by Rex Burns
“Do you know this number?”
“Mine,” said Tice. “He called us to get a message to you. He wanted you to call him right away.”
And Wager had not been there. The last entry in the book, on a dog-eared page, was in handwriting barely resembling the others. Two words sprawled shakily across the pale-blue lines, as if written with closed eyes and measured by a groping thumb. One was at the top of the page, the other near the bottom: “water” and “Wager.”
“How’s Mrs. Winston now?”
“Doc’s give her a sedative and some neighbors are looking after her.” Tice pulled the rubber sheet over Orrin’s face. “You’ll want to see Orrin’s last notebooks?”
He did, but that would have to wait for his return from the benchland, and Mrs. Winston’s return from exhausted hysteria.
Wager shifted down as the stiffly sprung vehicle jolted across a series of ruts. According to the map sketched by Tice, the site of Winston’s murder should be somewhere within the next two- or three-tenths of a mile. Wager slowed and scanned the line of the road, squinting through the heat that already formed shimmering mirages in the distance. There it was—a pale glint of new wood with a dot of shiny red winking at its top: a strip of fluorescent cloth fluttering in the wind. Stopping the Jeep, Wager surveyed the scene from the slight elevation he had. Orrin’s truck had been headed this way; the sniper was hidden on the right side of the road. Probably the small gulley that angled off from the road’s shoulder just in front of Wager. It wound behind the low, sandy ridge and then roughly parallel to the road. Here a vehicle could swing into the soft sand of that wash. Wager dropped into four-wheel drive and lurched across the ill-defined shoulder and into the sand.
Slower than a walk, the Jeep nosed down the wind-rippled wash, and Wager noted how the fluted dirt walls rose and fell between him and the distant stake. And, beyond, how the empty road, a pale streak through the low desert brush, could be seen clearly for ten miles before it twisted down to the next broad shelf. You would have plenty of time to get ready, would see the wind-flattened plume of dust coming, maybe the white flash of sun on a windshield. You could leave your vehicle somewhere along here, a four-wheel drive—it would have to be that—and wait until you saw Orrin coming. Wager stopped the Jeep behind a shoulder-high rise in the bank and got out, listening for a moment to the hissing whisper of the wind as it skipped among the stiff, low twigs. You would watch the slow approach of the dust, would walk down this wash, its slice of earth hiding both the waiting vehicle and you from Orrin’s eyes. Here the soft sand bed twisted back toward the road, following the steepest fall of land. By stretching a bit, Wager could glimpse the stake over the embankment, closer now; and he began to look with a rifleman’s eye for the clearest line of fire and the most stable rest for a prone shot. He found it where the gully bent nearest the road and turned sharply away: a high bank whose crumbling, rock-filled face let boots find a grip to scramble up to the edge and see, about a hundred yards distant, the red flutter of tape and a long, level stretch of road leading up to it.
According to the map, Tice also thought this was the spot. Wager lay there a few seconds, gazing down and imagining the approaching truck jouncing along at about thirty miles an hour almost straight toward this spot. You would see Winston’s shirt, pale in the cab’s shade. The driver’s head would be outlined against the back window. A telescopic sight would bring Winston’s hot face full into the circle of glass, and the cross hairs would steady with a smooth, gliding motion of the rifle. One hundred yards at an approaching target: not overly difficult if you’re any good with a rifle. But not a beginner’s shot, either; not one you would want to snap off too quickly. So you might use a sling, scrape a small hole to rest your elbow; long inhale and hold and squeeze gently the way the rifle instructors chanted at boot camp. Thump. A quick flip with the lever, rock solidly back into position, and one second later the next round on its way. Two shots, that quick and that tight in the target area—definitely not a beginner, definitely shots with some risk to them. Pick up the spent brass, a single golden tube, still hot but within arm’s reach. Down to the skewed truck to make sure.
Wager rose and brushed the sand from his clothes and walked down to the stake. He paused to look back at his line of tracks wavering between brush and rocks. If Orrin had been able to see, the killer would have come straight toward him, a figure squinting against the sun in his face. But far enough away not to be recognized yet—not by a man who had just been shot twice and who, under the stunning impact, knew he was dying fast. Twenty, at most thirty seconds to fumble out the notebook and write those two words. Half again that long to pick up the brass and jog the hundred yards up to the truck window. Probably slow down a step or two away, rifle at port arms just in case, hungry to see the victim totally motionless. Maybe a trifle frightened. Wager hoped so. He would like it if the killer had felt at least a twitch of fear when he leaned into the hot cab of the truck to slip the avenging angel between Winston’s still-warm fingers.
He reached Zenas’s ranch near midday, and under the numbing weight of noon sun the sandstone building seemed emptier than the last time. No one opened the blank wooden door to welcome him; no piping child’s voice carried like the call of far-off birds through the waterfall sound of the cottonwoods. Instead, Wager stood alone on the tiny concrete slab with its embedded colored stones and knocked loudly. When no one answered, he walked around into the Cottonwood shade and across the sandy yard toward the barn that dominated the packed earth and rail fences of the animal pens. A quiet voice from behind a screen of pungent mountain willow said “Hello,” and Wager, the hairs prickling up his nape, froze.
“You’re that Denver policeman.” Zenas, a rifle hanging comfortably in the crook of his arm, stood up among the tangle of willow branches. “Where’s Orrin at?”
“He’s been killed. He was shot two days ago on the way back to Loma Vista.”
The man’s flat, wide shoulders sagged but his face remained as closed as a fist. “The destroying angels?”
“Yes. Sheriff Tice found a drawing just like the others.”
Zenas let his gaze shift from Wager to the yellow Jeep and back up the road to the notch carved like a rifle sight in the wall of red sandstone. “You best come into the trees.”
Wager, too, glanced around the etched line of slick rock that towered over this corner of the river bottom. On the first trip, those walls seemed to keep strangers out; now they seemed to gaze inward to pin down any figure standing, like Wager, in plain view of the rim. He stepped quickly into the mottled green of tangled willow; wordless, Zenas led him a few steps along a dim trail to where even the hard blue sky was masked by peppery-smelling leaves.
“You think they know you’re here?” Wager asked.
His jaw moved slightly before he spoke, as if the words needed a running start to overcome his dislike of talking to a Gentile. “Willis visited with us before him and Ervil started their fight.”
“And he knows that you sided with Ervil?”
“He does.”
“Have you had any trouble lately?”
“Not yet.”
Wager listened to the high whine of an insect dodging among the pale leaves and veering sharply away from their two motionless figures. “Have you got the Kruse family hidden out here?”
Zenas’s dark eyes widened slightly. He was not used to lying; by avoiding Gentiles, he had no pressures to lie. But he didn’t have to answer clearly, either. “Why do you ask that?”
“The last time I was here, Willis knew whose side you were on—that’s why you had Orrin bring me out here with those pictures. But you weren’t worried for yourself then. Now you’re worried enough to hide your family somewhere around here, and I think it’s because you’ve done something that Willis wants to get even with you for—taken the Kruse family in, maybe.”
“You’re a good hunter.” But he still wasn’t willing to answer directly. “What makes you think my family’s nearby?”<
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“The farm’s kept up. Do you and your boys come in and work it nights?”
Zenas sighed. If a stranger and Gentile could figure it out, then so could the destroying angels. “I hoped we wouldn’t have to flee our homestead. My family, my children, they haven’t seen the ways of … of strangers, and I don’t wish to lead them into that corruption. But God’s will be done; we are his servants.”
If everything that happened was God’s will, then there was no need for policemen like Wager. But his feeling was that any God there might be didn’t care very much anymore what humans did to each other. That left the responsibility with people. “Maybe we ought to help God out a little bit, Mr. Winston. What did you tell Orrin before he started home?”
The word “God” in the mouth of a Gentile was blasphemy. But it was true that he often moved in dark and mysterious ways, and that he helped those who, with a pure heart, helped themselves. “I told him that I knew where the Kruse family lay hidden from the Antichrist, and that they were safe, God willing.”
“But you didn’t tell him where?”
