Relentless

by Brian Garfield

  Vickers was still talking-evidently to his superior in Phoenix. “Yes, sir. I think we ought to take all these bits and pieces of information we’ve got up to this point and run them through the I. D. classifications on the computer in Washington. It may help to get a make on these people. We can try all the usual openings-modus operandi, identity of possible twin-engine airplane pilots, access to military stores of chemical Mace, tracer on that abandoned Lincoln up in Fredonia where they stole the Buick-that was a last-minute switch, the Lincoln broke down on them. It’s probably stolen too, but it’s worth a try. And I’d like some assistance up here as soon as you can provide it. We’ll need to go over the witnesses’ stories and run checks on recently discharged employees-whoever planned this operation had to know a great deal about the situation here and you often find an ex-insider in on these jobs. I’d appreciate getting a good lab crew up here as fast as possible; they seem to have dusted everything for prints but the local equipment is pretty shoddy and they haven’t got any real technicians up here… Yes, sir, I realize it’s expensive and possibly redundant but there’s a good deal of cash involved… Traceable? I don’t think so. Not easily. According to the Chief Constable here they only had a list of serial numbers on the big bills, the hundred-dollar bills, and we all know how easily those can be passed in foreign countries…”

  Watchman stopped listening. Vickers was touching all the correct bases. He knew the regulation methods, had a command of the situation and a willingness to make decisions and set things in motion. But there was a weakness in it: the weakness a regular army met when it tried to close with guerrilla terrorists. Computerized organization and modern technology were fine for sealing off elaborate superhighway networks or city streets, or closing in on clues and identities, but Watchman was dubious about how well the technocrats’ methods were going to work in the desert with a high-country blizzard ramming down toward them.

  4

  The storm was ugly and black and they were driving straight toward it. The cruiser was convoyed by the mining company jeep, Cunningham driving; their speed was limited by the jeep’s but even so the tires snickered on the sharp bends. Watchman’s arms felt constricted by the bulk of the borrowed sheepskin-lined mackinaw. When he judged the spot right he pulled over on the shoulder of the highway. “End of the line. We swap here.”

  A truck snored by, heavy laden. The jeep waited behind the cruiser, its engine idling roughly. Cunningham stepped out, letting the canvas door flap behind him, and stood with a bland incurious expression on his freckled cheeks.

  Vickers took charge. “Constable, you’ll stay here in the Highway Patrol car with one hand on the car radio and the other hand on your walkie-talkie. You’re going to be my only contact with the rest of this search so I’ll want you on your toes. You can handle it.”

  Watchman looked on with the amusement compressed inside him. Vickers must have read somewhere in a Bureau manual that it was a good idea to compliment local officers and persuade them to give utmost cooperation: but it didn’t come naturally to him, he had a heavy hand with the butter-knife and old Jace wasn’t fooled; he just stood there with his glance fixed on Vickers as if he was waiting for Vickers to serve a subpoena on him.

  It unsettled Vickers; finally he said in a different voice, “You know how to work these radios, don’t you?”

  “I reckon.”

  “Fine-fine. Well, then, let’s get on.”

  They got into the jeep, Stevens in back with the knapsack and the walkie-talkies. Watchman handed the folded map to Vickers. “You’ll have to navigate. Watch the compass.”

  It hung in a black plastic shell from the windshield divider, below the mirror. Watchman put the floor stick in low gear and went grinding up over the hump of ground beside the highway shoulder; turned north, away from the highway, and went up through the gears fast, bumping across the brush-studded hardpan at a speed that made everything rattle.

  “You don’t need to shake us to pieces, Trooper.”

  “Maybe you’d rather get there after we run out of daylight.”

  Vickers cleared his throat.

  The dust lifted high and the jeep’s passage exploded gray wrens out of the bushes. After a little while Vickers said, “I think you want to head a few more points to the left-more over that way.” He pointed and Watchman adjusted the course, weaving among brush clumps and a spindle tracery of cactus and catclaw. In the half light the mountains were vague and hazy out ahead. Vickers kept his finger on the map in his lap and watched the compass; his finger moved a fraction forward every now and then, marking what he thought was their present position. “It shows a ranch back here in the foothills. What’s that supposed to be?”

