it over and it looked good. A lot of tracks coming in and out-that would whet the cops’ interest and make them nervous. Hanratty’s corpse, like an open honey jar, with the armed grenade under the breastbone. The creek exposed fully to enfilading fire from the pines above, along the edge of the rockslide. It was a fine ambush: but then the Major always set up fine ambushes. That was why the three of them were still alive after four tours of combat duty.