The Last Stand Read online

  “Why?”

  “Your husband might not like it.”

  “I’m not married, damn it!”

  “You will be, little sister.”

  After a few seconds she said, “He hasn’t asked me.”

  “That’s a mere formality,” Pete told her.

  “Suppose I say no.”

  “You won’t.”

  “Maybe he won’t ask.”

  “He will.”

  * * *

  As they came closer, Pete saw where the fire had touched the legs of Many Thunders and the glistening sheen of the ointment that had been smeared on him. The story needed little explanation, but there was still a big question unasked.

  Before Fox or Pete could pose the question, Joe said, “I’ve been talking with our new friend here. Maxie Angelo instigated this cute scenario. He wants us out of the way no matter how.”

  “Why, Many Thunders? What has he got against us?”

  After a few seconds, the huge Indian said, “I heard him say to Condon that you flew a plane, Joe.”

  Puzzled, Joe asked, “What difference does that make?”

  Big Arms’ eyes were half-shaded by thoughtful lids and he looked at each of them in turn. “He’s looking for old Miner Moe’s buried gold from the air. Doesn’t want anyone to beat him to it.”

  “Does he know where it is?” Joe asked.

  “From the air, it will show itself,” Big Arms said.

  “What do we do?” Fox asked.

  “First we plug those holes in the pickup’s tanks,” Joe said.

  “Then?”

  “Then we stop Maxie Angelo.”

  * * *

  In the early dusk, 819 stood out as something alien against the lighter shades of the sand. There had been little wind, so no abrasive particles had been blown under the engine cowling or into the brake pads.

  Earlier, they had decided that Running Fox would fly back to the rez with Joe while the two men stayed with the truck.

  This time Joe would land on the runway at the reservation where they could be picked up after they had a chance to talk to the station operator who, according to Pete, might not be inclined to help a white-eyes outsider but to Running Fox would give anything. Joe wanted a close look at Maxie Angelo’s plane while the other two would check on Miner Moe and, if he was coherent, try to get more information out of him about what his cryptic remark about “big bird tree” had meant.

  There were no runway lights on at the airport, but Joe made a low pass over the area with his landing lights on to make sure he was clear to come in, then banked hard, turned onto the runway and put down in a smooth three-point landing. There was no designated parking place, so Joe just braked and swung 819 around so that he was ready for a fast takeoff.

  Inside the operations shack, they found the dispatcher sprawled out on a pile of feedbags, a pint bottle of cheap booze still in his hand, a quarter empty. The smell of the liquor filled the room.

  Joe said something under his breath.

  Running Fox said, “Joe…he doesn’t drink.”

  “Even if he’d never had a drink in his life, that little rotgut wouldn’t be enough to knock him out like that.” He bent down to take a closer look at the old guy. Tobacco spittle had run out of his mouth and dried on his chin and, when Joe turned the man’s head a little, he scraped the remains of a small pink pill out of the crease in his neck. He held it out for Fox to see. “They must’ve forced some down his throat. They missed this one.”

  “It’s a pink duster,” she said. “The kids get hold of them and pass them around when they’re at their hill parties.”

  “What does it do?”

  “It’s a date-rape drug.”

  “I thought that was a big-city problem.”

  “This may be an Indian reservation, but people are people. There are good and bad and a lot you can confuse and corrupt.”

  “And Maxie Angelo brings this stuff in here?”

  She nodded, sadness in her expression. “What can you do?”

  “To kill a snake, you cut off its head.” Joe’s voice had a real bite to it.

  “The snake isn’t here,” Running Fox said.

  “His plane isn’t on the runway or in the parking area either,” Joe said. “You got any idea where he could go around here?”

  Fox said, “He’s been known to land out in the desert.”

  “Where? There aren’t any strips on the sand.”

  “You found a place, didn’t you?”

  Joe nodded. A night landing would be out of the question, but if Angelo had a spot he knew about and had set down when there was still plenty of light he could well still be there now, waiting for dawn to take off. But why, he wondered—what reason would he have to stop overnight?

