Buck Stevens reached for Watchman’s sleeve. “Sam, it’s no time to be a porcupine.”
Watchman shook his head. The wind across his face was sharp with chill: he turned his collar up against it and said in a hard clipped way, speaking each word as if he had coined it on the spot, “You’ve sent a lot of airplanes up into bad weather to hunt for something that isn’t there. You could have asked me before you went sprinting for that radio—you could have asked me first but you jumped right in the pool without looking to see if there was water in it. The super G-man—it doesn’t fit into your neat strategy to look for advice from a seminomadic food-gathering folk primitive. But this is still my home ground and nobody’s taken my jurisdiction away yet. Look—it was my friend who got butchered in that bank. And I can’t risk any more stupid …”
Vickers cut him off harshly:
“Let’s get this straight right now. I appreciate advice but the decisions are up to me—you know the statutes on Federal crimes as well as I do. We’re dealing with bank robbery, it’s an FDIC bank, and we’ve got attempted interstate flight. The ultimate responsibility is the Bureau’s. It’s not your case—it’s not a private war. I know the old man was an Indian and I could see the way that made a difference to your constable back there, but I’m not Cunningham and I haven’t got time to play that game with you. Don’t get thin-skinned with me. I don’t care if you’re red, black, or green. Your partner’s right—it’s no time to get contentious, we’re both on the same side. I understand your feelings. I understand about the old man. Hell, I had an Indian great-grandmother myself, I think.”
Oh God. You understand Innuns, yes indeed. That great-grandmother of yours was probably a Cherokee princess, wasn’t she. They always are. It you had time you’d tell me how you sympathize with the plight of the poor Innun and you’d pull out a Bible and flagellate yourself to atone for the sins of your ancestors against the red man—but right down at the bottom underneath all that crap you know for sure you’re just a little hit better than I am, don’t you, and you think …
Damn, he thought, quiet it down to a war whoop, Tsosie.
Vickers had stopped to glare at him but now added, “We need to get this straight right now—later on we may not have time to stop and get our chain-of-command sorted out. Ordinarily the Bureau doesn’t muscle in, we just ask politely for cooperation and we usually get it; but if you want to drag your heels you’d better let me know right now.”
“So you can pull rank?”
“Trooper, I represent the United States Government.”
Watchman laughed at him—brittle. “I’m not your ward, Great White Father.”
“I didn’t mean that and you know it.”
Watchman turned around, breathing hard, putting his shoulder to Vickers and contriving to deal with the sudden anger that had burst in him unexpected. He had never in his life been that kind of resentful Indian before: why now?
Jasper, he thought. Jasper and that crazy bit of a conversation on the phone with Lisa’s cool blonde sister-in-law.
It was enough to turn an Uncle Tomahawk into a raging Red Power militant.
And this was just a fine time for that.
He said, “If it turns out I’m wrong I’ll apologize.”
But he didn’t turn back to face Vickers and in the end Vickers was forced to walk around in front of him, shoes squeaking; Vickers touched Watchman in the chest with his fingertip—“This is my party, Trooper. Not yours.” And he wheeled away. Went thirty yards past the jeep and crouched down to search the ground. The light was so dim now he could hardly be seen. He began to move slowly around, crabwise. The wind was down now and the air was thick with a heavy layer of silence that muffled the crunch and squeak of Vickers’ movements. The jagged black shoulders of the mountains stood vague in the near distance like wreckage on an abandoned battlefield. The smell of dust and distant snow hung in Watchman’s nostrils.
Buck Stevens came over close and stood facing away from Vickers, talking over Watchman’s shoulder in a voice calculated to reach no farther than his ears. “That look on your face would’ve made quite a blaze if you’d touched a match to it. Listen, what’d he do?”
“Maybe I got rattled.” But that wasn’t all of it: suddenly he saw what he’d been missing. “I had to kick him in the teeth with it, Buck.”
“What the hell for?”
“We can’t let him go on thinking he’s going to wrap this up with radios and helicopters and their computerized crime lab.”
“I don’t get it. He looks pretty good to me.”
“Most everybody looks pretty good until you put them to the test. Then some stay good and some don’t. This one won’t. He’s going to run out of sand, Buck.”
How did you explain things to the rookie? This Vickers worked for an agency where you could get in trouble for turning in reports with bad spelling. They all went by the book. It was rigid, it came down from Washington, none of them was allowed to think for himself. They cared more about sticking to orderly procedures than about getting the job done—because the important thing was to be able to show in your report that you hadn’t made mistakes.
And out here in the mountain states you got the worst of them. Because when an agent got in dutch they assigned him to a district office in the sticks. They called it “going to Oklahoma City” but Oklahoma City was paradise against Phoenix, which was Coventry.
So this Vickers had got his fingers burnt for some transgression. That was what Watchman had known all along in the back of his mind: it had only just come to the surface and it explained Vickers’ eagerness to fall all over his own feet in an anxious rush to muster the minions of the law and summon all the manpower and machinery in three states when the coming blizzard was going to ground all that precious machinery and drive all that manpower into shelters. It was going to leave a lot of big holes for the fugitives to escape through, but Vickers wasn’t thinking that way because he hadn’t been programed to think that way: he was nervous, caught up by the fever of self-importance and the need for redemption. He wasn’t about to innovate, he wasn’t about to take chances. If he had to swat flies with a sledgehammer that was what he would do to get back in Washington’s good graces. Even if the sledgehammer missed the flies Vickers would be able to prove he’d done everything correctly.
But there wasn’t time to articulate all that. What Watchman said was, “Us Innuns have a name for people like him. The name is Custer.”
Vickers had gone back to the jeep and picked up one of the walkie-talkies. Watchman walked around the far side of the jeep, pulled the door back and began reaching inside and taking things out and distributing them on his person. He could hear Vickers talking into the hand radio:
“On the map I see a park headquarters and three ranches within fifteen or twenty miles of here in various directions. Get men into all those places and tell them to keep their radios open. And keep those planes in the air as long as you can—there’s still some daylight east of here.… They did? That’s fine. All right, we’re going to wait here until we get word. It’s a central spot and the fugitives can’t be too far from here.”
You could hear it now—the storm was beginning to move, the air right here was very still and heavy and there was a faint growl coming from the west.
Buck Stevens came around the jeep. His boots crunched pebbles and seemed very loud. “What’s up?”
“Time to move.” Watchman handed him the knapsack and a five-cell flashlight. He shouldered into the heavy night-fighter’s battery pack and slung the ’scoped Weatherby rifle, with its red-lamped projector, in the crook of his elbow.
Vickers came in sight with his small mouth tight. His eyes whipped from Stevens to Watchman and he made an obvious effort to be civil: