Rifle shot; he recognized the sound a second later. Its hard echo beat across the hills.
The report was directionless. Watchman crouched back against a ball of scrub oak. His head turned quickly, he tried to watch everything at once. There was no way of knowing whether that rifle was shooting at him or at something else but he could hardly ignore it.
He unsnapped the holster and palmed his service revolver. The adrenaline pumping through him made his hand shake.
The rifle boomed again and this time the bullet made a crease in the earth twenty feet to his right; it whined away like a flat stone skipped across a pond.
He heard the nearby crack of the next one. It broke some twigs out of the scrub oak beside him.
He threw himself belly-flat behind the scrub oak and fired two blind shots in the general direction he thought the rifle had spoken from.
Instinct prompted panic but his experience steadied him. There were two possibilities. Either the rifleman was a terrible marksman or he hadn’t meant to hit Watchman. Either way it meant he wasn’t likely to get killed right here and right now.
He edged his face forward past the clumped stems of the oak to peer back toward the road ruts where the shots had come from.
This time he saw the muzzle-flash. The bullet shook the scrub oak.
That was two in a row the rifle had put into the oak; so the odds changed. Not a poor marksman; they were warning shots.
Flat on the ground he considered his horizons. There was a dip behind him, twenty feet away—a shallow crease in the land that had probably been a torrent two hours ago. He began to slide back toward the gully; he triggered three .38s toward the place where he’d seen the muzzle flame, rolled into the gully and slithered in the mud and a rifle bullet chopped the air overhead.
Now what the hell?
He was fumbling to reload. Two cartridges dropped from his hand and he left them in the mud.
You’ve got no right to scare a man this way. He whacked the cylinder closed and fired a couple of potluck rounds. The revolver slammed against the heel of his hand in recoil; the racket had his ears ringing. The stink of cordite fouled the air.
There was a shot but it wasn’t aimed anywhere in his direction—it didn’t have that sort of crack. He searched the brush but his view was restricted by the scattered fat trees. He caught the reflection of sunlight off something metallic and he was rattled enough to turn his sights that way before he realized it was only sun-glare bouncing off some part of his own car.
He moved ten feet to one side to change his field of view through the clumps. There was another rifle shot. Again it wasn’t aimed in his direction. It had a muffled explosive sound as if it were being fired away from him.
He moved again but still couldn’t see anything. There was a third rifle shot and then a fourth, these last two quite close together. Thoroughly mystified he crawled up over the lip of the gully into a cluster of piñons and slithered between them, his uniform soaked with mud, prising the branches apart with his left hand and poking the revolver out ahead of him.
Then he heard briefly the crunch and scrape of someone moving through heavy growth; after that the padding of footfalls in the soft earth, a man dogtrotting. The sound dwindled quickly.
4.
He edged cautiously back toward the dirt track and found the place where the rifleman had squatted down to shoot at him. Deep heel-indentations and pointed toes: cowboy boots. Everybody around here wore cowboy boots, that didn’t mean a thing.
Quite obviously the man was gone. When Watchman got to his feet he heard the distant revving of an engine being started. The roar settled down to a chug and went whining away in a low gear.
He put the revolver away in its clamshell holster and started running back toward his car in disgust.
Whoever it was had followed him up the highway in a car. So it wasn’t Joe Threepersons.
The Highway Patrol cruiser squatted like a derelict on its rims. Watchman walked around the car and stared unhappily at the four bullet-shredded flat tires.
He broke a leafy twig off a scrub oak and rubbed it between his palms to clean them. Then he contemplated the 6.3-mile walk back to the highway.
You’re being a pretty stupid Indian. He tramped over to the car. The bottom of the door scraped the ground when he dragged it open.
It hadn’t occurred to the rifleman to disable the police radio. Watchman switched it on and hoped he hadn’t parked in a dead spot and put the microphone close to his lips.
“Niner Zero. Niner Zero. I have a Code Ten-thirteen.”
“Dispatch to Niner Zero. Go ahead on Ten-Thirteen.”
In an embarrassed mutter he explained where he was and the girl on the radio desk had to ask him to repeat it. Finally he got it across to her and asked her to make contact with Trooper Buck Stevens and ask Stevens to bring him a few items. When the awkward dialogue concluded he sprocketed the microphone and reached for his coffee thermos.
He left the door open in the heat; he settled back on the seat, caked with mud, and pulled his hat brim down over his eyes. It would take a while.
Sitting in a half-doze he reviewed the events that had sentenced him to this.
CHAPTER TWO
THE WALLED Arizona State Prison was surrounded by several acres of cropland contained within an eight-foot-high Anchor fence topped with nine parallel strands of barbwire strung in a configuration which in cross section resembled an arrowhead. There were no watchtowers on the fence.
From the corner where the north road intersected U.S. 80-89, the fence ran south along the shrubbed shoulder and travelers on the highway could glance out of their car windows and see small groups of prisoners working the farm fields, guarded by correctional officers who worked in pairs on horseback, armed with riot shotguns and hunting rifles.
