The Last Stand Read online

“All you got are some little feet and trinkets.”

  Pete wagged his head and frowned. “Those were accidental discoveries, flyboy.”

  “Oh?”

  “Miner Moe had the right answer. He took the time to do some research. He used to go to the State U library and write away to agencies in Madrid, Spain, and he put things together that sounded crazy, like the Aztecs or somebody fleeing northward with armed Spaniards behind them.”

  Joe said, “I suppose nobody believed him.”

  “Who would?” Pete demanded. “The native red man here hardly believes anything you white-eyes tell him. You take away his land and feed him booze. Why should they listen to old Miner Moe?”

  “But you did,” Joe said.

  For a full minute, Sequoia Pete sat quietly until his sister nudged him with her elbow. “Tell him.”

  Another minute passed and Pete said, “One day Moe showed up at our hogan half starved to death. We fed him, made him stay two nights, filled up his grub sack and hung two big canteens of water off his horse’s saddle and told him so long. Before he left he reached into his goodie bag and brought out an old engraved metal helmet that was a duplicate of the ones the Spanish officers wore on their rampage into Mexico.”

  “Where is it?” Joe asked.

  Running Fox said, “I cleaned it up, painted it red and yellow, decorated it with tribal markings and hung it up in the living room.”

  “Joe, she planted flowers in the thing. You can’t even tell what it was anymore.”

  “There a value on it?”

  “Guy at the university said one that was authenticated could be worth a few thousand bucks.”

  “So why didn’t you sell it?”

  “Because it was a gift from a friend,” Pete said. “But it proved that Miner Moe’s theory had turned to reality. Out there in the sand is the grand wealth of a defeated nation.”

  “Only nobody knows where it is,” Joe said.

  “Miner Moe does,” Pete said. “That’s why they tried to kill him. If they got him drunk enough he could have told them. Then they tried to kill him to keep him from talking about it. Twice, they tried.”

  “He still told us, didn’t he?”

  “The big bird tree?”

  Joe nodded.

  Finally, Pete took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Miner Moe was right. Someplace he’s piled up a huge stash. He’s just a shaggy old man who lived on the sand and hardly had anything to show for it. To him gold would be just a thing to chuckle over, not to gloat over.”

  They rode in silence a few minutes, watching the color of the terrain change as the sunlight bounced off the gentle, winding slopes of the sand. When Running Fox squeezed his hand, Joe said, “What have you got on your mind, Chief Sequoia Pete?”

  “We have two problems,” Pete said. “One, how do we handle the arrowhead the FBI wants so badly?”

  “Only two choices, buddy. You keep it or hand it over. No way they can simply take it from you and even though they are the feds, they’re on Indian Reservation territory. They’re outsiders here just like I am. So they got guns and badges and some degree of authority, but the national mood isn’t going to let them work under any kind of Wounded Knee script.”

  “So?”

  “Keep it until a better time shows up.”

  “Suppose they decide to search our hogan under other pretenses, like looking for drugs.”

  “Would they find any?” Joe asked him.

  The answer was fast and short. “No way.”

  “You think they’d stick their hands down an outhouse retainer?”

  Pete’s mouth twisted in disgust. He nudged his sister and said, “You hang it on a string inside a sandwich baggie?”

  “Good guess,” Joe said when he saw Fox nod.

  “Guess, hell,” Pete snapped. “That’s where she always hid her valuables. None of us were going to dive into that muck for anything.”

  “Then what’s the other problem?”

  “The impossible one.”

  Running Fox and Joe Gillian stared straight ahead and waited for Sequoia Pete to spell it out.

  After a half minute, Pete said, “We need to find Miner Moe’s cache.” When the other two nodded, he continued. “Big bird tree. That’s all we have to go on.”

  “I thought we had that figured out, pal. I was going to fly over the area and look for the damn thing.”

  Running Fox squeezed his hand again tightly. “It may not be a tree at all, Joe. Miner Moe is a real white native. He thinks like one of us and he acts like one of us. Big bird tree might just be a description, of something else entirely.”

  “Then what are we looking for?” Joe’s voice was brusque with impatience.

  “White-eyes,” Fox said, “if he called it ‘big,’ then it was a big something. It could have been a riverbed shaped like a tree where a bird had a nest. It could be a rock outcropping where the person who named it saw a bird perched.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Not to you, but that’s the way the original tribes thought.”

  “Then what do we look for?”

  Pete and his sister exchanged a glance. “You’ll know it when you see it,” Pete said.

  “Okay,” Joe said. “So we get some air under us and look around for something big that’s not a tree and might not even be there.”

  Overhead there was the faint propeller drone of a twin-engined plane. Joe’s eyes picked up the glint of the sun off the reflective aluminum body and his eyes narrowed. That was Maxie Angelo’s ship and it was getting ready to land at the reservation’s one-runway airfield.

  “The big fish is back in his pond,” Joe muttered.

  Both Pete and Running Fox nodded in agreement.

  CHAPTER 11

  Big Arms said nothing. His lips never moved, but his face spoke an eloquent language of hate egged on by a hunger for revenge. He knew there was no way he could challenge the white-eyes who had humiliated him again. Dying would have been better than having to live with the people all pointing him out as a fool. He could still tear the heads off any of them, but now the abject fear that once had held everyone in total subjection wasn’t there any longer.

  Now one of them could have a gun, or a knife honed to razor sharpness, and wouldn’t hesitate to use it. Somebody, anybody, could come up behind him and with one sudden thrust, slide a blade between his ribs that the strongest of muscles couldn’t stop. To that steel a muscle was only soft meat that it could slice easily. The needle point would penetrate the flesh, the fine edges of the metal would separate the tissue, and with no trouble at all the entire length of the weapon would stab into a beating heart and everything inside him would explode into horrible agony.

  A warped frown twisted Big Arms’ face into a grimace. He saw the old lady being helped out of an old pickup, and with a very deliberate twist of her head, she looked at him.

  Big Arms swallowed and couldn’t meet her eyes. He kept on walking and headed toward where a group from the local tribe in full historic regalia was dancing, the muted sounds of the drums keeping the tempo in full beat with that of his maddened heart.

  Maxie Angelo was a person outside his sphere of recognition. In his own world, Angelo was hated and feared and respected as only a mobster could be. Wealth and power bought him a form of respect he didn’t deserve; he commanded it from all because he was known to wreak terrible vengeance on any who crossed him. Even from Ted Condon, who Maxie treated and tolerated like a court jester, allowing him to go to all sorts of extremes without reprimand.

  Big Arms knew all of this. He realized that everyone else knew it too. They did business with Maxie Angelo because he paid immediately and in hard cash with no questions asked. The FBI knew all about Maxie Angelo, but they had nothing to slam him with and all they could do was play the cat-andmouse game until Angelo made the slightest wrong move, then they could nail his hide to a Federal Prison wall.

  Suddenly the great trafficker in crime was straight
ahead, Condon beside him. When Big Arms walked up Maxie said, “He tricked you, didn’t he?”

  Big Arms simply glowered. A muscle twitched in his cheek. It was admission enough.

  “You hear what the old women are saying?”

  The muscle twitched again.

  Ted Condon spat in the street. “He was kissing her. It was a long one, that kiss. The old women who saw it said it was a marrying kind of kiss. Her brother was all for it.”

  Everything Big Arms was feeling was written in his expression. Deadly rage. The dire need for immediate action. It was a wild, flowering deadly nightshade building up inside his chest and when it exploded into towering action there would be blood and the jagged ends of bones sticking out through ripped flesh and life would evaporate slowly, so that its loss could be appreciated and the revenge complete.

  “They headed back to their hogan. If you leave now they’ll be at the end of the Monster Teeth Hills.”

  Ted Condon knew what was going through Big Arms’ mind and he said, “I punctured their gas tank. They should be dry by now.”