“He knew better than to ask.”
“Well, I’ve only got the manners of a Gentile—”
“Yea, verily.”
“—and of a cop. We are willing to offer protection to the Kruses until this avenging-angel thing is cleared up.”
“The protection of Gentiles? To our people?”
“Yes.”
Zenas’s narrow lips stretched in a bitter smile. “That would be new under the sun. But this ‘thing’ will live as long as Willis and his followers do. It’s part of the eternal war between the Antichrist and the Chosen.” He gave his head a firm shake. “Against that, your shield is as clay, your sword as wood.”
Despite the thick and close shade they stood in, Wager was hot; he was thirsty from the dry air, which sucked up any sweat as soon as it showed, and his restless sleep at the motel had left him dull and weary when he woke up this morning. Moreover, he was quickly growing tired of biblical phrases which, despite the fixed and glittering eye of a true believer, rang more than once with a note of pretension. “Mr. Winston, we are going to catch the avenging angels. No question about that. But how much more damage they’ll do before we catch them, I don’t know—and neither do you. The Kruses will be safer with police protection, and if you’ve been threatened you’ll need it, too. If you know where they are, tell me so I can arrange that protection. Otherwise, if anything happens to them it’s on your head.”
“My responsibility to my people is glory unto God.” He shook his head once more. “Good-bye.”
“Yeah,” said Wager.
For the long ride back, Wager snapped the canvas top into place across the Jeep’s metal struts. Already he could feel that crinkly dryness of sunburn on his forehead and cheeks, and the heat gathered from the morning’s glare now radiated back from the hot sand and stone to add itself to the burden of the afternoon sun. As he squinted against the desert brightness and half consciously aimed his wheels along the ruts climbing the escarpments, he let his thoughts flow around Orrin’s death. He was certain that the Kruses were hiding with Zenas. Orrin had probably been just as sure, but he wrote nothing about it in his notebook. That was something you whispered into one ear only, not something you told the world in writing that might be seen by any pair of eyes. “Wager.” Call Wager—Orrin wanted whoever found him to call Denver because Wager was supposed to know something or learn something. Well, Wager knew why he sent Orrin out to see Zenas. And now he knew as much as Orrin about the Kruses. What else? Anything else? What did not fit was why Orrin would be killed. Why would the avenging angels shoot someone like Orrin? A message? A warning to Zenas? Why bother? Zenas knew they were after him, and he was already worried enough to hide his family. Was Orrin killed to keep him from getting to Wager? … But Wager could go to the source, too—had gone, for all the good it did. …
Eyes heavy from the heat and wind and glare, Wager nudged the hard tires hissing through the deep sand that kicked against the steering wheel. The sniper had fired from concealment. He had hidden his car behind a ridge of earth like any of a dozen Wager could see right now. But suppose he had left it in the open? Why wouldn’t Orrin, like anybody else, drive unsuspectingly toward it? Curious, maybe; certainly alert. But there was as yet no sign that the avenging angels were out here on the benchland; Mueller’s death had been in those far mountains hidden by distant rimrock. And who would know Orrin had driven out to talk to Zenas? Someone knew, feared, and waited—out of sight of the victim. A hundred yards away from a moving target … How much easier it would have been to drive slowly toward Orrin’s truck down this rough, one-lane road. Just pull over to let Orrin’s laboring vehicle jounce slowly past; wave and smile, and then, with the victim three or four feet away, shoot him with a pistol. Why risk a hundred-yard shot at a moving target? Unless the killer thought Orrin had reason to be afraid and on guard. Maybe in those notebooks … Maybe Mrs. Winston would know if Orrin was afraid of someone. A message? Was Orrin’s death simply a message like the bloody angel scrawled in Beauchamp’s house?
Wager tried to focus his mind on the questions, but no answers came. Just more possibilities that blurred any clear line of cause and effect that he could work back from the fact of Orrin’s death. A lurching thump sent the Jeep leaning heavily sideways and tossed the sheriff’s logbook from the cowl onto the floor. Wager pulled the wheels back into the ruts and bent to pick up the small book.