The prison had been built just after the turn of the century to replace the infamous and medievally rancid Territorial Penitentiary at Yuma. The present facility stood midway between Phoenix and Tuscon on the arid outskirts of Florence. It was antiquated and inevitably overcrowded. Its administration was as enlightened as could be expected—the state’s penal budget was insanely low—and conditions inside were “average” by national comparisons. It was the state’s Maximum Security Prison but at frequent intervals it had provided assurances that it was not escape-proof.
Only three highways led out of Florence and these were susceptible to rapid interdiction by cars of the Pinal County Sheriff and the Arizona Highway Patrol. Once a man broke out of Florence prison he had little choice but to strike out on foot into barren country where summer heat clung to the ground like melted tar and the pursuit was an amalgam of helicopters, Jeeps, packs of hounds, horsemen and Indian trackers. Yet prisoners kept breaking out and usually one or two fugitives got shot to death by overzealous manhunters but that was regarded as being part of the game because it was a country in which Westerns were very popular and it was no disgrace to die with your boots on.
Most of those who attempted to escape were chronic losers, the ones serving terms of twenty-to-life whose chances at early parole had been destroyed by circumstance, luck or their own behavior.
Fully half the population of the cells spoke no English or next to none. Some were Chicanos: Mexican-Americans who spoke Spanish. Others were Indians who spoke minimal Spanish, no English, and bits and pieces of native American dialects understood by no one outside their own villages. Unable to communicate with their lawyers they had been convicted and sentenced.
Language did not end the problem. The regulations of Anglo law made little sense to Indians whose own laws were based on logic instead of statute, reason instead of prejudice, and compensation of victims instead of punishment of criminals. An Indian who caused another Indian an injury that laid him up was required by tribal law to take upon himself the victim’s job and support of his family until the victim was ready to do his own work again. An Indian did not understand laws that sent him to prison while his victim’s fa
mily starved because there was no one to harvest the crops or care for the animals.
The Indian in Florence prison came to understand that he could not expect sanity or reasonable justice in an Anglo judicial-penal system. It was therefore sensible to get out of the place and run into the desert where a man could make his own justice with the earth.
Five prisoners were involved in the July 5 escape. Three were Chicanos and two were Indians: one Papago and one White Mountain Apache.
The break had taken place late in the afternoon. It was the day after the holiday and by their own later admission the two guards were hung over. Evidently the prisoners had taken this into account in planning the time of their break.
The five were not close friends or comrades-in-crime; it was just that they happened to be the five individuals who had been assigned to that particular work detail on that particular afternoon.
The Weather Bureau’s recorded high-temperature for the day, reached just after two in the afternoon, was 104 degrees Fahrenheit. By half-past-four the temperature had not dropped more than two or three degrees and the two horseback guards had posted themselves under the spindly trees that threw a bit of shade alongside the employees’ houses, just within the high fence.
The five prisoners were weeding. The rows were planted in sweet corn but the stalks were not yet two feet high; there was no problem of visibility and the horseback guards were reputed to be expert marksmen.
The five prisoners worked five adjacent parallel rows so that the guards could watch them without distraction. Each prisoner dragged a large burlap sack into which the pulled weeds were stuffed. Ordinarily the guards walked their horses around close to the prisoners but it had been a very hot week and these were not especially troublesome prisoners. By the late afternoon when the prisoners were down at the far end of their rows, the guards were separated from them by the full width of the field and the prisoners were separated from U.S. 80-89 by only a twenty-foot strip of ground and the Anchor Fence.
At first it was not clear whether the beige 1968 Chevrolet came along as part of an outside plan or whether the prisoners simply waited until they saw a car approaching from the south, then went over the fence and commandeered the car by standing in the road in front of it and forcing it to stop or run them down.
They went over the fence by tossing their burlaps across the barbwire and vaulting the nine-foot barrier by boosting one another and by monkeying up the woven-wire Anchor steel with fingers and boot-toes. It was no great athletic feat; the burlap protected them from the barbwire and the only real risk came from the rifles of the two guards under the trees. But the guards had the sun in their eyes and the prisoners were in constant motion once they set their plan in operation. The guards reacted slowly and when they did their shooting was poor; all five of the prisoners got away.
The beige Chevrolet stopped, the convicts squeezed into it, doors slammed, the car moved away to the north.
It was several minutes before the facts were sorted out and several more before alarms were issued. By then the escape car had had time to get ten miles from the prison. The warden alerted enforcement agencies and roadblocks were set up on the Pinal Pioneer Parkway to the south, on the highway below Florence Junction to the north, and on State Highway 287 between Valley Farms and the Casa Grande ruins to the west.
Units of the County Sheriff’s office and the Highway Patrol met for a briefing at the prison at seven o’clock and the hunt went into operation by seven-fifteen. Local police within the town were already searching all streets and driveways and garages for the missing car; three beige Chevrolets were investigated but all of them were owned locally and quickly cleared of suspicion of involvement. Two ranchers arrived at the prison in horse-vans with packs of hunting hounds, and a helicopter like a bloated mosquito hovered near the prison yard, the setting sun throwing a sharp reflection off its Plexiglas bubble.
Scout planes made ground-search patterns and at Florence the operation was coordinated in the warden’s office by the warden, the senior Undersheriff, and Captain Fred Custis of the Arizona Highway Patrol.
