Apache Country

by Frederick H. Christian

  “I know,” Easton said. “In fact, I’m kind of banking on it.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  If anyone had asked him, FBI Special Agent Edward Hatch, senior agent in charge of the FBI office in Albuquerque, would have told them he was pissed off, frustrated anger putting two deep lines between his eyebrows.

  “Another mess like this and Washington is going to give us a very hard time,” he said to his deputy, George Smith.

  “Hell, Ed, it wasn’t our fault!” Smith protested. “The both of us warned Reardon, and he still screwed up.”

  “I don’t blame Reardon. I blame that pushy asshole McKittrick down in Riverside,” Hatch said. “I never did like that guy.”

  “Hell, Ed,” his partner smiled. “You have to get on line to dislike Olin KcKittrick.”

  “I hate to admit it, but it may be we owe him, at that,” Hatch said. “If it hadn’t been for him we probably never would have gone up there and talked to the Ironheel woman.”

  “You believed her, then?” Smith said.

  Ed Hatch looked out of the window, the frown still in place. Fiercely honest, a man who truly hated crime and criminals, he knew all too well ‘believe’ was a word that came in a variety of different strengths. And what Joanna Ironheel had told them took a lot of believing. Even so ...

  “Damned if I can see how not to,” he said reluctantly.

  The preceding day, while their team of FBI agents diligently scoured the outlying settlements of the reservation for Ironheel and Easton, Hatch and Smith had spent several hours questioning – “comprehensive interrogation” in Bureauspeak – Joanna Ironheel. At first she had refused to talk to them at all.

  “You’d better talk to us, Doctor Ironheel,” Hatch told her. “Or there may be consequences.”

  “Are you threatening me, Agent Hatch?”

  He smiled. “I’m offering you a little friendly advice,” he said. “If you refuse to tell us everything you know, we would have to assume you are hiding something.”

  “You won’t believe me,” she replied angrily. “I know you won’t. You people aren’t interested in the truth.”

  “How can we respond to that meaningfully when you won’t tell us what you believe the truth to be?” Smith asked her.

  “This is not a matter of what I believe,” she said with great dignity. “Truth is truth. Da’adiihí.”

  “Spare me the homilies, Doctor,” Hatch said, making it weary. “The truth is that your brother killed an old man and a young boy, took an officer of the law hostage, and now he’s killed one of his own people. We’ve got to stop him before he harms anyone else.”

  She turned away, staring at the timber-dark hills across the valley. She was an attractive woman, Hatch thought, and wondered why she was unmarried. Maybe she was caught in the cleft stick of the classic racial dilemma, too aware of the difficulties of marrying one of her own race, too Apache to marry anyone else.

  “We’re trying to save a life here, Doctor Ironheel,” Hatch said. “We need your help to persuade your brother to bring in the man he’s holding hostage.”

  To his surprise, Joanna Ironheel whirled around, eyes blazing with anger.

  “David Easton is not a hostage!” she snapped. “He is out there trying to prove my brother’s innocence!”

  “You really believe that?” Hatch said.

  “Yes, I do!” she said. “Why won’t you?”

  Hatch looked at Smith, giving him an eye signal. Both of them were pragmatists. In their line of business you did whatever you had to do, used whatever came your way, without shame, without compunction. Grief was a key. Sadness was a handle. Loyalty was a word on a plastic card. They could use Joanna Ironheel’s anger to find out what they wanted to know. They had worked together a long time. Each knew every move the other would make.

  “Okay, let’s say for a moment we believe you,” Hatch said. “Easton is trying to prove your brother is innocent. Tell us the rest of it.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t trust you.”

  “Ma’am?”

  Hatch’s wounded look was the result of much practice. It didn’t work on Joanna Ironheel.

  “They sent you up here, didn’t they? Apodaca and McKittrick, those crooks. They told you to question me. Go on, talk to her. She has to know where they are. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”

  “The Bureau works with the civil authorities, Doctor Ironheel,” Smith said. “Not for them.”

  “Of course,” she said hotly. “Not for them. Just hand in glove with them.”

