Relentless

2

It had to be the fire-lookout station they were heading for; Watchman had known that by midmorning, before the blow had hit, following the tracks and seeing which way they were heading. They were boxing themselves into a series of step-up mountain passes that could only lead them toward the ranger cabin and once he had determined that much it had become unnecessary to track them; he had been able to keep moving after the blizzard had wiped out the tracks. Vickers, who was an indifferent horseman and a stranger to mountain weather, had slowed them down but they had kept pushing it until the middle of the afternoon when Vickers’ horse had gone lame with ice-split hoofs and they had come under the lee of the cliff. By that time Watchman had no clear idea of their position but he had a feeling they were not too far below the summit; the trees, briefly glimpsed in slack flurries of snow, were stunted up here and that meant they were close to timberline. It might have been possible to continue but with odds of three against five, with the woman being held hostage, and with the blizzard likely to confuse things beyond control there was no point in trying to close in on the cabin.

The fugitives most likely believed they had left pursuit far behind. If they had reached the shack at all it could be assumed they wouldn’t leave it again before the storm blew over: its comfort would be too compelling and there was nothing outside except the risk of dying in the snow.

Of course there was a good chance they had never reached the cabin. Maybe they had got separated in all this madness and were perishing one by one on the exposed flanks of the mountains. Maybe they had given up their try at the summit and doubled back, passing their pursuers unseen in the wheeling murk, heading back down toward the plain. But if they had done that they would run into police lines sooner or later and Watchman doubted they had tried that; when they hadn’t fallen for the bonfire invitation he’d set by the abandoned trucks he’d accepted the idea that the fugitives were well led by a man confident of his wilderness skills.

Probably they had reached the cabin. If they had they weren’t going anywhere for a while. Here under the cliff he had called a halt and built the shelter.

The woman had stumbled right into their camp for several reasons, but mainly because this was the only way down from the south face of the summit-the rest of it was too jagged, too crowded with boulders-and because it was a reasonably narrow trail, the same trail the fugitives had gone up. Mrs. Lansford had meant to come this way, it had been no accident of fate; it was the way she had arrived, it was the way home. She had known that if she managed to get down the trail a little way she would find at least a bit of protection from the wind because there were trees and boulders and mountain shoulders to hold back the storm.

Once out of the full brutality of the wind she had stopped and waited for quite some time on the trail, waiting for the pilot Walker, but he had not appeared and she had known she couldn’t wait forever.

In the end she had had to assume Walker wasn’t coming: either he wasn’t coming this way-he had gone down the other side of the mountain or taken shelter somewhere near the cabin-or he wasn’t able to come at all because the others had retrieved him or killed him.

She had been very bitter when she had wandered into the steep cut leading her horse and had almost trampled Buck Stevens. There had been a few moments of confusion there, Vickers ready to start shooting at the intruder, but it had got sorted out and they had brought the woman inside their shelter and fed her hot liquids and she had told them pieces of her story.

She was a remarkable woman, full of endurance and spirit, but women who chose to live isolated lives on the fringes of the wild country tended to be strong characters. At one point Vickers had told her how anxious her husband was about her and Mrs. Lansford had given him a twisted look and said, “How intrepid of him,” and looked around as if to emphasize the fact that Ben Lansford wasn’t here, hadn’t come after her. It was evident, and therefore sad, that Mrs. Lansford despised her husband; Watchman found himself regretting that because it violated his sense of orderly romantic neatness: a woman is in peril, you rescue her from it, you prepare to return her to her man, and you want her to look forward to that reunion with ecstatic joy. For a moment he resented Mrs. Lansford, he made her out to be an ingrate for obscure reasons, he even felt that her attitude somehow threatened everything good between himself and Lisa.

It was a brief passing irrationality and he had no time to dwell on it. Mrs. Lansford was just getting herself thawed out and beginning to answer questions coherently when they had heard the faint sounds of a man shouting. She had got up quickly and left the shelter before any of them had time to move. Watchman had gone after her; she had for some reason picked up the reins of her horse and was leading it along with her, and Watchman only just caught up to her when she found Walker and began to slap his face to stop his hysterical shouting.

Now they had Walker bundled into the stinking carcass and Vickers was talking to the woman in his methodically polite FBI voice: “Now Mrs. Lansford if you don’t mind I’d like you to tell us everything you can about those four men up there.”

The woman began to talk and Watchman listened with close attention. A corner of his mind marveled at her resilience; mostly he just absorbed her words, forming a picture of the four men. The images of two of them were only vague outlines-the older man, Hanratty, and the one called Burt; but she had reacted sharply to the one they called only “Steve” and the other one, “Major.” From the information Washington had sent, Vickers supplied their names: Baraclough, Hargit. When Mrs. Lansford talked about those two men there was a change in her voice; the mannerisms of country drawl fell away, the syllables tightened up. These men had frightened her: frightened her in a different way from the kidnaping itself. When you were abducted your fear was likely to be self-focused- What’s to become of me? — and Mrs. Lansford had reacted that way but in time she had worked up another kind of fear, induced by Hargit’s awful predatory indifference and Baraclough’s sadistic malice, and she was not surprised when she learned that the police deputy had been left dead in her house: she recalled that Baraclough had been the last one to leave the house and remembered the look of satisfaction on Baraclough’s strange face.

After a while Vickers’ voice ran down with fatigue. They fed themselves and Watchman checked the pilot’s condition-the man was dead asleep, almost comatose in his rancid cocoon-and they wrapped up in a huddled knot and slept.