  “Monument Rock Ranch. It’s a tourist outfit-they run horseback pack trips and hunting safaris back into the mountains.”

  “Safaris?”

  “Mountain elk, antelope, mountain lions.”

  “I gather you don’t approve.”

  “Hunting a near-extinct animal with a telescope-sighted high-power rifle isn’t what I call a sport.”

  “I see. What do you call it?”

  Watchman flicked him a glance. “I guess you like to hunt, don’t you.”

  “I’ve hunted deer a few times. In New Jersey.”

  “That where you come from?”

  “Leonia, New Jersey. You’d be surprised the deer population back there. If it wasn’t for the hunting season the damn deer would eat up every farm crop in the state.”

  There was no point in starting an argument and Watchman thought he had let the subject die, but Vickers revived it: “I like venison, you see.”

  “That’s more than you can say for most of the customers they get up here.”

  “I get you. The type that wants a head of antlers to hang over the fireplace,”

  “I don’t even think most of them care about that. They just like to shoot at something that moves.”

  “Well that’s a primitive instinct in all of us, isn’t it,” Vickers said. “Most people work behind a desk all year and don’t get much chance to act like natural men. I guess that’s a pet theory of mine-man is a hunter-killer by nature, the paleontologists have proved that.”

  Watchman tried to make his voice sound friendly. “Out here we get plenty of anthropologists full of theories about the nature of primitive man.”

  “I didn’t mean to step on any sore corns.”

  “Forget it.”

  “A little bit to the right now. Try guiding on that sawtooth peak.” Vickers buried himself in the map. The jeep rattled and bounced; Watchman squinted, peering through the bad light for gopher holes and sudden cutbanks.

  There was an X penciled on the map and Vickers’ fingertip was inching closer to it. Westward, over Watchman’s left shoulder, the storm obscured almost half the sky and great arms of cloud shot forward from its crest. The wind bucketed the canvas sides and top of the jeep. Vickers reached back for one of the walkie-talkies and got it going by his ear. “Cunningham? Can you read me?”

  Watchman heard it squawk faintly and Vickers said, “Fine, I’m just testing it. Any word?”

  There was more squawking and Vickers made a face. When he handed the instrument back to Stevens he said, “They’ve recalled the search planes on account of the storm. No sign of the fugitives.”

  “Not likely there would be. If they’re on foot they’d hear an airplane coming-plenty of time to hide.”

  “I thought they might be able to see tracks from the air. Footprints.”

  “In this hardpan?”

  “Well you know the country better than I do.” Vickers said it in a conciliatory voice but it was evident he felt stung by the mild reproof.

  5

  Far off in the eastward distance an Air Force jet made a sound like slowly ripping cloth. The silent engine of the jeep made a pinging sound, heat contraction in the cold air. Watchman stood rocking heel-to-toe, considering the crippled remains of the airplane. The landing gear had collapsed
on one side and it left one wing sticking up in the air at a high angle. The wind whipped at dried remains of foam where they had used the pressurized extinguisher to put out a fire-the starboard engine nacelle was blackened along half its length. Vickers had already got on the walkie-talkie and directed Cunningham to pass the word to get a team of technicians out here. That was all right; necessary procedure; but it wasn’t likely to find the fugitives for them. Watchman doubted the bank robbers had left any clues to their intended destination aboard; they’d done a thorough job of stripping the plane of everything usable-emergency water bottle, fire ax, maps. They had left several air charts behind, showing this morning’s weather and the radio navigation ranges of all stations in the tristate area, but the pilot had made no position-fix marks on his charts and there was no way to judge where they would plan to go, or where they had been planning to go before the plane had crashed.

