Apache Country (42 page)

“You and Gerzen will have to take care of
that part of it,” McKittrick said. “I’ve never been any good with
guns. I won’t be any use to you out there.”

Apodaca smiled. He’d always known McKittrick
was a gutless wonder. What amused him was the fact the man seemed
to think that let him off the hook. He had necessarily tolerated
his arrogance and vanity for a long time. Well, not any more.

“Oh, yes you will, Olin,” he said. “You can
be our Judas goat.”

“Me? McKittrick squeaked. “No, I can’t—”

Rage flared behind Apodaca’s eyes. “Don’t you
say ‘can’t’ to me, you useless sack of shit!” he hissed. “Just
listen carefully and do exactly what I tell you. Capisce?”

And then he told him. While they had been
talking, a whole scenario had sprung fully grown into his agile
mind. To be sure, its success depended upon a whole succession of
long-shots, but he knew it was the only way to go.

L’audace, toujours l’audace. Anything was
better than sitting on your ass waiting for the ax to fall.

“Jesus,” McKittrick muttered shakily when he
finished speaking. “Sounds damn risky, Joe. Are you sure—?”

“Do it, Olin,” Apodaca said, making it
brutal. “Just do it.”

He could almost hear McKittrick trying to
think of a way to weasel out – and failing. It made him feel
good.

“And what about … Cochrane?” McKittrick said.
“How do we—?”

“He’s right here. At his desk.”

The chips were down. There was a silence long
enough to draw two deep breaths, long enough for McKittrick to
realize he didn’t have anywhere to hide.

Apodaca waited. Come on, you gutless turkey.
He heard McKittrick let out his breath.

“What time do you want me there?”

Apodaca smiled grimly. “About an hour. Stay
by your cellphone and I’ll call you when it’s a go.”

“Are you sure there isn’t some other
way—?”

The chickenshit bastard was still looking for
a way out. Apodaca made an angry sound.

“Yes, I’m sure,” he gritted. “So do what I’ve
told you to do and do it exactly the way I told you to do it. Fuck
up and you’re dead. Do I make myself clear?”

McKittrick drew in a deep breath. “Okay, Joe.
I’m … I’m sorry I panicked. Don’t worry, I’ll handle it. Trust
me.”

Sure I’ll trust you, Apodaca thought. You and
Satan.

Like most men, Tom Cochrane was a creature of
habit. He always shaved the right side of his face first. He always
bought his newspaper at the newsstand on South Main. He always
drove the same route to work. And he always parked his car on the
right hand side of the rear alley behind the SO building.

He was opening the door of his Chevy when he
heard his name called and turned to see Joe Apodaca coming out of
the building through the same door he had himself just used. At the
same moment, Olin McKittrick’s silver-gray BMW slid smoothly into
the alley and came to a stop behind his car.

“Something wrong, Joe?” he said.

Apodaca shook his head. “Olin wants a word,
Tom,” he said. “Hold on a second, okay?”

He waited as McKittrick got out of his car.
The district attorney looked edgy and Cochrane wondered why.

“Olin?” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“Got something to show you,” McKittrick said,
opening the passenger door.

Cochrane frowned. Something wrong here, he
thought. He looked around quickly. Apodaca sensed his tension and
drew his gun. Cochrane stared at him.

“What the hell is this, Joe?” he said.

Apodaca held out his left hand. “Just give me
your piece, Tom,” he said. “By the book.”

With Apodaca in front of him and McKittrick
behind, Cochrane was whipsawed. He let out his breath in a long
exhalation, then reached inside his jacket and brought out the
Glock between forefinger and thumb – ‘by the book’ – and handed it
to the sheriff.

“What is this, Joe?” he said.

“Child safety,” Apodaca replied, and used the
Glock to point at the passenger seat. “Get in.”

Cochrane slid into the car and Apodaca got in
back with him, the gun resting negligently on the seat behind
Cochrane’s right ear.

“How are Kate and Tom, by the way?”
McKittrick asked.

Cochrane frowned. “Why you asking?” he
rasped.

“All in good time,” McKittrick said.

He started the car and slid out of the alley.
Twelve minutes later he pulled the BMW silently to a stop outside
Cochrane’s house. McKittrick took a pair of Tasco 8 x 32mm
binoculars from the glove compartment and handed them to
Cochrane.