  The answer was obvious enough. Maxie Angelo had found what he came for and all he needed now was to load it up and get away with it.

  As if she were reading his mind, Running Fox said, “He got to Moe’s stash.” They radioed back to the pickup.

  Pete answered. “You guys okay?”

  “We’re fine,” she told him, “but Maxie Angelo’s plane isn’t here and the old dispatcher has been doped out of his mind. They did him one better than they did with Moe. Poured booze down his throat, then dropped a pink duster in for good measure.”

  Pete mouthed a curse and said, “Someone got to Miner Moe, too. Came in when there was no attendant. Left some pretty damn big bruises on the old guy.”

  “Where was Mama White Bird?”

  “Out in the street with the others. A car was on fire in the middle of the road, but nobody was in it.”

  “That was a distraction, Pete.”

  “Well, nobody realized that when it was going on.”

  “Is Moe able to talk?”

  “He’s making sounds, but it will be some time before he’s able to make any sense.”

  “We have to get in there,” Fox told him.

  “I’ll tell you what to do. The dispatcher kept his old pickup truck behind the main building. It’s under an overhanging roof. He keeps a gas can in the truck’s bed in case it’s empty. Come on in, okay?”

  “You got it,” Fox replied.

  They located the exterior light and found the truck. It was a good fifteen years old and had been driven hard and put up wet, like the cowboys used to say. The key was in the ignition and when Fox turned it, the battery made a tired sound in turning over the engine, then it coughed, spit a few times, and shuddered into a worn grumble.

  Joe said, “Can you handle this?”

  She looked like she was going to give him a withering remark, then realized that he was truly concerned and instead said, “I was brought up on these crates. Besides, you think you could find your way back to the village?”

  “Lady,” Joe said, “you got the controls.”

  * * *

  Thirty minutes away on the barely outlined road the light of the moon took on a shaded hue and a few stray clouds drifted by the half-full orb. There seemed to be a heaviness in the air and something was sucking the heat out of the ground. Joe noticed it, but said nothing until Fox pointed to the sky. “There’s a storm coming in.”

  “Rain?”

  “No rain. Wind and sand. It will strip the paint right off a car.”

  In the air, Joe could have avoided this situation. He would have had access to the government weather stations and picked up reports from other pilots and rerouted his flight to circumnavigate his way around the disturbance.

  “How far out are we?” he asked.

  “Fifteen minutes. Soon you’ll see the lights in the village.”

  Her prediction was accurate. Beams were fingering out one area and several were flashing into darkened corners like long, probing fingers. Fox said, “Those are FBI vehicles. They’re the only ones who have spotlights.”

  “Where are they?”

  “That’s Mama White Bird’s place. Damn…if something else has happened to Moe…”

  “I
don’t see any red lights from emergency vehicles.”

  When they got closer the moving bodies of men surrounded a still-glowing mass that spit off tendrils of steam as water was shot on it. Running Fox stopped the old truck a distance away and they got out and jogged to the scene of the fire.

  Walker was in charge of the group squelching the rest of the flames with containers of foam and when Running Fox asked him what had happened, he shook his head in disgust. “Blasted car drove right up here and would have gone smack into Mama White Bird’s place if the motor didn’t quit. It almost looked deliberate, according to a couple of kids who saw it happen. The damn driver got out and ran for it.”

  “Any identification?”

  “You think they’d tell us?”

  “Whose car was it?” Joe asked him.

  “Somebody said it was Big Nose Henry’s?”

  Joe looked at Fox curiously.

  She said, “Big Nose kept it beside his trailer. He rarely drove it. Just kept it running so he could haul his cart full of junk out to the dump once in a while.”

  Looking toward Mama White Bird’s house, Running Fox asked, “Anything happen in there?”

  “The fire got everybody all excited. It’s quiet now. Your brother’s in there checking on the old man.”

  “Miner Moe?”

