Buick.
“Christ.”
“Patience, white man.”
Stevens’ rookie eyes flashed at him. “You don’t care much.”
He thought of old Jasper Simalie. “I care. Just take it easy, Buck.”
Radio microphone wires were tangled on the cluttered desk. Watchman stood near the front window, leaning a crook’d elbow across the top of the brown metal filing cabinet. Jace Cunningham was slumped at his desk and when Stevens paced angrily across the office Cunningham rolled his thin face around a few inches, without moving the palm on which his jaw and cheek rested. Cunningham’s freckled face was morose.
The radio speaker crackled-the Highway Patrol dispatcher in Kingman. Because of the approaching storm the signal was weak and pulsing. Watchman walked over to the desk and picked up a microphone, pushed its Send button and talked and listened. There was no news. The Civil Air Patrol had planes in the air in three states and there had been a report from Nellis AFB radar that a blip had appeared briefly and then disappeared again somewhere near the mountains eighty miles west of San Miguel. Probably an ionized cloud; the storm was playing hell with radars.
“That FBI agent get there yet?” the radio asked.
“Negative,” Watchman said.
“Keep a lookout for him. He should have landed in Kanab by now-he went up from Phoenix by Lear jet and he’ll be coming down to San Miguel by helicopter.”
“I don’t know what he thinks he can do that we haven’t already done.”
“Just cooperate with him, Sam. We don’t need to make enemies in that quarter.”
“Well I wasn’t planning to put his nose out of joint.”
“Just do what he wants. Hold it-Ben just handed me this, we’ve got a make on that Buick. Belongs to a fellow named Sweeney runs a cafe up in Fredonia. He didn’t even know it’d been swiped until Ben called him.”
A fat lot of help. “What about Baraclough?”
“Nothing from Washington. We’ve sent a telex to the Military Records people in St. Louis, maybe get a set of prints on him if he was ever in the arm service.”
It might come to that-the long slow hard way: trace Baraclough back, trace his known associates, gradually build a picture through the FBI’s resources. But that could take months. Here it was hardly ninety minutes since the bandits had fled the bank.
“Ten four.”
Watchman put the mike down and went back to the window.
Stevens leveled a pugnacious finger at him. “We ought to be out there doing something.”
At the desk Cunningham picked up a pencil and played with it as obstinately as a bored child. Two of his deputies were still down at the bank taking statements. A lot of detail would pile up as a result but Watchman had a feeling it wouldn’t lead to much. This bunch had been smart-they’d had it all worked out, every last detail except the bad luck of one of them picking up a speeding ticket. Just the same, they had to be somewhere — why hadn’t anybody found that airplane yet and started tracking it? He scowled through the window at the Feed amp; Seed store across the street. Maybe they hadn’t gone all that far, after all. Maybe they knew they’d be tracked if they stayed very long in the air. The whole thing might be a bluff: maybe they’d scratched out a landing strip on some ranch close by, flown fifteen minutes and landed, and hidden the plane in a barn. Maybe right now they were sitting in a ranch house within fifty miles of this spot, counting the loot and laughing up their sleeves.
Or it could be they’d decided to take a chance and flown right into that advancing blizzard. Not much chance of coming through that in one piece-but it did offer perfect concealment for an airplane, if you could keep it flying…
Too many ifs, too many maybes. There was nothing for it but to wait, chained to the end of their prime umbilical, the radio-microphone cord.
The phone rang and Buck Stevens jerked. Cunningham picked up the receiver and grunted, listened, grunted again, and hung up. “They’ve got the phone lines fixed out east. Still working on the other one.”
It was a small blessing. Watchman said, “Mind if I use it to call Flag?”
“Official call?”
“Personal. I’ll pay the charges.”
“Help ’self.” Cunningham got up and made his way around the desk. He moved with a heavy deliberation in his tread. Watchman walked past Buck Stevens, who had the look of a potentially enraged Brahma bull, and took Cunningham’s place in the swivel chair. He picked up the phone and listened for a dial tone and when he had one he put his brown finger in the dial holes and rang the number.
“Mogollon Gift Shop, may I help you?”
Watchman’s face changed with disappointment. “Hello, Phyllis, it’s Sam.”
The woman’s voice turned chilly. “Lisa’s not here right now.”
He’d known that already. If Lisa had been there she’d have answered the phone herself. Her sister-in-law only filled in now and then at the shop. “She be back soon?”
“Well she went up the street to buy a sweater. I’m minding the store for her. I don’t know how long she’ll be.” The voice was cool with habitual disapproval.
Watchman said, “Tell her I probably won’t make it back to Flag tonight. We’ve had a little ruction up here…”
“I just heard about the robbery. On the radio.”
He didn’t want to talk about that. Not with her. “I’ll probably get in tomorrow sometime.”
“I’ll tell Lisa you called.” There was a beat of silence and then Phyllis said politely, “Be careful, Sam,” and hung up. Phyllis was always polite and rarely said what she meant: I hope you get your red hide in a wringer. It was going to be an interesting clan to marry into.
It didn’t matter. He could see Lisa clearly, her movements and poses and faces; he could hear the cadences of her voice and feel the warmth of their deep silences together, filled with confidences.
He put his hand in his pocket and closed the little velvet ring case in his fist.
Buck Stevens was writing the past hour up in his daybook. He was filling a lot of paper. In this business it was getting so you even had to make out reports on the reports you’d made out. Abruptly Stevens snapped the book shut and began to prowl again. “God damn it.”
“Take it easy now,” Jace Cunningham said. “Gentle down.” It didn’t matter to Cunningham; he had all the patience in the world and the first thing he’d done was see to it that everybody realized it wasn’t his fault the bank had been robbed. Cunningham was going along with middle-aged caution, piling up the years toward his pension and a little ticktack house in a retirement community down in southern Arizona.
They heard the helicopter coming and Watchman said, “You suppose they know where to land that thing?”
“All them Kanab pilots know the drill,” Cunningham said, reaching for his hat. “May as well get on up there.”
2
The FBI man emerged from the bubble canopy and ducked to walk under the decelerating blades. A good deal of light had drained out of the sky and a chilly wind blew across the bald hilltop; only midafternoon, but electric lights were already coming on at the smelter on the hillside and in the town below them. Buck Stevens had his hands rammed in his pockets and was stamping from foot to foot. He said out of the side of his mouth, “Look out now for that masked man. He looks like he carries silver bullets.”
“Dry up,” Watchman said.
The FBI man had a sleek tawny handsomeness, somewhat dated, as if he required a slick part in the center of his hair and a cutaway coat to be in his element. In fact he was packaged in the Bureau’s regulation gray suit, handkerchief in breast pocket, white shirt and subdued necktie. His shoes were absolutely brand new: stepping out of the helicopter he had revealed shiny tan leather soles, hardly scratched.
