Kendrick said, “Wait a minute, you can’t—”
“Can it, Dwight,” Rand said, and the tone of his voice told Kendrick all he needed to know. Kendrick sagged but his eyes lay against Rand with an incredible force of hatred.
Victorio said, “I’d like to ask him some more questions.”
“I don’t need his answers,” Watchman said. “He’s sewed up. Come on, Tom. We’ve still got to catch Joe Threepersons before somebody gets killed.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
THEY WENT up to Rand’s ranch in two cars, the Bentley and Victorio’s Volkswagen; Watchman didn’t want Stevens’ cruiser to be seen there.
They parked in the driveway. Rand got out and looked past the house into the trees. In his consternation he turned a full circle, searching; the pressure of possibilities sucked sweat onto his forehead. He stood there for a moment like a floor lamp and then abruptly said, “Let’s go inside.”
Watchman trailed Stevens and Victorio inside after him. Rand closed the door and led the way into the back room. It was getting gloomy outside; the storm clouds were moving in—they’d just driven through it a few miles back. Rand reached for the desk lamp but then withdrew his hand from the switch and went to the drapes; he drew them shut and only then turned on the lights.
“All right. I’m supposed to be bait.”
“You,” Watchman said, “or somebody to double for you.”
“You mean somebody to play the part of the duck in Threepersons’ shooting gallery.”
“Yeah. He’ll come here with that magnum rifle. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, maybe next week. But he’ll be here.”
“And I’m supposed to wait around and get shot so you can arrest him afterward. That’s a hell of a brand of law enforcement you boys practice. I wouldn’t—”
“Nobody’s asking you to be the bait. Just give us the trap, we’ll provide the bait. Let us use some of your clothes.”
Rand’s square fingers were at war.
Watchman said, “Just keep away from windows. Now I could use one of those tailored jackets of yours and a pair of your sunglasses.”
Buck Stevens murmured, “You’d never pass, Sam. I’m about his build, better let me do it.”
Tom Victorio chewed his lip; Rand stared at Stevens and then withered a little, as if the reality of it were slowly reaching him.
“Sam, you know it’s got to be me,” Stevens said. “I won’t be a sitting duck for him. I’ll show myself but I’ll keep moving. It’s the only way to do it.”
The silence was such that Watchman heard Rand’s lips pull apart with a sticky gumming sound.
Watchman gave him a reluctant nod. “All right. Better bring the artillery from the car, and let’s get both cars out of sight.” He handed the Volvo keys to Stevens and turned to Rand. “We’ve got one rifle. I could use the loan of another one.”
Rand pivoted toward the door. “Rig him for a crossfire. Sounds good to me. I’ve got a pretty good ’Ought-Six, that do?” He left the room without waiting a reply.
2.
There was rain.
It came with a slow heavy beat against the roof. It was only just past five o’clock but the daylight had drained out of the sky and the house was dismal in gloom. Wearing one of Rand’s tailored rodeo jackets and a pair of Rand’s tinted glasses Buck Stevens went around the house switching on lights, taking risks but moving fast enough to discourage a chance gunshot from any window.
Rand had explained the emptiness of the house. His current wife was a film actress currently on location in Spain; in her absence Rand had wanted solitude and dispatched the house staff for a long weekend in Las Vegas. None of the ranch crew was likely to come up to the main house; Rand’s privacy was respected by those who worked for him.
Rand restricted his movements to those rooms in which they had drawn the drapes tight. Stevens played Rand in the rest of the house. Victorio raided the kitchen for cold roast beef and lettuce and went around distributing sandwiches and beer; Watchman wolfed down two sandwiches and wondered when he was ever going to put his belly around a decent meal.
He phoned Angelina. “I had him but he got away from me. He’s got a little dysentery but he’s all right. So far.”
“What’s going to happen, Sam?”
“I can’t tell you anything happy,” he said. “We’ll try to take him alive, that goes without saying. It’s mainly up to him.”
“My dumb brother.” There was a depth of concern and affection in her voice. “Isn’t there anything at all we can do to clear him?”
“He’s already cleared. We arrested Dwight Kendrick for the murders. But Joe’s got a poison in him, he wants to kill.”
The line crackled; it was a broken interval of time, not susceptible to measurement. At the end of it she said, “Try to keep anybody from getting hurt, Sam. Joe or anybody else.”
He pictured her face, the hair falling around it. He sketched for her what had happened. She asked a few questions but he cut her short. “I’ll call you later. Maybe have some good news.”
“I hope so. I haven’t prayed in a long time, Sam. But I don’t want anybody hurt. Anybody.”
“Then praying can’t hurt. I’ll see you.”
When the connection broke he stood with his hand on the receiver and felt the sweat of it.
3.
The rain beat at the window. Watchman checked the time. Nearly five-thirty. Buck Stevens walked past the window, past the ten-inch gap between half-drawn drapes; he sat down at the side of the window, out of the line of fire. “What if he doesn’t come?”
“The little hairs on the back of my neck tell me he’s around here right now.”
“Come on. There’s a limit to that stuff, Sam.”
“Well it’s not just instinct. Joe knows things today that he didn’t know yesterday. He talked to me this morning, he knows I know he’s going after Rand. It stands to reason he’d either abandon the whole thing or try to get here before I could get Rand out of his way. So if he’s coming at all he’ll come now. And he’s coming because if he wasn’t he wouldn’t have walked away from me this morning.”
It took great effort of will to maintain the patient waiting. Finally he put down the beer can and slid along the wall to pull the drawstring and close the drapes. “I’d like to speed this up. Let’s take a little chance.”
“I’m just as tired of this as you are,” Stevens said. “Name it.”
“Let me have that jacket you’re wearing.”
“Hold on a minute. You know he’ll never buy that. You’re too thin, you’re too dark. You don’t look anything like Rand.”
“Outside in the rain he’ll never spot the difference.” Watchman took one of Rand’s white cowboy hats off the rack and settled it above his ears. “Come on.” He beckoned and Stevens reluctantly shrugged out of the jacket and handed it over. It hung a little loose on Watchman’s shoulders. There was a transparent plastic rain-slicker hanging on the peg and he put that on. “Get Victorio in here.”
“You sure about this, Sam?”
“It’ll smoke him out if he’s around here, I’m sure about that.”
Stevens left the room with a brooding face. Watchman checked the loads in the .30-’06 and worked the bolt to slide the top cartridge into the chamber. He left the safety off.
When Victorio followed Stevens into the room Watchman handed the rifle to the lawyer. “It’s ready to go, the safety’s off. Can you handle it?”
“I’m fair, that’s all. Just fair.”
“Don’t kill him if you can help it.”
Stevens said, “What’s the script?”
“You take the window on the porch at the corner out in the front room there. Tom takes the window on the side of the house, same corner. No lights in the room behind you. Between you you’ll cover that whole quarter from the house. Keep your eyes on the trees between here and the bunkhouse because that’s where he’ll show himself.”
“He will?” Victorio said. “Why sh
ould he?”
“It’s a rotten light for shooting. That ’scope won’t be any good to him. He’ll have to get in close to make sure he doesn’t miss.”
“And you’re just going to stand out there and wait for him to pick you off?”
“I don’t know about you no-account Apaches,” Watchman drawled, “but up where I come from we don’t believe in suicide. No, I’m not going to stand there and let him pot me.”
There was a Western Horseman magazine on the table by the office door. He picked it up and folded it open. “This’ll do. Some papers in my hand, that’s what I want him to see.”
He led them forward through the house. At the end of the hall he reached around through the doorway and hit the wall switch inside the front room. It plunged the room into near blackness.
Rand’s voice came out of the dark television room. “How the hell long do I sit in here?”
“It won’t be long now,” Watchman said. “Just stay put ten minutes.”