With a hollow pop, sharp jets of glass stung into his neck and cheek and left eye. The windshield splattered over his lap in a crumbling blanket of safety glass and Wager swerved sharply off the road to tilt the car high. Flipping off the ignition as he dived from the low side, he already had his pistol in his fist when he hit the ground flat, eye burning and watering with each blink of the stinging lid.
A second shot hit somewhere on the vehicle and this time Wager heard the weapon, the high-velocity crack of a rifle aimed at him from not too far away. Blinking painfully to see, he crawled behind the ridge at the side of the wheel tracks and cautiously peeked toward the sound of the weapon. A blue puff of smoke thinned rapidly in the strong wind and then he heard the crank of a starter, saw the black line of a whip antenna glide and snap just beyond a rise of land. A moment later, a haze of dust caught in the wind and Wager, standing, trying to glimpse the fleeing car, heard the heavy engine strain away.
His eye. The pain had been there all along, but now, with the sniper gone, it suddenly throbbed and burned as though acid had been spilled across it. He fumbled a handkerchief out of his back pocket and blotted at the hot and seeping flesh, trying to keep his twitching lid from burying any glass deeper in the eye. Sniper. Just like Orrin. Wager groped for the radio, pressing the Transmit button despite the silence of his speaker. It might work—sometimes you could transmit when you couldn’t receive. Orrin had had a CB in his truck. He hadn’t had a chance to use it. If Wager hadn’t bent down at that moment—he pressed again, calling for Tice, calling for an intercept at the edge of the benchland. Now he could see the plume of dust from the fleeing car glide above a ridge of brush, and he followed the rising cloud of yellow haze as the sniper fled.
Cranking the engine and cursing as it hung fire, he finally coughed it into life and started after the dust cloud, now rising with increasing speed above the rolling earth. But his steering wheel pulled hard left through the sand, and, holding the handkerchief over his burning eye to try to still the pain, he saw that the second shot had torn a large hole in the knobbed tire. Ahead, the dust plume sped away from the crippled Jeep.
Wager again tried the silent radio. No answer, not even a querying crackle of static. He turned off the engine and groped for the water can strapped to the Jeep’s side. It was sun-warmed and smelled of metal, but the wet handkerchief cooled his burning eye, and he washed the eye gently with water cupped in his hands to dislodge the chips of glass that clung to his eyeball. Safety glass. But when it shattered un
der a bullet’s impact … And if he had not reached for that fallen book …
There was still glass in his eye and it felt like scorching lumps of gravel, but there was nothing else he could do.
Soaking his handkerchief again, he tied it gently over the hot lid to try to keep from blinking. Gritting his teeth against the burning sting, Wager began to change the tire. Far ahead, the sniper’s car was a dark spot followed by a high yellow tail like a speeding dust devil.
CHAPTER 9
“HOLD STILL.”
“I’m trying.”
He felt the heat of the lamp against his cheek, and across his clamped-open, drying eye saw the blinding whiteness of the circular mirror. “I thought doctors had stopped wearing those things.”
“Not if they need to use both hands. Hold still now.”
Wager heard Sheriff Tice come back into the clinic’s small examining room behind him, the creak of his pistol belt and his heavy breath loud in the quiet room.
“Did you get her?” Wager asked.
“Please don’t talk.”
“Yep. She’s a lot calmer now. Says we can come over any time and look through whatever we want to.” He heard Tice settle into a chair. “I called your man Doyle, too. He wants you to call him as soon’s you can. He wants to know if you need medical leave or a replacement.”
“No,” said Wager.
The doctor breathed “Damnit” and leaned forward again, steel instrument glittering in the white light. “Both you people shut your damn mouths.”
They did, the doctor finally squirting a cooling jelly into the corner of Wager’s eye and taping a gauze pad lightly over it. “I think I got all the glass, but it’ll feel pretty rough for a while. And look a lot rougher when the bandage comes off. Which,” he added, washing his hands in the corner sink, “shouldn’t happen for twenty-four hours. You should visit an ophthalmologist when you’re back in Denver, Detective Wager, just to be sure.”