“What is this?” Cochrane said.

“Take a look,” McKittrick said, pointing with
his chin. “Upstairs, window on the right.”

The front bedroom had a big picture window.
They’d installed it just a year ago, to let more light in. As
Cochrane focused the binoculars the curtains parted, and he saw his
wife Josie at the window; her face was pale and tense. Then Kate
appeared, then Tom, rubbing his eyes as if he had been crying.
Behind them, Cochrane could make out the figure of a big man with
blond hair. He had what looked like an Uzi in his hands. The muzzle
was almost touching Kate’s head. Cold fingers clutched Cochrane’s
heart.

“Who is that? What’s he doing up there?”

McKittrick smiled. “His name is Gerzen, Tom.
Does that mean anything to you? Carl Gerzen?”

Cochrane tried to hide his reaction, but
McKittrick saw it in his eyes.

“Wonderful thing, the imagination,” he said.
“Now, do you clearly understand what’s going on here?”

Cochrane nodded. “What … what do you want?”
he said hollowly.

“I want you to make a telephone call,”
McKittrick told him. “Just one. I’ll tell you what to say. Do it,
and nothing bad will happen. Give me trouble …”

He tapped the car phone.

“Kids disappear, Tom,” Apodaca added silkily.
“Every year, thousands of them. A lot of them end up in ... bad
places. I think you know the kind of places I’m talking about,
don’t you, Tom? You wouldn’t want anything like that to happen to
those two lovely kids, would you?”

“You bastards,” Cochrane seethed. “You dirty
bastards.”

“Save your breath,” McKittrick said harshly.
“You’re going to need it to talk to the Feebs.”

There was a time once, long ago, Easton
thought, when a man could saddle a horse, climb aboard, and ride
wherever he wanted to go in as straight a line as the land allowed.
Not any more. These days it could be positively dangerous for a man
to ride across country unless the country he was riding across was
his own. Open range was as much part of history as Kit Carson.

Nevertheless, scant miles from the urban
sprawls of Albuquerque, Las Cruces and Riverside there were still
places in New Mexico as wild and unfenced as they had been in the
1880s when Victorio was on the warpath.

Mescalero Sands was one of them.

An empty wilderness inhabited mainly by deer
and small animals living off the mesquite, chinnery, rabbitbrush
and other hardy plants that flourished in parts of its sixty-mile
swathe of dunes, the Sands was the bottom of a sea that dried up
250 million years ago, a silent, hostile, desolate place.

Which was why Easton had chosen it.

Whatever happened now would happen in a
virtual vacuum, unseen by anyone except those involved. A thin
thread of expectancy ran through him as he trudged through the
shifting sand toward his rendezvous with Ironheel. No matter which
way it went, today there would be a showdown. And although he was
grubby, unshaven, thinned down by lack of sleep and the time he had
spent on the run, Easton was ready for it.

At three thirty in the afternoon it was flat
dead hot. And silent.

Beneath a brassy sky the rolling dunes lay as
still and empty as the far side of the moon. Behind and a couple of
miles east of where Easton now stood was the Caprock, the sandstone
escarpment at the edge of the vast prairie beyond that the
Franciscan friars who came north with Coronado had named the Llano
Estacado.

Legend had it that on their way north, in
order to help them find their way back across the featureless land,
the holy fathers had hammered stakes into the ground. It wasn’t
true, but that was why people called it the Staked Plain instead of
the more descriptive ‘stockaded prairie’ the Holy Fathers had
pioneered.

Ironheel was already waiting where they had
arranged to meet, at the foot of the escarpment below the twin
windmills on Mescalero Point. He was wearing a blue denim shirt,
Levis, and flat-soled moccasins. A water bottle was slung on a
strap across his shoulder. He looked dark and hard and fit.

“You’re late,” he said. Easton let that go
by.

“Good to see you, too,” he said. “Cochrane
find you okay?”

Ironheel made a short, sharp sound that might
have been amusement.

“Other way around.” he said. “Why we
here?”

“We can talk on the way,” Easton said. “I’ve
got a lot to tell you.”

“Where we going?”

Easton pointed. About a half mile across the
sand dunes to the northwest of their position, he told Ironheel,
was an access road. It ran more or less south for about two thirds
of a mile, ending at the nearest thing to civilization there was
out here, a recreation area maintained by the Bureau of Land
Management, with picnic tables, trash cans and a chemical
toilet.

“See you got water,” Easton said.

“Need it,” Ironheel nodded.

They set out on a primitive track that ran
north between the dunes. Walking on the soft, yielding sand was
hard work, and they made slow progress. As they trudged on, Easton
told Ironheel about his visit to the Apodaca house and his later
talk with Tom Cochrane.

“Cochrane’s good,” Ironheel said. “Doesn’t
talk too much.”

“Glad we agree.”

“How we going to work this thing?”

“Up to now, we’ve been the bad guys,” Easton
said. “Even if we’d managed to contact the FBI or some other
law-enforcement agency, even if they’d believed I wasn’t acting
under duress. We needed something that would lure McKittrick and
Apodaca out into the open, incriminate themselves in front of
witnesses.”

“The DVD?”

“By now Cochrane will have contacted the
FBI,” Easton told him. “Given them the DVD and some other evidence
he was holding, laid out the whole story: you, Weddle, Gerzen, all
of it. He’ll have told them we’ll surrender and testify against
Apodaca and McKittrick – on one condition. That it’s exclusively an
FBI operation, no other law-enforcement agency involved or even
advised.”

“And?”

“I just called Cochrane on the cellphone. The
Feebs have agreed. Ed Hatch, who’s in charge of the Albuquerque
office, will be bringing a team out here at four o’clock.”

“Explain something,” Ironheel said. “Just how
is all this supposed to spook Apodaca and McKittrick? They don’t
even know where we are.”

Easton held up a hand. “I also called Ellen
Casey, told her we’re going to surrender to the FBI here. At five
o’clock.”

Easton nodded.

“Wait a minute,” Ironheel protested. “You
told me they’re coming at four o’clock.”

“Ellen Casey’s phone is tapped,” Easton said.
Ironheel’s eyes narrowed; the Apache admire cunning.

“You’ve invited them to kill us before the
FBI gets here.”

“I’m not giving them any time to think. Only
act.”

Ironheel nodded thoughtfully, as though they
were talking about a movie he would quite like to see.

“They aren’t stupid,” he said. “They’d expect
you to figure Ellen Casey’s phone is tapped. Aren’t they going to
wonder whether it might be a trap?”

“Yup,” Easton agreed. “But they’ve got no
time to maneuver. Only act.”

Ironheel fell silent, turning it all over in
his mind. It didn’t look like he was crazy about any of it. Hell,
Eaton thought, neither am I.

They trudged up to the crest of a long ridge
of dunes and Easton stopped.

“There it is.”

Below them the stony recreation area shone
like bleached bone. In common with many BLM facilities, it was
starkly basic, an open turning space with two table-and-bench units
on the east side flanked by twin waste bins, the phone booth-sized
block of the chemical toilet a few yards away, and on the south
side, two more table units with barbecue stands and their own waste
bins. The steel framed benches and tables with their plank tops
looked as if no one had used them for years. An immense silence
hung over the place.

“How many you think will come?” Ironheel
said.

“I don’t know.”

“And you don’t know when, right?”

“That’s right.”

Ironheel looked at the sky. “‘Hoka hey,
brothers, it’s a good day to die,’” he said.

“Who said that?”

Ironheel smiled. “Crazy Horse of the Oglala
Sioux. Just before the battle of the Little Big Horn.”

“Now I’ll tell you something Custer said,”
Easton told him. “‘We need cover.’”

It was almost a joke. Among these low,
shifting hills, it was just about possible to find partial
concealment among the scattered stands of mesquite and rabbitbrush,
but most of the area was as bare as the Sahara. Ironheel looked all
around and then let his gaze move up toward the top of the dunes to
their right.

“Ba’ch’anándíst’iig o’í’an yúdé,” he said.
“Fox always hides in a hole.”

He led the way along the ridge overlooking
the recreation area, then up to the crest. On the side farthest
from the road he began digging with his hands, and Easton followed
suit, making a long depression with a parapet of sand in front of
it, deep enough for the body to be protected on both sides,
invisible from twenty feet away. They lay belly down in the hot
sand and waited.

It was as hot as hell. Easton checked his
watch. 3:45.

“Anytime now,” he said, and almost as he said
it, they saw a drift of dust on the access road, the flash of
sunlight on bright metal.