The Last Stand Read online

  * * *

  When they were outside and well out of earshot, Joe shook his head and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Man, you sure pull into tight turns, kiddo. Those guys were big FBI types and you play games with them.”

  “White-eyes,” Pete said, “most people never even see a Fed Op, but they’re here all the time. This is government-owned land. They took it away from us and now they try to tell us how to use it. The old redskin gets kicked around, boozed to death, wiped out of the marketplace, yet when the big chips are down and they need us for something, suddenly we become essential heroes. We even get big medals. Plenty of purple hearts. Pretty graves.”

  “You got any medals, Pete?”

  “Not yet,” he said.

  “Where’s the arrowhead?”

  “Wherever Running Fox put it.”

  “Then I’ll assume it’s safe,” Joe said. “Let’s go shake down Long Weed’s hogan.”

  * * *

  The door was unlocked and the two mongrel dogs on the south side of the hogan didn’t even let out a warning howl. Either Weed was satisfied that he’d done a good job of hiding his valuables or he didn’t have anything to steal.

  Joe took the north side and Pete scoured the other areas. In five minutes, they had completed a close scrutiny of all the possessions in sight, Long Weed’s and Miner Moe’s. They found nothing at all. They laid the small handful of items they wanted to look at in greater detail on top of the upside-down crate Long Weed used as a table.

  The paperwork was mostly receipts for feed, seed and oil supplies. Long Weed had four letters from a county agent about re-nourishing a garden and one letter from a tribal dentist notifying him to come in for a checkup.

  Miner Moe had two small catalogs for mining tools with a penciled checkmark beside a set of small handheld hammers of the sort fossil hunters and geologists hang on their belts.

  Joe showed them to Pete who nodded immediately. “A lot of people here have them. They go out bone digging when the weather is right.”

  “Where?”

  “Over in the foothills. Since they found those mastodon bones in that area a few years back, the major universities have been sending in student teams to see what they can find.”

  “Don’t they need experts for that, Pete?”

  “Why? Ninety-nine percent of the finds are accidental and most are discovered by rank amateurs.”

  Joe eyed three Polaroid snapshots he’d found in a trunk in the back. All three were of Big Arms and on the ground in front of him were twisted things that used to be human.

  Cold sweat oozed out of his forehead and when he muttered something under his breath, Pete came over and looked at what he held.

  “They dead?” Joe asked.

  “No, but I bet they wished they were.”

  “This guy is pretty bad,” Joe mused.

  “Quit thinking about it.”

  “What were these fights about?” Joe pressed.

  Pete let a few seconds go by, then he let out a little cough and said, “Same thing. They made passes at my sister.”

  * * *

  Joe laid the photos down and blew the dust from a few dozen small sheets of paper held together by a rubber band that broke as soon as Joe tried to open it. The pages were nothing more than three- and four-year-old receipts.

  The last item turned out to be a well-worn map that had been folded and refolded so many times it almost fell apart at the tattered seams.

  Carefully, Joe laid it on the crate top and both studied it. The front and back surfaces had been used as a notation board for buying household supplies and meeting people with names like Cut Face, Owl Hand, and Leaping Deer. Using an old-fashioned indelible ink pencil, Miner Moe had made strange little circles with crosses in them in about fifty areas of the wide-open spaces that took up most of the map.

  Joe turned one corner of the map down and said, “Look. Standard Oil.”

  Pete ran his finger along the lines that were noted with the circled X marks. “What do you think these indicate?”

  “Places where Moe found treasure?” Joe said.

  “No.” Pete shook his head slowly. “He’d never put that down on a map and leave it lying around.”

  “What is it then?”

  “You note the date on this map, White-eyes?”

  “Sure, 1932.” He paused and frowned, thinking. “How many cars did they have around this way then?”

  “Not many,” Pete answered. “So we’re not looking at roads.”

  After a few long seconds’ study, Joe nodded and asked, “Trails?”

  “Keep looking.”

  “They weave from left to right, straighten up some and start weaving some more.”

  “That’s all desert in that area.” Pete said. “Think about it.”

  “I’m a city boy, Pete. Why don’t you just say what you’re trying so hard to tell me?”

  “When there are big rainstorms, water channels right down those paths.”

  “That’s an old riverbed?”

  “Where those ‘X’ marks are could be waterholes.”

  Joe said, “Spell it out, will you? I can read maps, but this is beyond me.”

  Pete sucked on his lower lip, his eyes running up and down the old Standard Oil map. He tapped the marked locations. “There’s nothing there now, but it’s possible a few shoots of greenery would show up at those locations and an old sand hound like Miner Moe might have noticed it.”

  “Something like that would make an impression on him?”

  “Damn right. In a barren area like that you’d better believe it.”

  “Why, Pete? He’d be carrying his own water supply out there.”

  Pete stared at him like the tenderfoot he was. “Go back a few centuries, White-eyes.”

  “So?”

  “So those damp spots could have been life-saving waterholes fed by an ancient riverbed running under the surface. There’s a rock bed under all this sand. That old river still runs through it, but every so often there’s a crack in the pipe-like system and the water seeps to the surface under pressure.”

  “What are you getting at, Pete?”

  “City boy, think about Miner Moe’s hypothesis. A group of Aztecs are fleeing north with all the golden treasure, statues, idols, ornaments the Spanish Inquisitors are after.”

  Joe was frowning now, trying to put all this information into perspective. Then he finally saw what Pete was getting at. “They camped out by those waterholes?”

  “Man, you got it. They were worn down to skin and bones. They had to stop and get their strength back. Most likely they spent a day at each layover.”

  “What about food?”

  “You like snake?”

  “Wasn’t too bad.”

  “These guys probably were used to whatever moved.”

  Pete paused, and for a while was quiet.

  Finally, Joe asked, “What’s on your mind, Pete?”

  “It doesn’t rain much in this area,” Pete said.

  Joe looked slantwise at his friend.

  “But there are sandstorms,” Pete said. “They come up real fast. One almost covered up my truck in fifteen minutes.” He looked long and hard at Joe. “Imagine that bunch trying to get their belongings together in the middle of a gale like that? They’ve come a long way, their coverings are tattered, they are pretty well worn down and when the storm passes a lot of artifacts are buried in the sand.”

  “This doesn’t happen at every stop, does it?” Joe asked.

  “Hell no, probably not, but whatever they carried their wealth in was getting ready to fall apart. And if it was getting heavy it might gradually be discarded so they could keep on going.”

  “Where were they heading?”

  This time Pete’s finger moved up six inches and tapped the mountainous area on the map. “The Superstitions. They would have had runners out ahead of them scouting the land. They knew where the mountains were.”

  Joe said, “And from this legend
comes the tales of the great treasure hoard in the hills up north.”

  “Legend my foot,” Pete snapped back. “Old miners have found those artifacts in those rocks.”

  “Why haven’t those finds been documented?”

  “You crazy, flyboy? They were traded in for money. Greenbacks. Heavy cash from collectors. Those pieces wind up in some millionaire’s mansion and if the public is lucky, they’re donated to a museum years later as a tax deduction.”

  “Now make your point, Sequoia Pete. It must be a beauty.”

  Pete nodded. “Miner Moe had it all figured out. Someplace he must have one hell of a big stash.”

  Joe turned his head and indicated the abject poverty of the room. “Pete…look where he lives.”

  “Don’t you get it? Money has no value to these guys. They’d trade a priceless artifact for a tin of tobacco and think nothing of it. The big deal is getting it. Beat some other slob to the punch. Hide it and yell ha-ha at the world, then forget where you hid it. That’s Miner Moe and that’s Long Weed. In one way they’re lucky. Nobody would believe they ever found anything at all. Oh, I’m not forgetting the way the little golden feet showed up or some of the other trinkets that got heisted by the city boys who got wind of these things. But the big find? No one would believe it.”

