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.
8
The woman sat with her knees against her breasts and her head tipped to one side on her folded arms. He realized she was watching him. Looking right at him.
He let his eyes open a little wider.
When she knew she had his attention she sat up and began to do something with her hair: pulled it back from her face on both sides and tied it in a horsetail knot at the back of her head. He could see tautness and pain ground into the lines across her eyes and mouth. She kept darting glances at Baraclough and the others: she had the look of a boxed in animal trying to watch five converging wolves at once. It was clear she was near the perilous edge of breaking, keeping herself rigidly under control.
Baraclough stood up, leaned his rifle against the wall, stretched, and bent forward a little to massage his thighs. His thin face glowed in the chilly air and his cynical eyebrows arched when he looked at the woman.
Walker watched him as he might have watched a barracuda.
His gut ached. He looked at the woman again and saw in her bloodless face the knowledge of what was going to happen to her. He suspected she’d known all along-she wasn’t stupid-but she’d probably found some way, just as he had, to keep herself from believing it. Until now. Now the defenses were down and she knew. Looking at Baraclough she knew.
It was like a hunk of concrete in Walker’s stomach: fear.
His slitted eyes moved and locked on the woman’s. Her face turned until it was no longer in Baraclough’s view but she held Walker’s eyes with her own and now her expression changed and they had between them that same unspoken shared understanding he had felt in the ranch yard, a sudden impact of communication and contact: and her eyes went wide, full of silent pleading, desperate need, a voiceless cry for help.
Almost imperceptibly Walker nodded. It was more in the drooping of eyelids than in any movement of his head but he was sure she caught it and understood it; she almost smiled.
It wasn’t important that she trusted him. What was important-in a way he sensed but did not really comprehend-was that she thought she knew him well enough to trust him. Something he had said, something he had done, something in the way he had looked at her: he had revealed enough of himself to give her that idea. And if he let her down now it wouldn’t just spoil her picture of him, it would spoil his own picture of himself. He didn’t have much self-respect left to his name but what was left he cherished.
So he knew he was going to try.
9
He sat up without hurry. Yawned, scratched his face. Tugged his boots on, got to his feet as if still groggy and extended his arms; stretching, he heard the crackling of his own musculature.
He felt his face color under Baraclough’s stare but he managed a short meaningless smile, shrugged for no particular reason except that it seemed a disarming sort of thing to do, and turned to the shelves on the wall to run his eyes over the canned-food labels. He still had the heavy coat on; he thrust his hand under it, down the sleeve of his leather flight jacket, and extracted a cigarette from the bicep pocket. He lit the cigarette, inhaled, choked, recovered, took down a can of stew and set it on the stove. During all this he never once looked at the woman.
Burt and Hanratty snored away. The Major was deeply asleep as well: the trek had been hardest, most exhausting, for him.
Baraclough must have had a few hours’ sleep and then relieved Burt on watch. He looked a little droopy but not likely to fall asleep.
Power of suggestion, Walker thought: he went into the sheet-metal lavatory and urinated into the john. The cubicle was no bigger than an airliner’s rest room.
He flushed the toilet but the noise was almost obscured by the steady roar of the blizzard against the log walls.
He stepped out of the cubicle zipping up his trousers and went back to the stove to test the temperature of the can of stew; left the can on the stove and sat down against the wall, midway between the stove and the woman. Baraclough sat beyond the woman, smoking; he had left the rifle leaning against the wall.
For a moment Walker thought it wasn’t going to work. But then Baraclough stood up, caught Walker’s eye, nodded toward the girl as if to say “Watch her,” and went into the lavatory. Baraclough was the kind of man to whom superficial manners were important: he probably killed politely. Walker had counted on that: Baraclough closed the door.
The moment the lavatory door was shut Walker scooped up his hat and mittens and crossed the room. Past the woman, moving swiftly and without sound. He picked up the rifle Baraclough had left tilted against the wall, and turned to sweep the rest of the room with a wary inspection.
Nobody woke up.
The woman was on her feet without a word, coming after him.
He had one mitten on. He put the other one in his coat pocket to keep his hand free on the rifle. Ducked under the nylon rope and walked between the horses to the front of the shed.
The woman’s face was upturned, alive, expectant. He pointed to the horse nearest the door and when the woman reached for its reins Walker made a signal with a jerk of his head to indicate that she should go first. With his mittened left hand he reached out and gathered up the trailing reins of the blue roan. Then he backed up against the front door and collected the lead-rope of one of the packhorses and wrapped that in his left hand along with the blue’s reins. Finally he nodded to the woman, braced the rifle across the crook of his elbow and slid the wooden crossbar back out of its slot. And shoved the door open with his boot.
The wind slammed in, banged the door back against the outside wall; the candles guttered out and he felt the woman go by, urging her horse through the doorway. The horse didn’t want to go out into that. Walker whacked it with the rifle-whacked where he thought the horse was, and seemed to hit it because it jumped and went rushing past him, almost knocking him over.
“What the fuck?”
“Jesus…”
“ What’s going on?”
The lavatory door slammed open with a tinny clank. If there were other sounds they were swallowed in the rock-crushing growl of wind.
Walker was through the door, outside, head bowed against the blast. Pulling the blue’s reins and the packhorse.
But something got stuck. He couldn’t see but it had to be that the two horses had wedged together in the narrow door. One of them screamed, a high whickering neigh; he felt the leather reins slide out through his mitten. Trying to grab for them with his right hand he dropped the rifle. And missed the reins.
Now all he had was the packhorse’s lead-rope and somebody inside the cabin started shooting.