  * * *

  There was nothing around Monster Teeth hills—no nourishment in the gray-yellow grass, so animals instinctively avoided the area. The jagged rock surface tore the tires from any off-road vehicles that tried to cross the odd desert anomaly.

  Sequoia Pete had been so engrossed with keeping the pickup in the faint packed tracks of other vehicles that he had neglected to watch the gauges on the dashboard. When the engine suddenly coughed and bucked he glanced down, muttered something under his breath, and said out loud, “Damn, we’re out of gas.”

  “You filled up before we left,” Running Fox said.

  Slowly, the pickup came to a stop, a silent giant bug dead in the desert. Joe said, “You have five gallon cans of gas in the back, haven’t you?”

  “It all went into your plane, if you remember,” Fox said.

  Joe had a grim look as he reached for the door handle. Outside, he stared back at their tire marks. There was no sign of wetness from spilling gasoline, but there wouldn’t have been under that hot sun and with zero humidity. Next he looked at the twin tanks themselves. Nothing was dripping, but each tank had a nail-sized hole in it just large enough to leave them fuel enough to get well away from the village before having to stop.

  Pete yelled, “What is it?

  “Sabotage, pal. Somebody punctured your gas tanks.”

  Running Fox and Pete tumbled out of the cab to see the damage themselves. Pete shook his head in bewilderment. “Now what would anybody do that for?”

  “Who’s going to come along and give us gas?” Joe asked him pointedly.

  “White-eyes, we’re not going to die out here. We walked fifty miles before, we can walk back to our place from here.”

  “Can’t you radio back for help?”

  “Not today, Joe. This is our only yearly entertainment. Everybody, and I mean everybody, is at the powwow. They’ll be singing and dancing and getting slopped with cheap booze and having one helluva time and nobody is going to be answering any radio calls. There’s only one thing to do, so let’s get moving.”

  “Okay with me. Let’s leave Running Fox with the truck and the two of us can haul five gallon cans of gas back.”

  It was Running Fox who stopped that idea short. She said, “I’ll go with Pete and we’ll hook the small trailer to his Harley and come right back. We don’t need any extra weight on that bike.”

  “But…”

  “Flyboy,” Pete told him before he could object, “you’re a city type. You got city feet and wear city-style shoes with soles that are half broken down already. So play nice, guard the truck from any outlaws and count the lizards.”

  The two of them pulled the empty five-gallon cans from the truck, took two each and trudged off up the path.

  * * *

  Outside, it was blazing hot. With the windows down, the breeze came in in intermittent puffs, but it was too hot to be comfortable. Joe pulled out a cold beer from the cooler and downed it in two long pulls. He let out a belch and looked for Pete and Fox, but they had rounded a bend up ahead and were well out of sight.

  He hadn’t seen a single lizard.

  By the time the sun had moved a good twenty degrees through its arc, he had finished the beers and two of the soft drinks, and taken off all his clothes except his shorts. He was wondering what kind of a skeleton he’d make.

  Earlier he had started fanning himself, but even that became too much work. He looked at his watch and shook his head. Time seemed to have stood still. The only relief he had came from dipping his hand into the cooler and wetting his face. Even that was risky. If something happened to his friends that cooler was his only water source.

  Joe kept wondering about old 819. She was squatting out there in the desert too, probably making weird noises as her metallic structure minutely twisted and reshaped itself in the glaring heat of the sun. But she wouldn’t whimper, not old 819. She’d be patiently waiting too, her seat hot as hell, and he hoped none of the gauges were affected by the intense temperature. He wondered idly if he had left the canopy open, then remembered shutting it and sat back and leaned against the headrest.

