Relentless

10

There had been a hitch that had almost soured the whole thing but Walker hadn’t found out about it until afterward, when Baraclough had told them about it.

Baraclough had cruised through San Miguel on Thursday afternoon to have a last look around. Everything looked calm and he had driven across the plateau and up over the mountains to Fredonia to spend the night in a motel. There was no point hanging around San Miguel overnight because someone later might remember having seen him there; it made sense to drive a few extra miles and spend the night elsewhere. There would be plenty of time to drive back to San Miguel Friday morning and Baraclough had it planned nicely to arrive in San Miguel not more than twenty minutes ahead of time so as to spend as little visible time there as possible, waiting for the plane to land on the highway beyond town.

Only when he’d gone out after breakfast to drive away from the Fredonia motel, the Lincoln had refused to start.

By that time the rest of them were already airborne out of Reno and Baraclough didn’t have a radio to make contact with them. He spent a few minutes angrily poking around under the hood of the Lincoln and finally determined the trouble was in the fuel pump. Nothing serious, but it would have taken time to get it towed to a gas station and even then there was not much chance this town would have the right parts in stock.

In a town that tiny it wasn’t easy to boost a car. Baraclough had spent almost an hour in fruitless exploration and by the end of it he felt clammy and slightly panicky, sweating in the cool mountain air.

Finally the old Buick came down out of the pines and stopped at the curb and Baraclough watched the driver get out carelessly, leaving the keys in the car. The man walked half a block and turned into a cafe. Baraclough crossed the street and looked in through the window-if the man was just having coffee it wouldn’t work.

The man was putting on an apron and going around behind the short-order counter.

Baraclough walked up the street, got into the Buick, drove back to his motel. He had a bad ten minutes there; he parked the Buick around the side of the motel where nobody was likely to see it, but he had to make several trips to transfer all the gear from the Lincoln into the Buick and that was hard to do without looking like a thief.

When he drove out of town he kept his head down and hoped no one would recognize the Buick or notice a stranger was driving it.

Nobody raised any alarums but by then he was running twenty minutes behind schedule and he had to push the old kluge up to its maximum-and a hick cop had pulled him over.

“I’d have shot the son of a bitch but he had a partner back in the car. Anyhow it takes a special kind of stupidity to leave dead cops around.”

On his way into San Miguel he had watched the power lines and when they began to diverge from the highway he pulled off into a side street to follow them; tossed his rope over the high lines, tied both ends to the Buick and pulled the cables down.

Then he had driven straight through San Miguel, glancing at the bank as he passed it. It was just about lunchtime and there was quite a crowd of workers streaming into the place. That would subside by one-thirty or so and then the next mob would appear about three o’clock when the shifts began to change. They had settled on two o’clock as the best time to hit the bank.

He had sped through the fringe of hills, emerged on the flats and pulled over opposite the crescent grove of scrub the Major had singled out two weeks earlier. Baraclough had got out the wirecutters and portable chain saw and taken down forty feet of roadside barbed-wire fence. Then he’d pulled the power lines down and driven the Buick in through the hole in the fence, jounced across the flats and concealed the car behind the grove.

By then the drone of the Apache’s twin engines was an insistent buzz in his ears and when he stepped out of the Buick he saw it making a sweep along the highway and pulling up and turning a slow gentle circle. Then he saw the stake-bed truck meandering along the highway.

The plane had to circle for ten minutes while three more cars and trucks went by. Then Walker had climbed for an altitude search, swept the highway in both directions with his inspection, and put the Apache into a fast nose-down descent. He made a quick low S-turn to come in final on the pavement and set the Apache down in a short landing which jarred the passengers but took the minimum time. He had judged the distance well; standing on the brakes he had the speed down sufficiently to make the nose-wheel turn into the gap in the fence and taxi straight across the flat, around the edge of the grove and into the little hidden pocket in back.

Baraclough had been standing beside the Buick with his palm out, knowing they’d be disturbed by sight of the unfamiliar car. When the rest of them climbed out of the airplane they had twenty minutes to spare before starting for town so Baraclough had told them his story.