  “Doctor, if you have information on this matter which you wish to remain confidential we can—”

  Joanna Ironheel shook her head again. “My brother was right. He told me not to trust any of you.”

  “Why do you think he said that, ma’am?” Smith asked softly.

  “Because you’re all …” She bit off the end of the sentence, but the anger won. “You’re all in it together.”

  “In what?”

  “All of it. The kidnappings, the young men, the whole filthy business. My brother told me all about it.”

  Hatch glanced at Smith. This was something new.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, you’ve lost us,” Hatch said. “Maybe if you explained ... What’s this about kidnappings?”

  “You people don’t know anything,” she said impatiently. “Not the murders, not my brother’s escape, nothing at all. Can’t you understand? David Easton is not a hostage. He knows my brother didn’t kill anyone.”

  “How does he know that, ma’am?” Hatch asked gently.

  “Because James told him who really killed them.”

  “And who was that?”

  Joanna Ironheel looked at them for a long moment. They waited tensely.

  “You have to help them,” she said. “You must.”

  “Then you’re going to have to tell us more than you’re telling us at the moment, Doctor Ironheel,” Hatch said. “We can’t do anything until you do.”

  She nodded, as if making up her mind. “They’re trying to kill them.”

  Hatch glanced at his partner again. “Who’s trying to kill whom, ma’am?” he said.

  She shook her head impatiently. “The men who are behind all this.”

  “Which men would that be?” Smith asked.

  They saw her hesitate, then decide. “Sheriff Apodaca. Olin McKittrick. And a man named Gerzen, a German who lives in El Paso,” she said.

  Hatch managed to keep his face expressionless. He looked at Smith, who raised a quizzical eyebrow to indicate he knew what Hatch was thinking. Joanna Ironheel had just rung a very large bell. Several months earlier, in the face of mounting evidence of the existence of a chain of sophisticated hebephile rings throughout Arizona and New Mexico, the Southwestern Regional Director of the FBI had created a hand-picked task force to conduct a top secret undercover investigation codenamed Blue Boy.

  Attention was presently focused upon the activities of a group of men in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez whose names had recurred frequently in the task force’s investigations into the disappearance of young men, many of them Mexican. One of the recurring names had been that of an El Pasoan named Carl Gerzen, but getting anyone to talk about him or offer hard evidence against him, or indeed any of the other men involved, was like trying to nail mercury to a wall.

  Which was why, with every man at his disposal fully occupied with the ramifications of Blue Boy, Hatch had been less than enthusiastic when Baca County D.A. Olin McKittrick contacted him to submit a request – in effect an order – for a comprehensive all-points search on the Mescalero Apache reservation for a fugitive Apache holding hostage a law officer. Not inquired if it was possible, you understand, not checked to see whether he could handle it. The FBI did not take kindly to being pushed around by small-town law-enforcement.

  “You know how big that damned Reservation is?” he had protested. “You know how many people live on it?”

  “Twenty seven miles long, thir
ty six miles wide. And at last count there were something like three and a half thousand enrolled members of the Mescalero tribe up there. Anything else you’d like to know?” McKittrick had snapped back.

  “Come on, Olin, you know damn well what I’m talking about,” Hatch protested. “There are settlements all over those damn mountains. Three Rivers, Elk Silver, Carrizo, Whitetail, Mud Canyon. We could be up there for a week. Always supposing we can get any sort of co-operation at all from the Tribal President.”

  “He has to do what you say, doesn’t he?”

  “Theoretically,” Hatch said drily. “But that’s as far as it goes. And you can bet your ass the last thing he’s going to do is welcome us in with open arms. If we turn the reservation upside down and come up empty, the whole thing will turn into public relations catastrophe. I’m serious, I don’t think the Mescaleros will co-operate, and absent their co-operation I can’t see where we can hope to achieve anything meaningful.”

  “I appreciate your concerns, Ed,” McKittrick replied smoothly. “But let me just remind you we’re dealing with a hostage situation here. Not to mention three homicides. I’m looking for a result. Even the powers that be, who don’t usually don’t give a shit about anything that happens more than ten miles south of Santa Fe, are watching this very closely. The Bureau’s image is not my problem.”