  “Yes. He’s okay.”

  The door on Walker’s car was opened and the beeps on his radio were suddenly interrupted by a garbled squawk and a muffled voice.

  Walker frowned and yelled, “Was that incoming?”

  The other agent yelled back, “Yeah.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Beats me, Chief. It’s not our traffic.”

  “What the hell is a VHF signal doing out there?”

  The young agent behind Walker said, “It’s probably a bounce.”

  “A what?”

  “A bounce.”

  “Now what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Sir, I’m not a specialist in radio, but some places oddball signals turn up. Maybe there’s something in the instructions…”

  “Hell,” Walker told him, “this is all new equipment. I wouldn’t know where to start. You make any sense of it?”

  “It’s marine talk.”

  “Like what?”

  “I think it said the cargo was loaded on the ship.”

  “So?”

  “And they’ll be casting off as soon as it clears up. That’s seagoing chatter.”

  “We’re not near a sea.”

  “I know. It’s probably a bounce. You want me to…”

  “Forget it,” Walker said.

  As they walked into Mama White Bird’s house, Joe said, “A bounce my tail. If you have VHF equipment in your truck, Maxie Angelo could have it in his plane.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Miner Moe was awake now, his eyes still looking drugged. When anyone spoke to him he’d absorb it, let the words sink in, then struggle for an answer. Pete stood beside the bed, Moe’s hand held gently in his, and his conversation was deliberately casual, nothing that would disturb the old man. Big Arms sat on a handmade chair in the corner looking like a kid who’s outgrown his potty stool.

  “We got here just after the car blew up,” Pete told them. “If it hadn’t blown when it did, it would have taken the side right out of this building, Miner Moe and all.”

  “The FBI looking for the driver?”

  “They’ll never find him,” Pete said. Then he nodded toward Big Arms. “But your buddy over there will.”

  “Oh?”

  “Many Thunders put the word out. Somebody talks soon or he’ll come after the whole damn batch of them. The kids in town are still scared stiff of him.”

  “How’s Moe?”

  “He wants to talk to you.”

  Joe took a step closer to the bed and patted the old guy’s thigh. Moe managed a small smile. “They sure want me bad, don’t they?”

  “They’re stupid,” Joe said to him.

  “All my stuff…”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s for the rez here. New houses. Real cooking stove. Schoolhouse so…the kids won’t have to travel so far. Mama White Bird needs a real…medical clinic.”

  “They’ll get all that, Miner Moe.”

  “If you want…”

  Joe looked across at Running Fox and said, “I already got what I want, buddy.”

  The wizened prospector nodded, pleased. “Good woman, she is.” Then his eyes narrowed and he said, “All my goods…”

  “How do we find the big bird tree, Moe?

  “Ask Mama. She was born right beside it. She was named after it.” And the old man’s eyes fluttered shut.

  Joe made a motion with his head and Pete followed him out of the room. They found Mama White Bird in the kitchen simmering something to feed her patient and Joe asked her, “What’s the big bird tree?”

  Joe saw her recoil, as though the question called up bad memories. “It’s where I was born. Why do you ask?”

  Joe said, “What is it?”

  “It’s the place where the old men said that the great bird men with the feathers in their heads died. The Ironheads killed them all, and then the Ironheads died there too. No one could explain why, what killed them.”

  “The Aztecs had feather headdresses,” Joe said.

  “And the Spanish had metal helmets,” Pete said.

  “I was born there because my mother gave me life very early. Very early.”

  “Where is it?” Joe asked.

  “That,” Mama White Bird said, “I don’t know. I’ve heard the songs and the stories, but I have never been back since I was an infant.”

  Hearing this, Joe felt his heart sink.

  * * *

  They watched the kids milling about the still-hot wreckage of the burnt car, thinking about what Mama White Bird had told them. Pete finally shook his head in exasperation. “The old men never made sense,” he said. “They’re stories from a century ago.”

