Apache Country

by Frederick H. Christian

  Apodaca shook his head, still trying to get some kind of handle on what McKittrick was telling him. Ellen Casey in her elegant Riverside home, smiling, serving coffee. Charming, warm. And all the time knowing while he was with her, Easton was talking to Alice, the one person in the whole fucking world he knew for sure he’d never ever have to worry about.

  “She’s got dates, Joe,” McKittrick was saying, his voice accusing. “Documents, photographs, God alone knows what else.”

  “Wait, wait a minute.” Apodaca’s mind was functioning again now, racing. “How do you know? Who told you all this?”

  “Ellen Casey’s phone,” McKittrick snapped impatiently. “We hacked it, remember? Easton called her and told her the whole story.”

  Apodaca frowned. Something was wrong here. Easton wasn’t a fool. He would surely have anticipated their having Ellen Casey’s phone tapped. Could that mean he wanted them to know what he knew? And if so, why?

  “Joe! You still there?” he heard McKittrick say.

  “Yes.”

  “Then say something, for Chrissake. What are we going to do?”

  “Leave this to me,” Apodaca growled. “It’ll take a couple of days, but I’ll straighten it out.”

  “Will you get real, for Chrissake!” McKittrick shouted, his voice fluty with tension. “We don’t have a couple of days! We’ve got to do something now! Easton and Ironheel have cut a deal with the Feebs. They’re going to surrender to them this afternoon. You hear me? Today!”

  He was just about holding down the panic, but only just, Apodaca thought. If it had been up to him McKittrick would never have been in the loop in the first place, but Gerzen had insisted: in order to be absolutely fireproof they had to have him. That didn’t make the self-centered bastard any less of a pain in the proctology.

  “Tell me the rest of it,” he said.

  “The Feebs have got the DVD with Gerzen on it.”

  “That’s impossible. Casey gave it to you.”

  “He must have made a copy. Someone did. And they’ve given it to the Feebs.”

  “How the hell did they do that?”

  “Easton used one of your SO people as a go-between.” McKittrick’s voice was poisonous with accusation. “Right under your fucking nose.”

  Apodaca let out a long angry exhalation of breath. He could feel his growing fury seething inside him like lava in a volcano waiting to erupt. All these years, everything he’d worked for. Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

  “Cochrane, right?” he whispered. “Tom Cochrane.”

  “You mean you knew? And you did nothing about it?” McKittrick shrilled. “What kind of a goddamn moron—”

  “I didn’t know, dammit!” Apodaca rasped, cutting off the jabber. “But I had a hunch someone inside SO had to be giving Easton and Ironheel support. Just before you called I was checking mileage logs, phone calls, looking for anything that ought not to be there. And Cochrane kept coming up odd. His mileage was all to hell. The day after the Feebs searched the Reservation his car was seen up there. Another time over in Albuquerque. And his charge card records list calls to FBI cover numbers.”

  Even as he spoke, his options were flashing through his mind. All that mattered now was his own survival. One thing he knew for sure: whoever the fuck went down, it wasn’t going to be him. He modulated his voice, making his tone persuasive, conspiratorial.

  “Olin, listen to me, we can still turn this around,” he said. “Just don’t panic. Take it one step at a time. First, do we know where Easton and Ironheel are now?”

  “Somewhere out near Mescalero Sands. They’re going to surrender to the Feebs there at five o’clock.” McKittrick’s said the tension in his voice still audible. “Five o’clock. That’s just a few hours … there’s no way we can—”

  “Olin,” Apodaca said, calming it down. “Get a hold of yourself. It’s going to be all right. Just pull yourself together and listen. Olin? You listening?”

  “Yes, yes, what, what?”

  “First, we’ve got to make absolutely certain the Feebs don’t turn up for that meet,” he said, ideas exploding in his head like skyrockets in a summer night sky. “If we can swing that it will give us a window, we can take Mescalero Sands at our own speed. Easton and Ironheel will be on their own out there with no place to hide.”

  “You and Gerzen will have to take care of that part of it,” McKittrick said. “I’ve never been any good with guns. I won’t be any use to you out there.”