  Some foreign sound brought him out of his heat-warped serenity and he opened his eyes. On the outside of the truck all was still. Then he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the cloud—big and brown and rolling slowly like a drunken dust devil. Then a dot showed itself at its base and kept growing larger, an almost outer space-like apparition that didn’t belong in this wilderness at all. It began a series of erratic movements, being blotted out a second or so by the low spires of the teeth of the monster who abided in the hills, then it was back again and the sound was louder now and identifiable; and with a mighty roar the monster took it, shook it hungrily as it tossed it in the air, and watched while it came down with a ripping, thunderous crash on the road it had just left. The energy of the event dissipated the dust cloud while Joe slipped out of the cab and ran back to the wreck as fast as he could.

  There was another sound too, a low moaning of something crushed, something injured, something needing help.

  A piece of metal wrenched from the truck’s body was by his feet and Joe took it to pry at what was left of the cab. He succeeded in unjamming the twisted door, and, making sure the driver’s head hadn’t reached the frame, he got his hands around the post and pulled until he thought his joints would crack. His muscles and tendons stood out in raw relief against his naked skin and with an agonizing sound the door came free just as gasoline hit a hot pipe and flames shot out from the front of the wreckage, the heat of it blistering.

  And there, looking up at him in the driver’s seat, was Big Arms. There was no strength left in that mighty frame now. There was only recognition of his plight. His world had ended. All his physical might meant nothing at all. His white-eyes enemy could leave him to die and no one would know. Joe could feel the fire and knew that there would soon be an explosion. If Big Arms were still in the truck when it came… If Big Arms were fortunate, it would blot him out immediately. If not he would burn. Like meat on a spit.

  Big Arms looked up at Joe and said, “Go.”

  Joe locked his arms around that great body. He said, “Like hell,” and pulled with all his strength. The heat from the flames was scraping at his naked back and he leaned into it, wrenching, pulling the big man from the flames.

  Once more, Big Arms said, “Go!”

  Joe said, “Forget it,” braced his feet, twisted the victim a half turn to the right, felt his enemy’s body suddenly come loose from some constricting piece of framework, and with one great burst of energy, dragged Big Arms free of the wreckage just as the gas tank let loose.

  Joe made sure Big Arms was comfortable, propped against a hillock of sand, before he ran back to Pete’s vehicle. Behind the front seat there was a medical kit that he grabbed along with two bottles of soda from the cooler. He ran back and had Big Arms sip at the soft drink while he salve
d and bandaged the burns and abrasions on his legs.

  There was a dull roar from the burning wreckage as another pool of gasoline fueled the formerly diminishing inferno.

  Overhead, the sun had completed its arc, but there was little cooling. The desert had absorbed all that energy and now was giving it back, but the encroaching twilight was at least relieving to the eyes. A hundred feet away from the smoldering wreckage of the pickup truck the two men sat quietly, thinking much, but saying nothing.

  In the distance was a speck of light. It was moving fast, the probing finger of the headlight picking out the old tire marks to drive on. “Sequoia Pete comes back,” Big Arms said with an odd quietness in his voice.

  “Running Fox is with him.”

  “I know.”

  “Do we talk about this, Many Thunders?”

  For the first time, Joe saw the big Indian smile.

  “She has told you many things about me,” Big Arms said.

  “You did a lot of crazy things, kid. You hurt a lot of people.”

  “That wasn’t me,” Big Arms said. His voice was softer now, almost ashamed. “That was who I thought I was. Who I had to be.”

  “Invincible?”

  Big Arms lowered his head and nodded.

  “The British had a battleship by that name.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “It got sunk, Big Arms.”

  “I would like it better if you called me by my right name.”

  “Okay, Many Thunders. Do we play nice now?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s just us. What about Running Fox?”

  “She is yours now,” he said simply. “If anybody tries to stop you I’ll…”

  Joe put out his hand. “Let me handle that, okay?” He held his hand out and Mighty Thunders wrapped his fingers around it.

  * * *

  The Harley drove up, the trailer rattling behind it. Pete dismounted and asked Running Fox, “Do you see that?”

  Even as he spoke, the two figures rose and walked toward them, limping, unsteady, but side by side.

  Running Fox said, “Holy shit!”

  “Watch the mouth, Sis,” Pete said gruffly.