  Joe reminded him that most fables seemed to have some basis in fact. “That iron hat business and feathers in their heads came from history. Distorted a little, but there’s a similarity.”

  Pete waved his hands in disdain. “And they just ‘died.’ Poof, and the birds cleaned their bones. Great. So what do we do now?”

  “We, meaning you and me, are going on a scouting expedition. We have a plane to find.”

  “Damn it, Joe, it’s still night.”

  “We have to get back to the landing strip and gas up. By then it will be sunup.”

  They told Running Fox their plan, ran the motorcycle up the ramp into the back of the airfield dispatcher’s truck, hoping it would stay together long enough for them to make it back.

  It did. And when they arrived nothing had changed. The dispatcher was still where they had left him, breathing like an old drunk, a few mumbled words coming from between bubbly lips.

  “Maxie Angelo did this?” Pete demanded.

  “Nothing we can prove, but it fits. He doesn’t like witnesses. Between him and Ted Condon they wouldn’t have had any trouble taking the old man down.”

  They had to hand-pump the fuel out of the drums into the BT 13 and the sun was well up when Joe made his walk-around of 819. Unlike more modern equipment, the World War Two planes had far greater longevity and were made to stand the rigors of tough usage—more than the planes that were currently in use, Joe had found.

  Satisfied that the inspection showed no apparent defects, Joe waved Pete into the rear seat, made sure he was buckled in and climbed into the cockpit. He adjusted his gas and prop settings, flipped the energizing lever and held it until the whine said it was ready to turn the prop, then flipped it over and watched the prop spin. The engine let a blast of smoke out the exhaust and roared to life. When he had a full magneto check he made sure Pete had his headset on, then released the brakes and taxied out onto the runway.

  He leveled out at two thousand feet, circled the airstrip once, then pi
cked up an east heading and changed prop pitch.

  He heard the click of the intercom in his ears and when he looked in the mirror he saw Pete with the microphone at his lips and tapped his earphones for him to begin speaking.

  “Flyboy, we going up to thirty thousand feet?”

  Joe shook his head and picked up his microphone. “No way, Chief. This is no P-51. We don’t carry oxygen on board. What are you worried about?”

  “I don’t feel like passing out, that’s what.”

  “Five thousand will be our cruising altitude. No trouble there. You keep your eyes on the ground. We can cover a lot of distance from up here and on all that sand, a plane ought to show pretty well.”

  “Suppose we spot it?”

  “A call to the FBI guys at the rez can get them to order a plane from a military installation in a hurry.”

  “Good luck,” Pete answered. “The nearest base is in the next state. By the time anything got here they could be a long way off.”

  “Then we’ll just have to think of something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  For an hour, Joe searched the area a sector at a time. They saw nothing but hills of sand and occasional weathered wreckage of old wagons. Twice, the sun-bleached bones of dead horses were like ghastly road markers pointing west. One even had the remnants of a saddle plainly visible around the skeletal remains.

  Pete pointed out the edge of Monster Teeth Hills as it showed up dead ahead. From the air the ground had an even more jaw-like appearance, rocky protuberances jutting upward like deadly canine teeth. The ridge of nearly black stone was a good five miles long, stretching out in a two-mile width.

  Joe touched the rudder pedal and nudged the stick and 819 banked into a right turn to cross over the dismal area. There was a sudden bump and Pete didn’t bother using the mike. He yelled, “What was that?”

  Joe lifted his intercom and said, “Thermals. The ground configuration changed and caused a disturbance. No sweat, buddy.”

  But he barely got the words out when 819 gave another violent shake and was sucked up another five hundred feet, buffeted all the while by the freakish air currents. He gave a quick glance at his instruments and what he saw made a chill run through him—the air speed indicator was reading a hundred fifty-five M.P.H., but the magnetic compass was spinning too fast to see the numbers go by. A glance showed the gyroscopic compass holding fast, but the altimeter started to make violent jumps from ground-level readings to ten-thousand-plus feet over the terrain.