Relentless

3

One of the FBI technicians offered a pack with a half-extended cigarette and Vickers, nodding thanks, took it and put it in his mouth and poked his face forward to take a light from the technician’s cupped match.

The technician waved his hand to extinguish the match. “Been dead two and a half, three hours. Not more.” He turned to Watchman: “The front door was open when you got here?”

“Yes. It looks like the kind of door that’s never shut.” Watchman’s eyes went beyond the technician to Vickers. “While you were on your way here I called Olsen’s horse ranch. Asked them to send a couple of four-wheel-drive trucks and horse trailers over here. All right?”

Vickers looked up at him; he had been bending down to look at the one-millionth-scale contour map on the table. “You think you can catch them in this country with trucks?”

“We can get fifteen miles back in there and use horses from there. We’ll gain at least an hour.”

“They’ve probably got three hours’ jump on us.”

“And they’ve got the woman,” the technician said. He was down on one knee, spreading a blanket over the dead deputy.

Watchman turned to Buck Stevens. “They left three horses in the barn. Let’s get saddles on them.”