  Apodaca smiled. He’d always known McKittrick was a gutless wonder. What amused him was the fact the man seemed to think that let him off the hook. He had necessarily tolerated his arrogance and vanity for a long time. Well, not any more.

  “Oh, yes you will, Olin,” he said. “You can be our Judas goat.”

  “Me? McKittrick squeaked. “No, I can’t—”

  Rage flared behind Apodaca’s eyes. “Don’t you say ‘can’t’ to me, you useless sack of shit!” he hissed. “Just listen carefully and do exactly what I tell you. Capisce?”

  And then he told him. While they had been talking, a whole scenario had sprung fully grown into his agile mind. To be sure, its success depended upon a whole succession of long-shots, but he knew it was the only way to go.

  L’audace, toujours l’audace. Anything was better than sitting on your ass waiting for the ax to fall.

  “Jesus,” McKittrick muttered shakily when he finished speaking. “Sounds damn risky, Joe. Are you sure—?”

  “Do it, Olin,” Apodaca said, making it brutal. “Just do it.”

  He could almost hear McKittrick trying to think of a way to weasel out – and failing. It made him feel good.

  “And what about … Cochrane?” McKittrick said. “How do we—?”

  “He’s right here. At his desk.”

  The chips were down. There was a silence long enough to draw two deep breaths, long enough for McKittrick to realize he didn’t have anywhere to hide.

  Apodaca waited. Come on, you gutless turkey. He heard McKittrick let out his breath.

  “What time do you want me there?”

  Apodaca smiled grimly. “About an hour. Stay by your cellphone and I’ll call you when it’s a go.”

  “Are you sure there isn’t some other way—?”

  The chickenshit bastard was still looking for a way out. Apodaca made an angry sound.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” he gritted. “So do what I’ve told you to do and do it exactly the way I told you to do it. Fuck up and you’re dead. Do I make myself clear?”

  McKittrick drew in a deep breath. “Okay, Joe. I’m … I’m sorry I panicked. Don’t worry, I’ll handle it. Trust me.”

  Sure I’ll trust you, Apodaca thought. You and Satan.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Like most men, Tom Cochrane was a creature of habit. He always shaved the right side of his face first. He always bought his newspaper at the newsstand on South Main. He always drove the same route to work. And he always parked his car on the right hand side of the rear alley behind the SO building.

  He was opening the door of his Chevy when he heard his name called and turned to see Joe Apodaca coming out of the building through the same door he had himself just used. At the same moment, Olin McKittrick’s silver-gray BMW slid smoothly into the alley and came to a stop behind his car.

  “Something wrong, Joe?” he said.

  Apodaca shook his head. “Olin wants a word, Tom,” he said. “Hold on a second, okay?”

  He waited as McKittrick got out of his car. The district attorney looked edgy and Cochrane wondered why.

  “Olin?” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Got something to show you,” McKittrick said, opening the passenger door.

  Cochrane frowned. Something wrong here, he thought. He looked around quickly. Apodaca sensed his tension and drew his gun. Cochrane stared at him.

  “What the hell is this, Joe?” he said.

  Apodaca held out his left hand. “Just give me your piece, T
om,” he said. “By the book.”

  With Apodaca in front of him and McKittrick behind, Cochrane was whipsawed. He let out his breath in a long exhalation, then reached inside his jacket and brought out the Glock between forefinger and thumb – ‘by the book’ – and handed it to the sheriff.

  “What is this, Joe?” he said.

  “Child safety,” Apodaca replied, and used the Glock to point at the passenger seat. “Get in.”

  Cochrane slid into the car and Apodaca got in back with him, the gun resting negligently on the seat behind Cochrane’s right ear.

  “How are Kate and Tom, by the way?” McKittrick asked.

  Cochrane frowned. “Why you asking?” he rasped.

  “All in good time,” McKittrick said.

  He started the car and slid out of the alley. Twelve minutes later he pulled the BMW silently to a stop outside Cochrane’s house. McKittrick took a pair of Tasco 8 x 32mm binoculars from the glove compartment and handed them to Cochrane.

  “What is this?” Cochrane said.

