Brian Garfield: Relentless

The Major was watching him and when Walker looked at him the Major smiled very slightly with his mouth. The opaque eyes blocked all argument and inquiry, turned all objections back, as effectively as if they had been the eyes of a dead man.

The Major said, “We don’t have enough gas to go around it.”

Walker considered that. His eyes swept the panel. The quivering flow meters, manifold pressures, temperatures. The gauges stood half-full; there had been no place to refuel since take-off this morning. With the weight of five passengers and the money she was running on rich mixtures and she didn’t have another four hundred miles in her tanks; they had the Beechcraft waiting on a dirt landing strip northwest of Reno and that was something more than three hundred miles from here in a straight line. To go around the storm would eat up another hundred and twenty miles and they just didn’t have it. The Major’s eyes didn’t miss a thing.

Walker said, “Then we won’t make it anyway. You know how much gas you eat up bucking a storm.”

“The winds are counterclockwise. Stay on the north side of the storm and you’ll have a tail wind.”

“More like a sixty-mile gale. It’ll shake this crate to pieces.”

The Major’s eyes just stood against him, like a knife blade-motionless but prepared to cut.

He had to think. Behind him in the passenger seats the others were talking loudly, keyed up, nervy. Eddie Burt was making exultant noises and Baraclough was saying in his flat nasal voice, “No need to smack your lips so loud,” but laughing off-key with excitement. The Piper 235 had seats for six, including pilot, and there were five men in it; the sixth seat held the duffel bags. Too cramped in here to count it but Baraclough had a good eye and had estimated it at a minimum of nine hundred thousand dollars. About ten cubic feet of tens, twenties, fifties and hundreds. Walker had hefted the four duffel bags when they’d put them aboard and the things weighed maybe sixty pounds each.

Baraclough was saying in a travelogue-narrator voice, “And now, happier but wearier, we bid a warm farewell to the home of the jolly green swag…”

“Jesus, will you please shut up?” Jack Hanratty was in a fever of terror. He couldn’t take heights, airplanes terrified him, and the Major was angry with him-back there in the car for a minute Walker had thought the Major was going to kill Hanratty for shotgunning the fat old Indian bank guard. The Major could have done it without working up a sweat; the Major was versed in a dozen methods of killing a man barehanded and silently and very quickly.

When somebody got killed during the commission of a felony all parties to the felony were automatically and equally guilty of first-degree murder. That was the felony-murder statute. Hanratty and his shotgun. The son of a bitch just had to carry that shotgun. Walker hadn’t even had a gun but Hanratty had made a murderer out of him. It was no wonder Hanratty was shaking: all five of them had got sucked into this mess by his nervous trigger finger.

The Major had drummed it into them time and time again while they were setting up the score. Arizona still has the death penalty. I don’t want anybody killed. I don’t even want anybody bruised. They’ll forget the money but there’s no statute of limitations on murder.

Hanratty and his fucking shotgun.

The fat old Indian guard had sneezed.

Sneezed.

It was the stupid little things that got you every time.

Walker had a tooth with a hole in it. Food got stuck there and made him suck on the tooth. He should have gone to a dentist weeks ago.

He glanced at the ASI and saw the airspeed was down to 140 in the thinning dead air ahead of the storm front. He gave the throttles a boost, up to seventy percent of power, got the engines in synch and adjusted the trim tabs. “Look, we can turn north, go up to Ely or Elko and set down. We could steal another plane there or maybe even a car.”

“No.”

“Why the hell not? They’ll get it figured out we used a plane. They’ll start an air search. If we switch to a car they won’t be looking for us. Why the hell not?”

“Because I’m telling you. Because it’s all worked out down to the button. We’re not going to start changing the plan now,” the Major said.

The engines made a harsh drone and there was a loose rivet somewhere, rattling. Walker pointed at the blackness ahead of them. It ran right up out of sight above them. The mountain peaks, running alongside their course on the right-hand side, disappeared right into the opacity of weather. The Nevada state line was somewhere under all that. “Look, we’ve got four or five minutes to make a turn and get out of the way of it, that’s all. That thing’s no autumn shower, Major, that’s a fucking blizzard. You saw the weather map.”

He had picked up the map overlay this morning at five o’clock at the Reno tower, when he’d filed the phony VFR flight plan for Salt Lake City. That had been the midnight weather report. At that time the storm had been crossing the California-Nevada line somewhere south of Reno and the projections indicated it would hit Vegas around midmorning and keep moving east toward Kingman at about twenty-five or thirty knots. But obviously it had gathered speed and shifted course since then. Now it was getting sawed up by the mountaintops northeast of Vegas and that meant it was dumping moisture.

He said, “There’s snow and hail in there.”

The Major glanced at the quivering needle of the outside-temperature gauge. It stood at 43 degrees, but Walker shook his head. “You don’t get this. We haven’t crossed the front yet. Inside there you’ll get a ten- or fifteen-degree drop. You get a hailstone driven by a sixty-knot wind and you can get bullet holes in the wings of a light plane. This is no Air Force cargo job, Major.”

In back the others had stopped talking: they could see the storm for themselves and it was beginning to penetrate past their other fears and past the excitement the money had generated.

Now Baraclough leaned forward and Walker could feel the man’s menthol-cigarette breath on his neck. “Listen, Major, I think he’s right. That’s no monsoon rainstorm.”

“Ice,” said Eddie Burt. “We don’t want to go into that.”

“Now you’re getting the idea,” Walker said. His mouth felt powder dry. He locked both fists on the split wheel and toed the rudder pedal with his right foot. “I’m turning.”

The Major stiffened to speak but then they hit the front and the plane stuttered. The blast of the wind hit the underbelly of the banking plane and skidded it back, and Walker, feeling her begin to slide, had to give her a heavy left aileron. It leveled her off and he let the wind push her around and complete the turn for him, sideslipping rather than banking. But now the mountains were dead ahead and he had to put on full power and lift the nose into a climb, and in the low air pressure she responded only sluggishly. Half a minute of this and he could see it was no good.

“We’re not going to make it,” he said. “We’ve got to turn around and get some altitude.”

The Major didn’t say anything. Walker didn’t have time to look at him, to measure his expression, but he knew what the Major’s face would be showing: irritation, not fear.

At least the Major wasn’t arguing with him.

He completed the ninety-degree turn and now he was headed east again, the way they had come, and the winds of the storm’s leading edge were pushing him forward while he climbed. He would have to pick up at least five or six thousand feet of additional altitude before he could think about turning north again and crossing over the mountains; in fact it would be better to climb 7,500 feet higher because you never knew what kind of downdrafts you might hit over those canyons. And with the low pressure of the air and the heavy load inside the plane she wasn’t going to climb that high very fast. It was going to take a while.