He went into the front room with Stevens and Victorio and posted them at the corner windows. Slowly they raised the sashes. Rain sprayed in, bouncing on the sills.
Watchman said, “I’m going to make a run for the bunk-house with this paper in my hand. I’ll go inside and pass the time of day with whoever I find in there. That should give Joe time enough to work his way down in the trees here. Right now he’s probably up behind the house someplace, looking for a way in, but he’ll see me run across and he’ll come down and wait for me to come out of the bunkhouse and back to the house here. That’s when he’ll make his play.”
Stevens said, “Jesus. He’ll nail you cold.”
“I won’t give him the chance.”
“Shouldn’t one of us be out there in the trees, wait for him to come down and get in behind him when he shows up?”
“He won’t show himself. He’s careful. And if anybody leaves the house right now he’ll spot it. This’ll have to do.”
“You better zig and zag like a son of a bitch.”
“Bet your bottom.”
4.
Moving as if he had lead in his shoes he dropped off the porch and jogged toward the fountain, the plastic oilskin flapping around him. With the hat pulled low over his face it was hard to see much of the trees but there wasn’t much chance Joe was anywhere near here yet.
He skirted the grass by the fountain and made an abrupt turn; just in case. Ran on toward the bunkhouse, then stopped suddenly as if he had forgotten something; shook his head in exasperation and ran on. The performance was designed merely to destroy Joe’s timing if in fact Joe was close enough to be aiming at him.
The rain seemed to be letting up a little but the light hadn’t improved yet. He kept his shoulders back the way Rand always did; he had the automatic pistol clenched in his right hand out of sight and the open magazine in his left, visible but covered by the transparent plastic poncho. Twice as he trotted up to the bunkhouse porch he swept the line of trees than ran from the side of the bunkhouse along to the back of the house but nothing moved in the rain except the wind-tousled treetops. He crossed the last corner of lawn and went up the steps two at a time, fumbled for the door latch and almost dropped the magazine; and twisted inside.
He slammed the door behind him with his foot. Two card players bounced to their feet like soldiers and showed their surprise when Watchman took his hat off and wasn’t Charlie Rand.
He said, “Highway Patrol.” His eyes picked out the locations of the windows and he stepped into the corner where the only visible windows were on the far side of the building, the far front corner; Joe wouldn’t expose himself outside by going around to those windows.
He flashed the badge in his wallet. The two men just stared: at Watchman and at each other.
He said, “There may be a man out there with a rifle. Be a little safer if you two went in the back of the place for a while.”
He dropped the magazine on the seat of the chair behind him. One of the cowhands said, “Who’s got a rifle?”
“Just a fugitive. We think he’s around here. Best to keep your heads down until we’ve arrested him.”
“Mr. Rand know about this?”
“He’s cooperating.”
The second cowhand said, “You need a hand maybe? I got a rifle in my kit.”
“Thanks for the offer. But we’ll handle him.” He didn’t want trigger-happy cowboys killing Joe. “Go on now,” he said, making it gentle.
They went.
The air, even inside, was sticky and close. Rain battered the bunkhouse and suddenly a white flare winked in through the windows; three seconds and then the thunder exploded like racks of billiard balls. He placed it somewhere to the northeast and that meant the center of the rainstorm had passed. The room had the steamy odor of damp-swelled wood. Watchman had to guess how long it would take Joe to get down here from the higher slopes; probably Joe would hurry it because he couldn’t know how much time Rand planned to spend inside the bunk-house.
It would be best to give Joe time to come close but not time enough to get settled in too well; but there was no way to guess where the dividing line was and so Watchman just waited until fear began to pump the sweat out of him. Then he made his move.
5.
The edge of the timber made an arc from the side of the bunkhouse to the back corner of the main house; it left a curved patch of open lawn clear as a field of fire.
