Brian Garfield: Relentless

“He’s back by the state line. Waiting to bottle up anybody who happened to get past me. What the hell, you mean nobody passed you guys either?”

Watchman just pointed at the tire tracks leading off toward the grove.

The Nevada cop’s face changed and he pushbuttoned his clamshell holster. When it popped open on its spring catch he lifted the service revolver out and turned to stand squarely facing the grove. “Do we go in after them or wait for reinforcements?”

Watchman suppressed a smile. “Let’s go in and have a look before we call out the troops.”

“Radio said there was four, five of them.”

“All right. But I doubt they’re in those trees.” Watchman was studying the black-rubber dashes on the road pavement-smears a car might have left if it locked its brakes trying to stop suddenly. Maybe somebody’d had a blowout; there was no telling how long that had been there; but it was all piecing together in Watchman’s mind and he didn’t bother taking out his gun when he began to walk toward the grove.

The other two trailed along gingerly and began to spread out to either side as they approached the trees. Watchman said, “Don’t get too jumpy.” The way he had it figured, all they were likely to find was an empty ’fifty-seven Buick.

He went in straight up because there was no point crouching and dodging. If there was anybody waiting inside those trees with a bead on him they’d nail him either way. He had a theory and he was sure enough of it to be confident he wasn’t going to draw any fire. Two of the sets of tire tracks were wide-set with narrow tread; there was a single track running down the middle, like a motorcycle spoor, and then there were three sets of tracks left by the Buick-it had come in, gone out, and come in again: therefore it was still here.

From boyhood his eyes had been trained to read signs left in the earth’s surface. You learned these things quickly when you grew up hunting strayed sheep across the broken badlands of the Window Rock country. For Buck Stevens and the Nevada trooper it wasn’t all that easy-the tire markings were a jumble of intertwining grooves, disorderly and blurred and often superimposed-but Stevens did say, “Is that a motorbike track?”

“I doubt it.” Watchman was about forty yards out now and the Nevada cop was bouncing his revolver nervously in his fist, eyes darting, trying to keep every inch of the grove covered.

The patch of scrub was crescent-shaped, perhaps eighty feet wide, with its convex face toward the road. No doubt it followed the course of an underground stream that came close enough to the surface, under artesian pressure, to support the root systems of the growth at this point. The tracks didn’t go straight into it; they went past the left-hand end and curled out of sight behind the scrub.

Watchman walked in the tracks, going around the end of the patch and sighting the gleam of sunlight reflected on metal. When he got past the obscuring branches he saw it was the chrome bumper of the Buick. They had parked it back here hard against the inside of the bend so it wouldn’t be spotted from the road.

Stevens was coming along behind him, gun lifted, and the Nevada cop had spread out to go around the far side of the grove; now he appeared beyond the Buick, face screwed up in bafflement.

Watchman walked over to the Buick and looked inside. The back seat was littered with what looked like a spilled pile of dirty laundry: nearly a dozen pairs of men’s trousers. There were five nylon stockings and four small gray-painted spray canisters, about the size of spray cans of shaving foam. The canisters had military markings in stencil.

The Nevada cop came up holstering his gun and peered inside over Watchman’s shoulder. “I just don’t get this.”

“They took everybody’s pants when they held up the bank To keep people from following them outside.”

“To hell with that. What I mean, they can’t have just disappeared into thin air.”

“That’s exactly what they did.”

Buck Stevens reached in through the open window and picked up one of the spray canisters. “Mace chemical, all right. Army issue-riot control. Maybe they got it out of an armory someplace.”

“Or maybe they had a source handy to them,” Watchman replied. “This whole thing feels like a military operation.”

The Nevada cop said, “I don’t get it. I don’t get any one bit of it.”

Watchman started to walk away. “Let’s get on that radio.”

“And tell them what?” the Nevada cop insisted, hurrying to catch up because Watchman had long legs and was using them.

Buck Stevens was hanging back to give the Buick a last glance. Soon enough there would be a crowd of technicians out here to go over it for microscopic clues but Watchman had seen all he needed to see. Mainly what had cinched it was those black dashes on the highway.

The Nevada cop said, “Maybe you ought to spell it out for us country boys.”

Buck Stevens caught up, dogtrotting, and Watchman said, “They broke a hole in the fence and hid it over there behind the brush. Baraclough came along in the Buick and picked them up, and they went into town and hit the bank, and I guess they had it all timed down to seconds. They must have worked it out how much time they needed-that’s why they scattered those guerrilla spikes on the road, to buy enough time to get back here and transfer everything out of the Buick.”

“What are you talking about? Motorcycles?”

Watchman made a face. They went through the hole in the fence and he pointed at the black dashes on the pavement. “Ever looked at the surface of an airport runway? Those are the marks a plane leaves when it lands. You’ve got thirty-seven miles of straight and level road here. It makes a good runway. They used an airplane.”

Buck Stevens said, “Smartass Inyun.”

“We’ve got to go around it,” Keith Walker said.

The Major beside him said, “Negative.”

“We haven’t got oxygen. I can’t get above it-hell, it goes up forty thousand feet anyway.”

He was scowling at the wall of tumbling storm clouds dead ahead. “We can cut around north of it.”

“We haven’t got time.”

“Nuts. You’re a long time dead.”

“You can cut it,” the Major said. “It might do you some good-prove something to yourself.”

After the number of missions Walker had flown he did not need to prove anything to anybody. What he said was, “Up yours, Major.” But he was thinking, I guess I could cut it. And then: Of course pilots always have to believe that. Christ don’t let him talk you into this one. And so he said, “Just this once we’re going to do things my way, Major.”

He gave it a little aileron and a little rudder-gingerly, because he was flying on the deck, holding less than two hundred feet above the hilltops. The mountain range ran along to starboard, parallel to his course, and he. was staying below it because of the radar at Nellis Air Force Base just outside Las Vegas.

He came around to a heading of Three Zero Five magnetic, vectoring north of Las Vegas VOR. The storm ahead of him was a black cascade, wall-to-wall violence. Under him cool air settled into gully shadows and hot air came rising explosively from the sunwhacked hilltops, and the ground turbulence kept the twin Apache bouncing around.

He had a broad-band receiver mounted below the dashboard, designed to detect radar transmissions, and he was picking up the jiggles of the flicking Nellis scanner circuit. But the mountains above him to starboard would absorb the signals and hide him in the scanner’s ground-return. They hadn’t picked him up; if they had, he would have seen a change in the interval of the signal-it would have gone to a quicker pattern, a fast localized sweep, but it wasn’t doing that. The radar didn’t worry him. The weather did. He had never been a white-knuckle flier but he had a survivor’s respect for enemy weather and he wasn’t confident of the aging Piper’s capacity for punishment.