  Vickers came up from the jeep, new shoes creaking and squealing, and stood restlessly beside Watchman, bouncing on his arches like an athlete waiting to compete. After a while he cupped both hands around a match and hunched his shoulders to light a cigarette, blew smoke unnecessarily at the match and conscientiously put it in his pocket. “You know we may be jumping to conclusions. Maybe this wasn’t an accident. Maybe they planned it this way.”

  “You think they planned to crash?”

  Buck Stevens, ten feet away, got up from his haunches and came over. “What do you mean?”

  “Look at it this way,” the FBI man said. “You get five or six professionals together and you lay out a plan to rob a bank. The bank itself is a pushover but there’s a hitch, there always. is-this time it’s the getaway route. Only one highway through town. So you lick that problem by using an airplane to make your getaway. But you also know the police are going to figure out that you used an airplane. You’re not going to have much more than half an hour before everybody in three states starts hunting for you in the sky. Radar, search planes, ground spotters-an airplane’s a very easy thing to spot and a very hard thing to hide, as long as it’s in the air.”

  Buck Stevens said, “You’re saying they landed here on purpose. They planned it this way from the start.”

  “It’s possible. Or take another possibility. Say this wasn’t the getaway plane at all.”

  Stevens said, “No other planes have been reported missing. It’d be too coincidental.”

  “Not if our bank robbers planted it here deliberately. Look, they knew we’d be looking for an airplane. So they’ve given us one. It’s possible they hired some out-of-work stunt pilot in California to crash-land here and make it look as if he had an engine fire. That fire could have been set after the plane landed, you know. Then the pilot walked away, knowing we’d find him sometime soon but knowing he wasn’t going to be in too much trouble-he was hired to do this, he doesn’t know any more than that. In the meantime while we’re chasing the son of a bitch the real fugitives are halfway to Mexico.”

  Watchman said, “It’s a mite fanciful.”

  “Sure it is. The whole caper showed imagination-making them all take off their pants.”

  “I suppose you’ve just told Jace Cunningham to get the planes back in the air and keep searching for the real getaway plane.”

  “That’s right. I admit it’s a long shot but it’s worth trying.” The polite smile rode smugly on Vickers’ satisfied face.

  “It’s a cute theory,” Watchman said. “There’s only one hole in it”

  Vickers’ smile coagulated. “Such as?”

  “The way I read the signs, four or five men walked away from this plane. Probably five.”

  6

  The smile disappeared completely and instantly. Cigarette smoke trailed slowly from Vickers’ mouth and nostrils and whipped away in the cool wind. He said slowly, “You let me go all the way through with it before you stepped on it.”

  “I always like to let a man say what’s on his mind.”

  “I don’t like being made fun of, Trooper.”

  “It’s an old habit. Hang around and you’ll get used to it.”

  Buck Stevens said, “Wait, Sam.”

  Vickers threw his cigarette down and ground it out under his toe, making the movement fierce and violent. “Trooper, let’s grant you’re clever, in your toe-in-the-dust way. Let’s grant you’ve got a sense of humor. I’ve seen all the movies where the Westerners let the dudes make jackasses out of themselves-maybe you think I’m that kind of dude. I’ve only been out here a few weeks, I’ve got things to learn. All right; but I’m a quick study and if I wasn’t capable of handling my job the Bureau would have replaced me with somebody who was.”

  Buck Stevens reached for Watchman’s sleeve. “Sam, it’s no time to be a porcupine.”

  Watchman shook his head. The wind across his face was sharp with chill: he turned his collar up against it and said in a hard clipped way, speaking each word as if he had coined it on the spot, “You’ve sent a lot of airplanes up into bad weather to hunt for something that isn’t there. You could have asked me before you went sprinting for that radio-you could have asked me first but you jumped right in the pool without looking to see if there was water in it. The super G-man-it doesn’t fit into your neat strategy to look for advice from a seminomadic food-gathering folk primitive. But this is still my home ground and nobody’s taken my jurisdiction away yet. Look-it was my friend who got butchered in that bank. And I can’t risk any more stupid…”

  Vickers cut him off harshly:

  “Let’s get this straight right now. I appreciate advice but the decisions are up to me-you know the statutes on Federal crimes as well as I do. We’re dealing with bank robbery, it’s an FDIC bank, and we’ve got attempted interstate flight. The ultimate responsibility is the Bureau’s. It’s not your case-it’s not a private war. I know the old man was an Indian and I could see the way that made a difference to your constable back there, but I’m not Cunningham and I haven’t got time to play that game with you. Don’t get thin-skinned with me. I don’t care if you’re red, black, or green. Your partner’s right-it’s no time to get contentious, we’re both on the same side. I understand your feelings. I understand about the old man. Hell, I had an Indian great-grandmother myself, I think.”

  Oh God. You understand Innuns, yes indeed. That great-grandmother of yours was probably a Cherokee princess, wasn’t she. They always are. It you had time you’d tell me how you sympathize with the plight of the poor Innun and you’d pull out a Bible and flagellate yourself to atone for the sins of your ancestors against the red man-but right down at the bottom underneath all that crap you know for sure you’re just a little hit better than I am, don’t you, and you think…

  Damn, he thought, quiet it down to a war whoop, Tsosie.

  Vickers had stopped to glare at him but now added, “We need to get this straight right now-later on we may not have time to stop and get our chain-of-command sorted out. Ordinarily the Bureau doesn’t muscle in, we just ask politely for cooperation and we usually get it; but if you want to drag your heels you’d better let me know right now.”

  “So you can pull rank?”

  “Trooper, I represent the United States Government.”

  Watchman laughed at him-brittle. “I’m not your ward, Great White Father.”

  “I didn’t mean that and you know it.”

  Watchman turned around, breathing hard, putting his shoulder to Vickers and contriving to deal with the sudden anger that had burst in him unexpected. He had never in his life been that kind of resentful Indian before: why now?

  Jasper, he thought. Jasper and that crazy bit of a conversation on the phone with Lisa’s cool blonde sister-in-law.

  It was enough to turn an Uncle Tomahawk into a raging Red Power militant.

  And this was just a fine time for that.

  He said, “If it turns out I’m wrong I’ll apologize.”

  But he didn’t turn back to face Vickers and in the end Vickers was forced to walk around in front
of him, shoes squeaking; Vickers touched Watchman in the chest with his fingertip-“This is my party, Trooper. Not yours.” And he wheeled away. Went thirty yards past the jeep and crouched down to search the ground. The light was so dim now he could hardly be seen. He began to move slowly around, crabwise. The wind was down now and the air was thick with a heavy layer of silence that muffled the crunch and squeak of Vickers’ movements. The jagged black shoulders of the mountains stood vague in the near distance like wreckage on an abandoned battlefield. The smell of dust and distant snow hung in Watchman’s nostrils.

  Buck Stevens came over close and stood facing away from Vickers, talking over Watchman’s shoulder in a voice calculated to reach no farther than his ears. “That look on your face would’ve made quite a blaze if you’d touched a match to it. Listen, what’d he do?”

  “Maybe I got rattled.” But that wasn’t all of it: suddenly he saw what he’d been missing. “I had to kick him in the teeth with it, Buck.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “We can’t let him go on thinking he’s going to wrap this up with radios and helicopters and their computerized crime lab.”

  “I don’t get it. He looks pretty good to me.”

  “Most everybody looks pretty good until you put them to the test. Then some stay good and some don’t. This one won’t. He’s going to run out of sand, Buck.”

  How did you explain things to the rookie? This Vickers worked for an agency where you could get in trouble for turning in reports with bad spelling. They all went by the book. It was rigid, it came down from Washington, none of them was allowed to think for himself. They cared more about sticking to orderly procedures than about getting the job done-because the important thing was to be able to show in your report that you hadn’t made mistakes.

  And out here in the mountain states you got the worst of them. Because when an agent got in dutch they assigned him to a district office in the sticks. They called it “going to Oklahoma City” but Oklahoma City was paradise against Phoenix, which was Coventry.