Two-foot piñons and junipers squatted here and there along the crescent of grass, haphazardly spotted. They weren’t much protection but they would conceal a prone man well enough in this poor light; he was counting on that for safety but if Joe was there it was still a matter of avoiding the impact of Joe’s first shot.
It would take a certain fraction of time for Joe to see him come out of the building and another fraction for him to react and steady his aim. Then Joe would have to judge the speed at which Watchman was moving, and the range, which would tell the hunter how much of a lead to give his moving target. There would be hesitation because things were hard to see in the dark shimmer of slanted rain and that would be countered by urgency because Watchman was only going to be in the open for a short time.
So Joe would have to take his first shot before Watchman reached the midway point between the two buildings. If the shot missed he would still have time to work the bolt of the .375 and squeeze off another shot before Watchman could reach the house. There might even be time for three tries. That was the way Joe had to figure it.
So Watchman had a set of limits, beginning and end, and had to work within them: he knew Joe wouldn’t shoot earlier than a given moment, nor would he delay past a certain moment. Between those two moments lay the uncertainty and that was where intuition had to sustain his judgment. And if his intuition was wrong it would be too bad because a mere graze from a .375 magnum would knock him twenty feet across the earth and a solid hit anywhere in the torso would kill.
It was no comfort knowing how likely it was that Joe wasn’t there at all. He had to assume he was there; odds didn’t enter into it.
…. Coming out the bunkhouse door he had the pistol in his fist across his chest, the muzzle under the jacket lapel so it wouldn’t throw a telltale flicker. He paused fractionally on the top step, still under the porch roof, and lifted his head as if to look at the weather; actually he was scanning the ring of trees. He didn’t expect to see anything and he didn’t. He waited long enough to be spotted but not long enough to be shot; he turned past the supporting pillar and went down the steps, taking the top two deliberately and then abruptly jumping the rest when the rain hit him. He broke into a slow lumbering run along the outside curve of the driveway, took four measured running strides and then doubled the pace without warning. Three strides that way and he dropped back to a dogtrot and the sudden noise of the exploding cartridge ripped a gash through the fabric of the rain.
He heard the bullet rip up ten inches of the airplane fountain but he was already reacting then, diving straigh t
oward the trees and skidding across the grass on his belly.
He slid up against the tiny bole of a juniper and tried to see through the branches. Buck Stevens spoke loudly through the open window to his right: “You’re surrounded, Joe. Unload and come out.”
Watchman had the pistol up but he didn’t want to use it. Stevens said, “You all right Sam?”
“Come on out, Joe,” Watchman said. “Nobody wants to shoot you.”
Then he heard the snap of brush and he took the chance: gathered his legs and ran half the distance to the trees and flopped down before Joe could tag him. But Joe didn’t shoot at all and Watchman wasted a little time before the crawled off to his right and got around the far side of the clump and ran straight into the woods.
In the lofty pine cathedrals the light was murky and rain splattered the puddles, confusing the ear; but Joe was on the run and Watchman heard him—ahead of him and up to the left. There was a dim reflection of lightning somewhere far behind Watchman. He moved toward the sound, going from tree to tree. Thunder crashed back there in the mountains to the north. Watchman had been waiting for it and when it began to roll he broke into a run, knowing that Joe’s hearing wasn’t going to be very acute right now after that magnum charge had gone off right next to his ear.
He stopped forty yards into the woods and listened.
There was the drip of rain and he heard a door slam behind him. His eyes burned through the grey light, seeking corner-of-the-eye movement but when something drew his attention and he stared it turned out to be a squirrel leaping from branch to branch.
Then a little grey bird made a brief racket and spun up into the rain and Watchman swung that way, moving with more care, smothering his sound.
Something had scared that bird. He reached the spot and froze and turned his head slowly to pick up what he could on his retinas and the flats of his eardrums. There was a faint murmur of distant thunder; he hadn’t seen any lightning this time. The rainfall was distinctly thinner than it had been five minutes ago; the edge of the storm was nearby. But no sign of Joe.
Threepersons Hunt Page 22