  “I’ll talk to Dick Reardon,” Hatch said reluctantly. “But I can’t see him sanctioning it.”

  Richard Reardon was the FBI regional director in Denver. Someone had once described him as an idea whose time would never come. There were plenty of people who thought that was too fulsome a compliment. Reardon was renowned throughout the Bureau for giving new dimension to the art of playing safe.

  “Wrong,” McKittrick said. “I’ve already cleared your participation with him. Reardon says you’re oaky to put all the facilities of your office at our disposal immediately and draft in any extra manpower you need.”

  “You won’t mind if I just confirm that?”

  “Go ahead,” McKittrick said, ignoring the sarcasm. “But get back to me, okay? And the sooner the better.”

  In spite of Hatch’s protests, Reardon had overruled him, and a full-scale search of the Mescalero Reservation had been mounted, with exactly the dire results Hatch had predicted. From the moment the heavily-armed FBI agents appeared at the Agency’s administration building until the moment they left, the ambient hostility of the Apache was thick enough to cut with a knife. Agents were jostled and spat on; jeers and insults followed them as they went doggedly about their work. Cars parked at the Agency were defaced with paint stripper or daubed with white paint slogans: FASCIST BASTARDS INCORPORATED was one. FEDERAL BUREAU OF IDIOTS was another.

  Each of the several ten-strong team of agents involved left Mescalero complaining bitterly about having been assigned to such unpleasant and unrewarding duty, every one secretly relieved to get off the Reservation before the situation deteriorated even further. On his return to Albuquerque, Ed Hatch reported to his regional director, not without some satisfaction, that not only had the whole undertaking been the PR disaster he had predicted, but it had also been a waste of time. What he did not share with Reardon was the information Joanna Ironheel had given them, or the new avenues of investigation it had opened up. Which put him on something of a knife-edge. If he was right, Reardon would be up shit creek and he, Hatch, would be a star.

  But if he was wrong …

  “No way could she have been making it up,” he said to his partner, letting it hang there. “Is there?”

  Smith shrugged by way of reply.

  “It fits real tight,” Hatch reasoned.

  “Maybe too tight,” Smith said. “And hell’s own job to prove.”

  “I know that,” Hatch replied.

  “Okay,” Smith said. “We assume Ironheel is innocent and we make Joe Apodaca our prime suspect. God, I can’t believe I just said that, it sounds so weird.”

  “Weird is right,” Hatch said sourly. “Maybe we ought to just hand the whole thing over to Internal Affairs, keep our noses clean.”

  “We do a lot of that,” Smith observed gently.

  “Yeah,” Hatch said. “Too much.”

  Smith got the message, nodded. “So – where do we start?”

  “I want to do some serious digging into Apodaca’s background. McKittrick’s, too. Look for a connection between them and Gerzen. The whole shmeer, George. Womb to tomb.”

  “You got it,” Smith said.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  “You want to tell me just what the hell is going on inside that devious brain of yours?” Cochrane said.

  “Answer me this first,” Easton said. “You know Ed Hatch, runs the FBI bureau in Albuquerque?”

  “Sure,” Cochrane said. “Good man. He was in charge of the team that searched the Mescalero Reservation. What about him?”

  “How tight is he with McKittrick?”

  Tom shook his head. “Not. In fact, the opposite. They banged heads hard over this business of Apodaca and McKittrick insisting on search and interrogations at the Reservation. Hatch wouldn’t buy it, said it was a waste of agency time and resources, and that it would antagonize the Tribal Council, not to mention a lot of very bad PR. So McKittrick went over his head and twisted the regional director’s arm and Hatch had to do it anyway. I imagine he’s still seriously pissed off. Especially because it turned out just like he’d said it would.”

  “Okay, Tom. What I want you to do is tell Hatch we want to turn ourselves in, we’ll only deal with him.”

  “You crazy?”

  “Maybe. Will you do it?”

  “Sure. And he’ll say, ‘Why would they want to do that?’ Ed Hatch is a decent cop, Dave, but he’s still a Feeb. And you know the Feebs. They’re not exactly what you’d call simpatico.”

