Brian Garfield: Relentless

If only it wasn’t so God damned cold. He was shivering in his clothes. His toes hurt with a bony kind of pain that was altogether different from the numbness he’d fought against when he was leading them through that hell of a blizzard. Then he’d been moving, making an active fight of it, and that was what he was best at.

None of them knew how much it had taken out of him, breaking trail in that storm. At the end of it he’d been drunk in his legs, shaking with fatigue, an incredibly deep drained ache in all his fibers.

This coldness wasn’t the blasting fury of the blizzard. It was still, soundless, clear; there was no way to fight it. Fifteen or twenty below, he judged. His lips were cracked, his eyes felt painful. It was hard to breathe. He kept clenching and unclenching his hands inside his gloves.

The horse came plunging down the hillside and he watched it come. Nobody on board.

He looked around in the trees for sign of movement and once he thought he saw something sliding between trees but he wasn’t sure and he just waited. He had good cover here. He squatted in a groined joining of two ice-split boulders. They formed a kind of cave, a right-angle corner with a flat shelf of rock lying across the top. Nobody could creep up behind him. The cop had to come at him from the front. Either the cop would come in sight between the boulders in front of him or the cop would come over the top. Probably the former; the cop wouldn’t expose himself on the skyline by climbing over the top. When the cop appeared, Hargit would yank the rope and the cop would hear the click of the grenade handle flying off; the cop would dive for cover and the grenade would explode and Hargit would know where the cop was but the cop wouldn’t know where Hargit was. That would give him his shot at the cop.

Hargit squatted with one leg bent to run, and laid the rifle across his thigh. Carefully he bit into the fingertips of his right-hand glove and pulled his hand out of it, and put the glove in his pocket.

The steel haft and trigger of the rifle were very cold to the touch. He wrapped his hand around them, deliberately disregarding the icy pain. Positioned his index finger on the trigger and lifted the rifle, braced his left elbow on his bent knee and snugged the stock into the hollow of his shoulder. He was ready to swivel toward any point within the range of his vision.

He lifted his right arm until the rope tautened. That was good: one yank of his right arm and he’d pull the pin. He wouldn’t even have to take his hand off the trigger.

He settled in to wait. His breath made a frosty film on the metal breechbolt of the rifle. The cold air sliced into the bare knuckles of his right hand and the steel conducted frigid chills into his bones but as soon as he’d shot the cop he’d rub his hand to warm it up and then he’d put his glove on again.

He heard the horse clattering around in the rocks and he steadied his aim and waited for the cop to come to him.

Watchman wormed into the boulders on his elbows with his rifle in an infantryman’s carry across his forearms but when he got into the rocks he laid the rifle down and left it. If there was shooting in here it would be at close quarters and for that a pistol was more maneuverable. He stood up, flat against a boulder that towered above his head, and removed the service revolver from his holster and put the revolver in the pocket of his mackinaw. Then he removed his glove and put his hand on the grip of the revolver deep inside the sheepskin pocket.

He moved very slowly through the rocks. He did not crawl; he walked, bent over in a crouch, because he wanted his legs under him in case he had to jump for cover fast. Every turning in the maze of tumbled passages was a potential ambush and he stopped at every pace to study the new contours that his progress revealed. Several times he turned into blind clotures and had to retrace his steps. Once he climbed onto a handy shelf and put his head up cautiously to look around. He saw only the piled-up rocks in a jumbled panorama. His horse was moving around a few yards away; he saw its ears and the saddle horn go past a rockpile. He backed down and circled the boulder and moved on.

The shadows were deep and threatening. He moved very slowly and without sound. The pressure of time grated on the raw exposed ends of his nerves because there was always the chance Hargit wasn’t in here at all, the chance that Hargit had kept riding and was halfway to the flats by now, but Hargit was never going to find a better spot for an ambush than this one and Watchman had to rely on his own judgment of Hargit’s conceit.

The adrenalin pumping through his body made his hands shake. He took a step forward, easing around the jutting shoulder of a house-size rock, and that was when he heard the snick and clack of the grenade handle flying free.

He saw it spinning across the granite and he flung himself flat below the rock shelf.

The blast was ear-splitting. Shrapnel clanged off rock facets above his head and a chipped rock splinter fell hot against his calf.

He was still rolling, desperately spinning his head to catch sight of Hargit because Hargit had to be there somewhere drawing a bead on him; he tugged at the revolver in his pocket and it snagged, and he ripped the pocket wide open dragging the gun out, and now he saw Hargit in the dim shadows under a balanced-rock cave, the snow reflections pale against the graven face, the rifle muzzle black and steadying, and he knew he didn’t have nearly enough time to bring his revolver around before Hargit killed him but he had to make the try.

The rifle bore was dead-aimed at him and he waited with his body braced for the bullet while his arm came up incredibly slowly with the revolver. And still Hargit wasn’t shooting, Hargit’s eyes went wide with alarm and terror and disbelief, and Watchman snapped a shot from the ground. It missed; the bullet whanged off the rocks; and the rifle stirred in Hargit’s arms but did not fire, and Watchman lifted the revolver at arm’s length and pulled the trigger and saw, vividly, the jump and puff of Hargit’s coat as the flesh received the bullet.

The frenzied glitter of Hargit’s eyes changed focus. He was buckling, the rifle dipping toward the ground, he folded up over the rifle and fell over on his side with his knees drawing up against his chest.

Watchman ran forward and kicked the rifle away. The Major’s eyes brooded up toward him dully, not tracking properly, and slowly the Major’s right hand fell to his side. The fingers were bluish in the bad light and Watchman understood then: the man had kept his hand wrapped around cold steel too long, the fingers had gone rigid in the subzero night It was something Watchman had known and Hargit had not known and now, crouching down beside the man, Watchman heard himself say, “I guess I’m a better Indian, Major.”

He saw the puzzlement in Hargit’s dying eyes. Hargit had no idea what he was talking about.

The reaction hit Watchman then and his jaws began to chatter like a pneumatic hammer.

The FBI agent was counting the money. He packed it back into the duffel bags and sealed it with adhesive tape from the first-aid kit and initialed it under the figure he had written: “931,670.” Watchman signed his initials in a crabbed hand below Vickers’.

They had laid out the two dead bodies-Hargit and Hanratty-and covered them with blankets and they were all waiting for the choppers. They had seen the first chopper, go over already; it had waggled its rotors and kept climbing toward the summit to pick up Mrs. Lansford and Keith Walker. Now they heard the flut-flut-flut of another helicopter coming up from the flats and Vickers got to his feet and shaded his eyes in the morning sun to look for it. The sun made little clouds of steam rise from the ice surface on the brush flat.