Late in the twilight a search plane reported a light-colored car apparently abandoned in a desert draw about a mile off U.S. 80-89 up toward Mineral Mountain. The site was some sixteen miles northeast of the prison and Captain Custis immediately dispatched two Jeeps and a Dodge Power Wagon filled with hounds.
Some time was wasted debating the feasibility of throwing up a cordon of men around the area—the fugitives were on foot now and had only some two hours’ jump on the pursuit; they had to be somewhere in the hills within a ten-mile radius. But the logistics were prohibitive and so was the cost; it was decided to entrust the hunt to the dogs. Still the officers were edgy because if the car belonged to confederates of the convicts it was possible the convicts were now armed. A deputy radioed Florence the license number of the car and the information was put through to DMV Phoenix but it would be a while before they would ascertain the identity of the car’s owner.
One of the deputies affixed a red battery-lamp to the collar of the leading hound and the dogs were turned loose to follow the spoor, which was given by items of clothing from the escapees’ prison cells. The dogs ran baying into the hills and the officers in their Jeeps chased the bobbing red lamp, five men to a Jeep, armed with pump rifles.
The escape car had been abandoned here because the country began to buckle and heave almost immediately beyond it; this was as far as a car could go. The Jeeps ran with full headlight beams but it was hard going; the deputies almost pitched out on some of the hills and several times the dogs got too far ahead and the trainers had to whistle them in. Frequently the headlight beams swept wildly across the sky like air-raid searchlights. Probably the fugitives could see them coming but it couldn’t be helped: a Jeep with a broken axle was useless.
At nine-fifteen the baying changed in volume and tone and the trainers knew the dogs had closed.
The Jeeps stopped on a hillside and one man remained on guard, moving the Jeeps periodically to play the headlights against the opposite slope where the dogs circled a high clutter of boulders.
The police fanned out to cross the canyon on foot, carrying flashlights and weapons, moving slowly with their muscles braced against half-expected bullets. But the convicts weren’t shooting the dogs and this led the police to believe that perhaps after all they weren’t armed.
When the police approached within flashlight range they found the convicts in a tight knot around a middle-aged couple and the blade of a pocketknife was pressed against the woman’s throat.
The man and woman were being held by four convicts—a fact which only became important later. The immediate problem for the police was how to handle the situation and it looked like a stalemate. The convicts had two vulnerable and innocent hostages. They wanted free passage out, they wanted one of the Jeeps.
One of the deputies went back across to the Jeeps to radio Florence for instructions. On receipt of them he returned to the flashlit tableau and stalled for time with a series of arguments which were sensible but did not reach receptive ears.
The police might not try to stop the convicts as long as they kept their hostages, the deputy said, but this would not prevent the police from shadowing the convicts everywhere they went and if the convicts tried to harm the hostages to discourage their followers, the police would kill them.
At this point a rifle spoke. One of the deputies had slipped up the hill to one side and taken careful aim on the most exposed of the four convicts, a Mexican-American named Ruiz. The orders were to wound, not to kill. In this case either the shooting was imprecise or the deputy exceeded his orders; the convict Ruiz received the bullet through the bridge of his nose and dropped dead.
The other three convicts huddled close behind their frail human screen. The pocketknife drew a drop of blood from the woman’s throat but the convicts were not yet ready to destroy their only means of protection. They began to scream demands at the deputies an
d step by step the deputies gave ground, retreating across the canyon toward the Jeeps with the convicts in strange pursuit. From the darkness another rifle shot exploded but this one missed and after that the convicts began to move the hostages back and forth around them so that there was too much risk of hitting them.
Guided by the Jeep headlights the warden, the Under-sheriff, Captain Custis and their retinue of pilot fish arrived in a Land Cruiser and the Dodge Power Wagon. There was a whispered conference. Over on the dark hillsides several deputies were practicing psychological warfare by loudly working their bolts to throw cartridges into the chambers of their rifles.
The warden knew his convicts. He could see they were uncertain. He felt that time and resistance would abrade them into surrender.
The warden walked out into the blaze of headlights and offered to exchange himself for the civilian hostages. The offer was refused.
In sibilant Spanish the warden told the prisoners that they were cowards, that they had no macho, no cojones, that they would cook in hell like frying bacon for all eternity because of the unforgivable mortal sin they were committing against innocent bystanders. He spoke at some length and not without eloquence, and because the convicts listened to him he felt he had them.
In the meantime the dead Ruiz was carried over to the Power Wagon and the dogs were set to sniffing out the trail of the fifth escapee—the missing one—but they scented no spoor.
The warden was an effective talker, his Spanish was first-rate. He spoke of mercy and leniency, he tried to impress upon them that if they voluntarily released the hostages he would see to it that federal kidnapping charges were not pressed against them and that they would be liable for trial only on a charge of jailbreak; since they were all lifers the conviction would add nothing to their sentences.
Unfortunately this information had an effect opposite to that which the warden desired. It reminded the convicts of how little they had to lose. They seemed to be arguing and the warden suspended his sermon.
Threepersons Hunt Page 2