  “I know,” Easton said. “But do it anyway. Tell him everything, Tom. The whole story -– Gerzen, Boy’s Ranch, all of it.”

  “Hatch doesn’t shoot from the hip,” Cochrane said. “He won’t move without evidence.”

  “That’s why I want you to call him, Tom,” Easton said. “Maybe he doesn’t have a lot of imagination, but I’ve heard he’s straight as a die. More important, he knows you are. Hand over the DVD, the phone records, the tire casts, whatever you can get on Gerzen. He’ll believe you. Besides, what’s he got to lose? If we’re telling the truth, he breaks up a sex ring and gets the people who did all the killings. If not, he gets us. Either way, he’s a hero.”

  Cochrane nodded slowly, thinking it through. He took the battered cigarette pack out of his pocket and opened it, tapping it with a forefinger.

  “So I call Hatch and he listens,” he said. “What happens then?”

  “Get him to send a full-strength FBI team to bring us in. And this is important, Tom – it’s got to be at precisely four o’clock tomorrow afternoon. Radio silence, absolute secrecy. Ironheel and I will be waiting for them at the Bureau of Land Management facility at Mescalero Sands.”

  Forty miles east of Riverside, just below the caprock bordering the Llano Estacado, bare dunes that turned red as blood in the evening sun rose sixty feet above the plains, moved about a foot each year by the prevailing southwest winds. Invisible from the highway and accessed only by a gravel road, Mescalero Sands was wild and empty and – central to Easton’s plan – uninhabited.

  Cochrane frowned. “I thought you said Ironheel was up on the Reservation? How the hell is he going to get from there to Mescalero Sands?”

  “How the hell do you think, Tom?” Easton said. “You’re going to drive up to Mayhill, take the Cherry Road north as far as Whitetail Canyon. He’ll be waiting there for you.”

  “That’s all, is it? And when does all this happen?”

  “Tomorrow. Aim to get there around noon, bring him down the hill. It’s that simple.”

  “Simple,” Cochrane said, leaning even more heavily on the irony. “Why can’t you just surrender to the Feebs up there in the m
ountains?”

  Easton shook his head. “Just trust me on this, Tom,” he said. “It’s got to be the Sands.”

  “I must be crazy,” Cochrane said. “But all right, I’ll do it. Just tell me one thing: what do I do if I hit a roadblock?”

  “They’re not going to search an SO vehicle, Tom,” Easton said. “You’re in your own jurisdiction. You’ve got as much right to be there as they do.”

  “Mescalero Sands,” Cochrane said, reflectively. “That’s Apache country out there. If Apodaca or McKittrick got wind of this, you guys’d have no place to hide.”

  “Then we’ve just got to hope Hatch goes for it,” Easton told him, hating to dissimulate but knowing he had to.

  “You’re still taking a hell of a chance. Suppose Hatch says no? Suppose he passes the word to McKittrick? Suppose he sends in a State Police SWAT team? Once you set it in motion this thing could go any damn whichaway.”

  “‘Even Apache will only run so far’,” Easton said.

  Cochrane frowned. “Huh?”

  “Something Ironheel told me. That there’s a point where you have to say, I’m through running.”

  “And this is it?”

  “This is it,” Easton said.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  “There’s a problem, Joe,” McKittrick said. His voice sounded accusing, angry, and apprehensive all at the same time. “And it’s major. Can you talk?”

  “Go ahead,” Apodaca said.

  “Easton was here. In Riverside.”

  Apodaca stifled a curse. “God damn, I knew it,” he said angrily. “And I’ll bet a year’s pay Ellen Casey had something to do with getting him here.”

  “Damn right she did,” McKittrick gritted.

  “Do we know where he went? Who he talked to?”

  “Indeed we do,” McKittrick said, a vicious snap in his voice now. “He talked to your wife, Joe. Your goddamn lush of a wife. He opened her up like she was fitted with a zipper. While you were drinking coffee with Ellen Casey and discussing the goddamn funeral.”

  Apodaca stared at the wall, stunned.

  “And that’s not all,” McKittrick went on inexorably. “She told him everything.”