Relentless

7

Walker came awake and the first thing that drew his attention was the aching stiffness in all his joints. He was saddlesore, his feet hurt, he felt as if he had arthritis in his knees and charleyhorses in the tendons of his ankles and calves. And he was still cold. Not frozen numb as he had been before, but chattering painful cold.

He was lying on his back wrapped in two blankets with his sock feet toward the stove. The shack was thick with a steamy moisture that came off the drying hides of the horses and smelled foul.

Probably there were a lot of things to think about but his mind wasn’t tracking well. He lay on his back and rolled his head slowly from side to side to look around and see how things looked. The inside walls looked flimsy and there was no insulation but the wind wasn’t getting inside; it was probably a split-log cabin, well chinked on the outside. He could hear occasional brittle cracks outside against the steady drumming of the wind-icicles breaking off. Well there probably wasn’t any ranger up in the tower. From what he had seen of forest watchtowers they weren’t anything but six-foot-square platforms surrounded by plate glass. They had probably recalled the ranger when they knew there was a big blow coming.

The potbelly stove had a flat top with a handle sticking out of it. That was where the ranger did his cooking. One narrow bunk built against a wall-the Major was asleep on it now, his face poking out of the blankets. A sheet-metal enclosure in one corner beyond the stove flue-that would be the plumbing, one of those portable shower-toilet-sink arrangements, probably brought in by helicopter. There would be a water tank outside. They didn’t equip these places for winter use; firewatching was a summer-fall job.

There was one comfortable reading chair, lightweight but well cushioned. Eddie Burt was in it, fast asleep, his chin down on his chest.

Half a dozen shelves above the stove with tins of food. A little office-size refrigerator behind Burt’s chair. Probably a diesel generator outside somewhere: there were electric light fixtures hanging from the rafters but the current wasn’t on now. The windows were boarded up from the outside: possibly the ranger had closed up for the winter.

On the floor just inside the front door lay a broken padlock and that explained how the Major had got in.

Someone-Baraclough-had run the nylon rope around two of the upright roof-supports and anchored them to windowsill coat hooks to make an enclosure that kept the horses in their area. Their area took up three quarters of the floor space. There was left only the L-shaped sector from the stove to the lavatory to the bunk. Hanratty lay on the floor at the foot of the bunk, snoring with his mouth open. Baraclough sat on the floor with a rifle across his knees, smoking. Mrs. Lansford was sitting with her back against the lavatory wall, arms wrapped around her knees, brooding toward the stove.

Walker rolled his head, still not getting up, and looked at the horses. The cinches had been loosened but they had been left saddled. There was nothing to feed them. They were docile, asleep on their feet; probably thankful to be in out of the wind, too exhausted to feel their hunger.

He looked over at Mrs. Lansford and then at Baraclough. Baraclough had turned his head: he was staring at the woman, eyes hooded and erotic and amorally detached-amused, yet reflecting vicious thoughts. That cold stare of Baraclough’s could mesmerize you.

If Mrs. Lansford was aware of Baraclough’s stare she gave no sign of it. She sat with her forehead against her drawn-up knees. Her hair hung damp and heavy against her cheeks, hiding her face.

Baraclough flicked a cigarette against the back of his hand; yawned and patted his lips.

The blizzard made a great battering racket against the cabin. It muffled the occasional stirrings of the horses. Walker kept his eyes slitted and pretended to be asleep; he had Baraclough and the woman in the narrowed range of his vision and now his brain began to work.

There were hunters and there were killers. Sometimes one man could be both but the qualities were separate and Baraclough was a killer: he took pleasure in it, it gave him something like a sexual relief. Walker had seen it when Baraclough had come out of the ranch house and left the cop dead inside.

This whole thing had gone sour. Walker’s tongue sucked his sore tooth and he saw the way Baraclough’s hands rested on the rifle in his lap, and it was obvious that when the time came to murder Mrs. Lansford it would be Baraclough who would do it.

There hadn’t ever been any doubt in his mind that she was going to be killed. It was possible that by now the cops had put some kind of tracer on them and begun to get clues to their identities, but they’d all been pretty careful about that and most likely the cops still didn’t know who they were chasing. That was what would make it possible for them to separate in Utah and melt into the itinerant traffic that flowed endlessly toward California. They had to safeguard their anonymity and now Mrs. Lansford was the only outsider who could identify them. Obviously the Major wasn’t going to turn her loose to talk.

He probably wasn’t going to turn Hanratty loose either. The spine had melted out of Hanratty a long time ago and if you found the right button and pushed it Hanratty would spill out everything he knew like a computer spilling out reels of programed tape.

And Walker. Walker wasn’t one of the inner circle either. The three of them, the Major and Baraclough and “Sergeant” Burt, had their plans all neatly worked out to go someplace in South Africa or Latin America and use their share of the loot to finance the mobilization of a private army so that they could go out into chickenshit little countries and play little war games. That was fine, but it wouldn’t work out that way if anybody remained behind who could finger them for the American law, because there weren’t many countries in the world that wouldn’t cooperate in their extradition when it turned out they were wanted for multiple murders and assorted federal crimes. Hargit and Baraclough were deliberate, methodical, careful; they didn’t take unnecessary risks, they didn’t leave loose ends lying around to be picked up, and at bottom they didn’t trust anybody except themselves.

They were going to kill him. He had tried to talk himself out of the notion, tried to chalk it up to fear and paranoia and the general sinister portentousness and unreality of the past twenty-four hours; but when he looked at it with cold logic it always came back to the same thing: they weren’t going to leave him behind because he might slip up, he might get caught, he might for any number of reasons decide to spill his guts to the cops, and if there was even a remote chance of that happening they would plug the hole.

They weren’t going to do it now. Not now and not here in this place. It was still possible the cops would catch up, in which case they would need their hostage alive and they would need all the guns they could muster. All right then, they weren’t going to kill him in the next ten minutes or probably the next ten hours. But sooner or later, before they got out of these mountains, they were going to do it.

And he didn’t see any point in hanging around obediently waiting for it.