  “What about the arrowhead, Pete? We have another priceless trinket here.”

  “Joe…it’s a dream.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. For twenty years, they’ve had teams out here with all sorts of instrumentation trying to locate more of that crystal. You think the scientific minds of this country are going to let something like that go past their noses?”

  “What have they come up with?”

  “Nothing. They have the bits Mr. FBI mentioned, but bits are all they have. Five years ago, they came out here in a big semi hauling a few million bucks worth of scientific equipment. You know what they found?”

  Joe shook his head.

  “Nothing, that’s what. Now they’re all stirred up over that arrowhead.”

  Overhead, the drone of a twin-engine plane whined by, then changed its tone as the power was cut back.

  Pete said, “Maxie Angelo’s crate. This is his big weekend.”

  “How come?”

  “The locals will have all their carefully secreted valuables up for sale.”

  “Like little gold feet?”

  “Maybe,” Pete said. “Maybe.”

  * * *

  Miner Moe’s eyes were red with tiny blood-gorged veins. His fingers clutched the top of the sheet so tightly his hands looked death white. His expression seemed permanently fixed and his breathing was fast and shallow. His right pinky and the finger next to it were raw and bruised, the nail on his little finger partially torn off.

  Mama White Bird motioned with a forefinger for them to come to the other side of the bed. She raised the steel gate that kept the occupant from rolling out and pointed to the nasty indentation in the metal framework. “Rifle bullet,” she said. “Somebody shot at him right through the open window.”

  Pete ran the tip of his finger in the little hollow. “Whoever took the shot used a lead-tipped job. The railing stopped that round, but a steel slug would have gone right through into Moe’s head.” He paused, and glanced up at Mama White Bird. “Anyone hear the shot?”

  “Little Dewey heard it,” she told them. “He said it came from the other side of the road.”

  “He had a telescopic sight then,” Pete said. “He probably figured he nailed old Moe and just took off. Anybody hear any cars leave?”

  “Plenty of cars around here all the time,” Mama White Bird said.

  Joe tapped Pete on his shoulder. “Think he could have had a silencer on that rifle?”

  “Could be, but hell, everybody has some kind of homemade muffler. Nobody wants to get nailed taking down a deer out of season.”

  Mama White Bird held up her hand to quiet them and stared down at Miner Moe. His tongue worked at his lips again and his eyelids flickered. Pete bent over the bed and kept his voice soft. “What is it, Moe?”

  “They got my goods, didn’t they?”

  “Moe…we don’t know. We don’t know where your stash is.”

  “They got it. All them years of working…”

  “Moe…tell us where it is and we’ll check it out. If we can nail those lousy…”

  “Too late. The kid made me tell,” he muttered. “He took my map, the one I made. It had…compass coordinates on it.”

  Joe pushed Pete aside and looked down into Moe’s eyes. They were rheumy and watery and Moe blinked twice to clear them. “Lats and longes, like on the boat.”

  “What’s he talking about?” Pete demanded.

  “He’s talking about latitude and longitude coordinates, buddy.”

  “Come on, how would he get them?”

  “You have global positioning instruments in your truck, haven’t you?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “Before those gadgets came on the market there were earlier devices. They were bulky and crude, but they worked. You want me to describe them?”

  “Never mind.”

  Joe nodded. “And you said he had a smattering of surveying in his background…” He looked down at the old man in the bed. Moe’s mouth was working as if he wanted to say something. When Joe leaned over he heard Miner Moe say, “Big bird tree,” then Moe closed his eyes and fell back into his troubled sleep.

  Joe stood up and Pete asked, “What?”

  “He said ‘big bird tree.’ ”

  “Hell, there are no trees out here!”

  “That’s what he said, Pete.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “He’s hallucinating.”

  Pete walked in closer and stared hard at Miner Moe. The old man’s face was placid now, almost contented, but a little tic pulling at the corner of his mouth reflected some inner turmoil going on in his mind.

  “What were his exact words, Joe?”

  “Like I said… big bird tree.”

  Their eyes met and Pete raised an eyebrow. “You remember when we were clearing a runway to get your plane out of the soft sand.”

  “Yeah.” Joe thought back, mentally reviewing dragging the tires until a runway was etched into the loose ground surface.

  “You asked what those colored scraps were that were broken up all over the place.”

  “You said they were pieces of tree branches.”

  “This wasn’t always a desert, Joe.”

  Joe waved his hands impatiently. “So what’s on your mind? Those were hunks of branches miles away from here. What’s that got to do with a big bird tree?”

  Pete tilted his head and looked through the window, up at the sky. “Not even many vultures these days. Hardly any eagles, either.”

  There was no use doing anything but waiting Pete out. Joe took a deep breath and composed his expression and let Pete ramble on about just how big a vulture or an eagle can get and how they would search for food from a high place like a cliff face or while soaring on a thermal high above the earth.

  Joe said, “Or a big tree, right?”

  Pete simply smiled and answered, “Right.”

  “Those were only pieces of branches we saw on that homemade runway.”

  “You’re getting there. And on bigger branches grow smaller branches, but bigger branches grow on…”

  “Big trees,” Joe agreed. “But, like you said, there are no trees out here.” When Pete just looked smug and didn’t answer him, Joe said, “But there were at one time?”

  “For that you get one feather in your crew cut, white boy.”

  Joe turned his head from one side to the other, mentally seeing the rise and fall of the gentle mounds of white sand that made up the desert.

  * * *

  They left Moe to Mama White Bird’s tender ministrations and walked outside. They went around the buildings opposite Mama’s house and finally found t
he spot where a shooter could have stood to home in on Miner Moe. While the light was on in the room they could see Mama tending to her patient and it was easy to see that this could have been a deadly shot if only the rifleman had elevated his rifle barrel a fraction of a degree upward.

  There were no prints in the soil, no sign of an ejected shell casing, and several ways to exit. What should have been a clean kill had opened the door to a full investigation.

  Joe asked, “You going to bring the tribal police in on this?”

  “With the FBI squatting on our doorsteps?”

  “There’ll be another try on Miner Moe, you know,” Joe told him.

  “Yeah, but hopefully there’ll be a breather in between.” Pete pounded one fist into the other. Then, “Mama White Bird knows the tricks. She’ll have Moe covered nicely. She’s got storm shutters on all her windows and she’ll have a half dozen young bucks covering the yard area.”

  “Suppose they threw a firebomb?”

  “I don’t think they could get that close,” Pete said.

  “Okay, then we’re the outside troops. Where do we go from here?”

  “I guess we find the big tree Moe was talking about. First we go pick up Running Fox.”

  “Why? Can’t the two of us…”

  “White-eyes, the only way we’re going to scout for a tree that isn’t there anymore is in your airplane, and that is one place I won’t go. I’ll stay in the truck and you can lead the way in the sky.”

  Joe nudged him with an elbow. “Geronimo would have fired you, buddy.”

  “Geronimo was another tribe.” Pete grinned. “But first things first. Let’s make sure that arrowhead is in a secure place. Fox is just liable to leave it out on top of her dresser.”

  * * *

  Running Fox was sitting on a homemade bench outside their hogan sipping a hot brew from a coffee mug. She watched them drive up in the truck and when they walked up she said, “The government men are really after that arrowhead, aren’t they?”

  Pete nodded and sat down beside her. “This is only the first contingent. They’ll be bringing in the heavyweights next.”

  “When?” Running Fox asked. She looked up at Joe, her face serious.

  “This ol’ world is in one hell of a mess,” he told her. “You’d never think that out here where there’s nothing but sand and mountains, you’d be sitting on a little hunk of power that could change the future.”