  “Take a look,” McKittrick said, pointing with his chin. “Upstairs, window on the right.”

  The front bedroom had a big picture window. They’d installed it just a year ago, to let more light in. As Cochrane focused the binoculars the curtains parted, and he saw his wife Josie at the window; her face was pale and tense. Then Kate appeared, then Tom, rubbing his eyes as if he had been crying. Behind them, Cochrane could make out the figure of a big man with blond hair. He had what looked like an Uzi in his hands. The muzzle was almost touching Kate’s head. Cold fingers clutched Cochrane’s heart.

  “Who is that? What’s he doing up there?”

  McKittrick smiled. “His name is Gerzen, Tom. Does that mean anything to you? Carl Gerzen?”

  Cochrane tried to hide his reaction, but McKittrick saw it in his eyes.

  “Wonderful thing, the imagination,” he said. “Now, do you clearly understand what’s going on here?”

  Cochrane nodded. “What … what do you want?” he said hollowly.

  “I want you to make a telephone call,” McKittrick told him. “Just one. I’ll tell you what to say. Do it, and nothing bad will happen. Give me trouble …”

  He tapped the car phone.

  “Kids disappear, Tom,” Apodaca added silkily. “Every year, thousands of them. A lot of them end up in ... bad places. I think you know the kind of places I’m talking about, don’t you, Tom? You wouldn’t want anything like that to happen to those two lovely kids, would you?”

  “You bastards,” Cochrane seethed. “You dirty bastards.”

  “Save your breath,” McKittrick said harshly. “You’re going to need it to talk to the Feebs.”

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  There was a time once, long ago, Easton thought, when a man could saddle a horse, climb aboard, and ride wherever he wanted to go in as straight a line as the land allowed. Not any more. These days it could be positively dangerous for a man to ride across country unless the country he was riding across was his own. Open range was as much part of history as Kit Carson.

  Nevertheless, scant miles from the urban sprawls of Albuquerque, Las Cruces and Riverside there were still places in New Mexico as wild and unfenced as they had been in the 1880s when Victorio was on the warpath.

  Mescalero Sands was one of them.

  An empty wilderness inhabited mainly by deer and small animals living off the mesquite, chinnery, rabbitbrush and other hardy plants that flourished in parts of its sixty-mile swathe of dunes, the Sands was the bottom of a sea that dried up 250 million years ago, a silent, hostile, desolate place.

  Which was why Easton had chosen it.

  Whatever happened now would happen in a virtual vacuum, unseen by anyone except those involved. A thin thread of expectancy ran through him as he trudged through the shifting sand toward his rendezvous with Ironheel. No matter which way it went, today there would be a showdown. And although he was grubby, unshaven, thinned down by lack of sleep and the time he had spent on the run, Easton was ready for it.

  At three thirty in the afternoon it was flat dead hot. And silent.

  Beneath a brassy sky the rolling dunes lay as still and empty as the far side of the moon. Behind and a couple of miles east of where Easton now stood was the Caprock, the sandstone escarpment at the edge of the vast prairie beyond that the Franciscan friars who came north with Coronado had named the Llano Estacado.

  Legend had it that on their way north, in order to help them find their way back across the featureless land, the holy fathers had hammered stakes into the ground. It wasn’t true, but that was why people called it the Staked Plain instead of the more descriptive ‘stockaded prairie’ the Holy Fathers had pioneered.

  Ironheel was already waiting where they had arranged to meet, at the foot of the escarpment below the twin windmills on Mescalero Point. He was wearing a blue denim shirt, Levis, and flat-soled moccasins. A water bottle was slung on a strap across his shoulder. He looked dark and hard and fit.

  “You’re late,” he said. Easton let that go by.

  “Good to see you, too,” he said. “Cochrane find you okay?”

  Ironheel made a short, sharp sound that might have been amusement.

  “Other way around.” he said. “Why we here?”

  “We can talk on the way,” Easton said. “I’ve got a lot to tell you.”

  “Where we going?”

  Easton pointed. About a half mile across the sand dunes to the northwest of their position, he told Ironheel, was an access road. It ran more or less south for about two thirds of a mile, ending at the nearest thing to civilization there was out here, a recreation area maintained by the Bureau of Land Management, with picnic tables, trash cans and a chemical toilet.

  “See you got water,” Easton said.

  “Need it,” Ironheel nodded.

  They set out on a primitive track that ran north between the dunes. Walking on the soft, yielding sand was hard work, and they made slow progress. As they trudged on, Easton told Ironheel about his visit to the Apodaca house and his later talk with Tom Cochrane.

  “Cochrane’s good,” Ironheel said. “Doesn’t talk too much.”

  “Glad we agree.”

  “How we going to work this thing?”

  “Up to now, we’ve been the bad guys,” Easton said. “Even if we’d managed to contact the FBI or some other law-enforcement agency, even if they’d believed I wasn’t acting under duress. We needed something that would lure McKittrick and Apodaca out into the open, incriminate themselves in front of witnesses.”

  “The DVD?”

  “By now Cochrane will have contacted the FBI,” Easton told him. “Given them the DVD and some other evidence he was holding, laid out the whole story: you, Weddle, Gerzen, all of it. He’ll have told them we’ll surrender and testify against Apodaca and McKittrick – on one condition. That it’s exclusively an FBI operation, no other law-enforcement agency involved or even advised.”

  “And?”

  “I just called Cochrane on the cellphone. The Feebs have agreed. Ed Hatch, who’s in charge of the Albuquerque office, will be bringing a team out here at four o’clock.”

  “Explain something,” Ironheel said. “Just how is all this supposed to spook Apodaca and McKittrick? They don’t even know where we are.”

  Easton held up a hand. “I also called Ellen Casey, told her we’re going to surrender to the FBI here. At five o’clock.”

  Easton nodded.

  “Wait a minute,” Ironheel protested. “You told me they’re coming at four o’clock.”

  “Ellen Casey’s phone is tapped,” Easton said. Ironheel’s eyes narrowed; the Apache admire cunning.

  “You’ve invited them to kill us before the FBI gets here.”

  “I’m not giving them any time to think. Only act.”

  Ironheel nodded thoughtfully, as though they were talking about a movie he would quite like to see.

  “They aren’t stupid,” he said. “They�
�d expect you to figure Ellen Casey’s phone is tapped. Aren’t they going to wonder whether it might be a trap?”

  “Yup,” Easton agreed. “But they’ve got no time to maneuver. Only act.”

  Ironheel fell silent, turning it all over in his mind. It didn’t look like he was crazy about any of it. Hell, Eaton thought, neither am I.

  They trudged up to the crest of a long ridge of dunes and Easton stopped.

  “There it is.”

  Below them the stony recreation area shone like bleached bone. In common with many BLM facilities, it was starkly basic, an open turning space with two table-and-bench units on the east side flanked by twin waste bins, the phone booth-sized block of the chemical toilet a few yards away, and on the south side, two more table units with barbecue stands and their own waste bins. The steel framed benches and tables with their plank tops looked as if no one had used them for years. An immense silence hung over the place.

  “How many you think will come?” Ironheel said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “And you don’t know when, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  Ironheel looked at the sky. “‘Hoka hey, brothers, it’s a good day to die,’” he said.

  “Who said that?”

  Ironheel smiled. “Crazy Horse of the Oglala Sioux. Just before the battle of the Little Big Horn.”

  “Now I’ll tell you something Custer said,” Easton told him. “‘We need cover.’”

  It was almost a joke. Among these low, shifting hills, it was just about possible to find partial concealment among the scattered stands of mesquite and rabbitbrush, but most of the area was as bare as the Sahara. Ironheel looked all around and then let his gaze move up toward the top of the dunes to their right.

  “Ba’ch’anándíst’iig o’í’an yúdé,” he said. “Fox always hides in a hole.”

  He led the way along the ridge overlooking the recreation area, then up to the crest. On the side farthest from the road he began digging with his hands, and Easton followed suit, making a long depression with a parapet of sand in front of it, deep enough for the body to be protected on both sides, invisible from twenty feet away. They lay belly down in the hot sand and waited.