Steven Havill - Bitter Recoil

Francis nodded. “I’ll try to drop in on you later this evening. Behave yourself.” He smiled.

“And you get some rest, kid. You look like shit.” It felt good to be able to tell someone else that for a change.

Dr. Francis Guzman left, and I called the hospital gestapo to ask them if they’d let Father Nolan Parris enter the “R” zone. I had no desire to hash over his problems or his guilt that was no doubt rampaging after what had happened. It was simpler than that. I needed wheels, and Parris had access to a station wagon.

Age sixty-two is too late to worry about growing up and following the rules. There wasn’t anything wrong with me that wouldn’t heal as well elsewhere…where I might be more useful.

Nolan Parris hadn’t found his way through the multilevel labyrinth to my room when the telephone rang. I grabbed it. It was Tate. The old bastard must have been a mind reader.

“Bill, are you dressed?”

“Hell, no. I’m sitting here in a goddamn robe pretending I’m a nursing home patient. What’s up?”

“We got a break. A private pilot who was going to fly over and look at the forest fire says he saw Finn’s Blazer on one of the back roads of the reservation.”

“It’s not Finn’s goddamned Blazer and where was this? Which reservation?”

“Northwest of Grants somewhere…over by Haystack Mesa, they called it. He’s cornered at an old wildcat uranium mine. There’s dozens of them out that way. We’ve got it pinpointed on the map. A chopper is going to pick me up here in a minute.”

I was about to interrupt him and tell him that if I got left out of this one I’d curse his firstborn for generations. But there was a light knock on my door, and Nolan Parris stepped into the room. He was wearing his clerical suit, complete with white collar. I turned my attention back to the telephone.

“You have to pick me up, Pat.”

“That’s why I called. I cleared it with the hospital already. You need to get your old ass in gear, get dressed, and be at the helipad on the roof in about thirty minutes.”

“You got it.”

“And, Bill…”

“Yep?” I was already impatient to be off the phone.

“I’m not doing this as a favor to you. I want you to know that from the start. If it was up to me, you’d be locked in that hospital room for a week or so. I’m doing it because I was told to do it.”

I slammed on the brakes. I couldn’t imagine Pat Tate taking orders from anyone. “This is your case, Pat.”

“Damn right it’s my case. And it’s going to stay that way. But he’s got the child and this may be our only chance.” I heard the steady whup-whup of a helicopter in the background, and someone shouted at Tate. “I’ll talk with you in a few minutes. Finn must know he’s not going to slip through the net. He’s cornered, Bill. And he knows it. Now he wants to talk to you.”

“Finn wants to talk to…”

“Thirty minutes, Bill. Don’t make us wait.” Tate hung up and I stared out the window, the phone still in my hand. If the media had pried enough information out of Tate to know that the hospital was treating two survivors from the war on the mountain, Finn would have heard the news on any radio station. He knew my face. If he’d rifled through the glove compartment of the Blazer, he knew my name. The bastard wanted to negotiate.

I had forgotten that anyone else was in the room. Nolan Parris had heard enough though.

“Sheriff,” he said, and I turned around to look at him.

“You have to let me go along.” Parris limped across the room and touched my arm. He repeated his request, and I hung up the phone and pushed myself out of the chair.

“Why the hell not,” I said. If another passenger on the helicopter was all right with Pat Tate, it was fine with me. I didn’t know how they’d managed to corner the son of a bitch, but the rules had changed. Maybe the services of a priest would be useful.

Floyd’s Number Two was a vertical shaft sunk into the bleak, tan desert just off one corner of the Navajo reservation. The boneyard around the mine was littered with three decades of rusting hardware and trash.

By the time our helicopter arrived, there were five cops for every lizard.

H. T. Finn had taken the wrong turn. The two-track had swerved around an abrupt rise and then dead-ended at the mine headframe. My Blazer had been spotted earlier by a private pilot as the truck kicked up a plume of dust, heading west. The pilot had called the cops. A customs helicopter had given chase then ran out of fuel. They’d skipped back to Gallup, figuring it was either that or walk. If they’d stuck on Finn’s ass another minute, they’d have had him.

“In a day and a half, Finn could have been deep in Mexico, if he’d dodged all the right roadblocks!” I shouted at Tate over the noise of the chopper. “This is only a hundred miles from San Estevan, as the crow flies!”

Tate pointed at my Blazer and I had my answer. A long, jagged rent tore the bodywork from the driver’s door back to the bumper. From where I stood I could see that Finn had had to mount the spare tire, a ratty summer tread two sizes smaller than the rest.

He’d tangled with something. Too bad it hadn’t ripped his goddamn arms off. If Daisy had been hurt, I’d rip his arms off.

We made our way through the flying dirt and dust to the old headframe. I ignored all the curious faces except one.

I knew Sheriff Edwin Sterns from days gone by-felons rarely bother to observe county lines, and over the years a cop meets his compadres from other agencies. This county was Sterns’s-and it fitted him, big, lazy, and all but empty.

He was a tall, gangly man with a potbelly that looked like he was carrying a bedpan under his shirt. He’d been a state trooper years before but had found their military bearing too much trouble to imitate.

“How’d you rope this one, Gastner?” he asked as we shook hands. “And what the hell brings you all the way north into God’s country?”

“Just lucky.”

Tate said, “He’s on vacation.”

Sterns shook his head in wonder. “Hell of a vacation.” He turned and motioned us over to the headframe.

The mine shaft gaped, the opening ten feet square. The damn hole went straight down into the earth. The shaft’s edges were heavily timbered, and a thin grating of woven steel like the troops used to make runways over soggy ground in Vietnam covered the opening. The mesh rested on an H-frame of two-inch angle iron. At one time a barbed-wire fence had enclosed the area, but now that was broken and scattered. I shuffled carefully to the edge and looked down. The shaft was bottomless black.

Directly across from where I stood, a corner of the mesh had been pried up. Below the torn mesh, a steel ladder disappeared into the depths. The ladder hugged the wall of the shaft, the rungs no more than four inches from the timbers to which the ladder frame was bolted. There was no safety cage around the ladder. Once a man was on his way down, there was no other support if his hands should slip from the rust-covered, half-inch-diameter rungs…just a lot of empty space. It gave me the willies.

“And he’s down in there? With the child?”

“Sure as hell,” Sterns said.

I wasn’t a bit surprised that no one had followed Finn down inside that hole.

“We’ve got to get Daisy out of there,” Parris said. His eyes were wild, and I took him by the arm. He looked like he wanted to step out on the mesh.

“Shit,” I said and looked westward. “If it was me, I’d rather take my chances walking out across the desert than sliding down in that hole. And he had my Blazer, for God’s sakes. He could have kept going, road or no road.”