Relentless

4

The clouds to the west didn’t look sinister yet but up here it could hit very fast. They cleared the edge of town and Watchman put the cruiser up to sixty on the road heading east toward the mountains. A light plane went by overhead at four or five thousand feet with a buzzing sound that irritated Watchman: there were several fly-by-night outfits over on the Utah and Nevada slopes which made a business out of taking rich poachers into the Arizona high country at night to hunt antelope and whitetail from slow, low-flying planes equipped with enormous floodlamps that could pin an animal, dazzle it, paralyze it until the arrogant “sportsmen” had made their kill. Then the guide outfit would send in a flunky in a pickup truck to collect the carcass and if the pickup got intercepted the driver would claim he had collided with the animal and killed it by accident. Game wardens seldom had time or facilities to perform autopsies and most of the time the flying poachers got away with it.

This plane didn’t look like a hunter; more like a business executive’s charter job. One of those Twin Apaches that seated seven or eight. It went over with a harsh drone, flying west toward the clouds, probably headed for Las Vegas or Reno.

“They’re likely to run into some turbulence, heading that way,” Stevens observed.

“Those guys usually know what they’re doing.” Watchman had a secret admiration for pilots. He’d only been up in airplanes a few times, mostly in big liners, but every time he happened to drive past a private airport he would run his eyes over the little planes and start to think about maybe investing a little money in flying lessons and getting himself a license. The Highway Patrol had a few planes and maybe…

It was idle fantasy; nothing was likely to come of it but daydreams. Basically he was a groundling, rooted in the earth. In the Army after high school he’d been MOS Infantry all the way-that had been in ’fifty-seven and ’fifty-eight-and they’d flown him all the way from Fort Bliss to West Berlin during the crisis but there’d been no action and when he had returned to the States they had refused his application for transfer into the Military Police, so he’d let his enlistment expire and come back to school on the GI Bill-two years at the State College in Flagstaff and then a rookie beat with the Highway Patrol. At thirty-three he had been a cop almost exactly one-third of his lifetime. To show for it, he had three commendations, two citations for bravery, and five written reprimands.

Just the same it was a long way up for a Dine, which was the Navajo word for Navajo (Navajo being an Apache word that meant “enemy”). He had been born in 1938 in one of four mud-brush hogans that belonged to the cluster of his grandmother’s family-grandmother and married daughters and their children-just about dead center on the sixteen-million-acre Window Rock Reservation. When he was a kid they’d had to carry water up to the hogan in a bucket from a well a quarter mile away and it was a twenty-five-mile walk to the trading post where his father worked as an Agency cop. You never got out of debt to the white trader. But you were taught never to complain. In those days there hadn’t been any Red Power movements but Watchman’s father had been a man of strength who had refused to be degraded by charity or the patronizing paternalism of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The old man had had one thing nobody had ever taken away from him and that was his sense of humor; and that was Sam Watchman’s legacy. No point in fighting the Indian wars all over again; the thing to do was get along with folks, have a few laughs, love a good woman and take pride in the dignity of your work. On the college psychological tests there had been a question, “How would you characterize yourself?” and of the five choices for answers Watchman had picked “Easygoing.” He just didn’t understand folks who made one big crisis out of life.

They passed Holcombe’s roadside oasis-half a dozen sycamores, a dusty trailer park, a decrepit old motel with five “modern cabins” and Holcombe’s store and filling station with its untrue sign, “Last Gas Before Desert.” Watchman got comfortable in the seat for the long afternoon’s drive ahead, with his wrist hooked over the top of the steering wheel and his left elbow poking out the window, and then the radio coughed and sputtered and Buck Stevens reached down to turn up the volume against the noise of the wind.

“… Repeat, we have a Code Ten Thirteen from San Miguel. Car Niner Zero, acknowledge. Car Niner Zero.”

Watchman plucked the mike off its sprocket and took his foot off the gas while he talked into the microphone. “Niner Zero to Dispatch, Niner Zero to Dispatch. Go ahead-what’s the ruckus?”

“We have a Ten Thirteen from San Miguel, Officer Needs Assistance. Robbery in progress-repeat, robbery in progress. That you, Sam?”

“Aeah, Ernie, go ahead.” He had the brakes on now to swing wide for a U-turn.

Buck Stevens sat up higher in his seat. “What the fuck?…” The shape of his blue eyes was changing.

The rear wheels slewed in the gravel as Watchman hung the end-for-end turn on the shoulders and started back the way they had come. The radio kept coughing: “It looks like the San Miguel bank, Sam.”

Watchman’s eye flicked the passing milepost-twenty-three more miles into town. Stevens was switching on the flasher. Watchman cranked his window closed to hear the two-way’s speaker. The needle climbed up past the eighty m.p.h. mark.

“… coming in on the emergency shortwave band. Their teletype lines must be down and we can’t get through on the phone. It could be some ham operator pulling a hoax but they’ve got the right signal codes. It keeps fading in and out-pretty weak. Something about robbery in progress, officer needs assistance, maybe the bank. It’s coming in garbled-possibly one of Cunningham’s company cops on the key.”

“We’re on our way.”

“How far out are you?”

“Be there in fourteer minutes.” Watchman saw Buck Stevens’ hand reach the jolting dashboard and grip its edge. “We’re east of town. You’d better put a stopper on the road west.”

“Affirmative, Niner Zero. Two Nevada patrol cars coming east from the state line. They’ll cross the line in seven minutes.”

They worked like that up here, operating vaguely under” interstate “hot pursuit” statutes; in fact a Utah sheriff’s office regularly covered the northwest corner of Arizona’s Mohave County. It had to be done that way. Watchman’s was the only Arizona police car in fifteen thousand square miles.

Even so it would take the two Nevada cars an hour to reach San Miguel.

Watchman reached up for the siren switch. “God knows what we’ll run into-better get armed.”

Buck Stevens was pale. He twisted in the seat to get at the rack inside the back door that held the riot shotgun and rifle; dragged both weapons over the back of the seat and held them across his knees. In the corner of his vision Watchman saw the rookie’s Adam’s apple shift up and down.

They whipped past the city-limit sign and several cars and pickups crowded over close to the curb to let them by. Watchman brought the speed down and came into the last bend at forty; the cruiser swayed on its springs, tires wailing, the ten-foot spring-mounted radio antenna lashing violently from its mountings on the rear bumper.

A small crowd stood gaping outside the bank and Watchman slid in at the curb, switched off the siren but left the flasher on. “Never mind the guns.” People in crowds could be stupid but not that stupid; if there was any chance of shooting here these people would have been behind cover. Conclusion: if the bank had been robbed, the robbers had already fled.

The crowd was a tight knot around the door and when Watchman and Stevens came across the curb the crowd parted like the waters of the Red Sea. A barefoot kid in frayed jeans stood open-mouthed with his nose pressed to the window. Watchman went inside.

People were clustered inside the bank. Most of the men had no trousers on.

There was a little group crouched around an object on the floor by the rear teller’s cage.

There was a lot of talking, everybody shouting at one another and at Watchman. He lifted his voice; “All right, let’s hold it down.”

The racket subsided from clamor to mutter. A thin shape straightened and detached itself from the knot of people by the teller’s cage-Jace Cunningham, looking greenish and soft around the mouth. He came forward quickly and showed his consternation by shaking his head grievously and letting his hand dangle limply at the wrist, shaking it back and forth as if wearily drying his fingertips. “Jesus H. Christ.” He had his pants on.

“What happened, Jace?”

“I ain’t sure. I wasn’t here-I just got here. But somebody hit the bank, a bunch of them. They got the cash, pretty close to a million. And that over there…”

Past the crowded people Watchman could see a pair of boots protruding and he heard Cunningham say, “They killed Jasper Simalie, Sam.”