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BY POPULAR DEMAND (Thanks, folks!)

 THE LEGEND OF KATIE DOLLAR  Part 2

    It seemed to Katie as if the police car - Jake said it was tribal police - caught up to the big truck within seconds. But Jake only cursed, asked her to excuse his language, and shifted smoothly through the gears. The far more powerful truck engine soon quickly began to outpace the smaller car motor.

   "They'll chase us to the reservation border, but I doubt they'll go any farther," Jake shouted over the engine noise. "They don't have any jurisdiction off the rez."

   "Why are they chasing us?"

   "Because I stole this truck."

   "Oh. Of course."

   Odd, Katie thought. Six months before, such a statement would have seemed inconceivable to her. As implausible as the idea of her husband and son dying horribly one day apart, and coyotes would try to...she abandoned that line of thinking. Now, neither the way he openly admitted to involving her in another one of his crimes nor the fact he as an Indian understood the word "jurisdiction" seemed too terribly strange.

   Hanging on to the armrest while Jake maneuvered the truck through deep ruts and around rocks, and sometimes through private yards, she studied him.

   He was tall and lanky, but not spindly. She could tell there was solid muscle under his dusty jeans and hickory shirt. He seemed to be a few years older than she, but he could have been her age or even younger for all she could tell from his high cheekbones and smooth facial skin. His hair looked black at times and dark brown at others, and it was shorter than she'd have expected on an Indian - certainly shorter than the Navajo, if that's what he really was, who told ghost stories and sold blankets at the Quartzsite railroad depot had been wearing.

   And he had blue eyes. The clearest icy blue eyes she'd ever seen on a grown man.

   "Where's your friend?" she asked.

   "Friend?"

   "The one who knocked on the window the other night." She raised her voice over the dry desert wind roaring through the open window. "You know."

   Jake shrugged. "He's in jail," he said. "He got drunk and sloppy, and they caught him over in Bakersfield. They'll probably put him away for twenty years or more. We won't be seeing him again."

   Bakersfield? She knew Bakersfield was in California.

   "Are you going to take me to California?" she asked.

   "Before or after the gold?" He jerked the wheel to avoid a cow standing in the road. "Because, to tell the truth, Katie, that's my main interest right now. No offense."

   She sighed. "None taken," she said. "You can have the damn gold for all I care. All of it." She noted smoke rising from the chimney of what had at first looked like an abandoned old mud hut. "I just want to get back to civilization. And then tell the authorities about my...you know."

   "And if I don't?"

   "Don't what?"

   "Take you to California."

   "Then I'll get there without you."

   He steered the Chevy expertly around a sharp curve, and pointed at sunlight glinting off water to their right.

   "Okay," he said. "There's California, just across the river. It's pretty shallow along this stretch, so you can walk it from here."

   She stared at the west bank, deeply shaken. Katie didn't know what she expected to see, but California looked just like Arizona. At least, this part of it did.

   Jake slowed the truck. "Do you want me to let you out, then?" he asked, peering into the rearview mirror. "If you do, make it quick. I can't guarantee I'll come to a complete stop."

   Katie slumped back against the seat and silently shook her head no.

   Noting a tear gathering at the outside corner of her left eye, Jake stomped the gas pedal again. The truck blew past the reservation border sign within another few minutes and, as he predicted, the Indian police car didn't follow.

   An hour or so later, Jake pulled off the dirt road at an indiscreet little trail where he parked among a dense stand of cottonwoods alongside the river. "Let's eat," he said, reaching across her to punch the button on the glove box. He pulled wax paper-wrapped sandwiches and a couple of oranges from the compartment, and motioned toward the river.

   Katie followed him to a deadfall log near the water's edge. There, Jake sat and divided the food equally, and dug into a ham sandwich while Katie held hers thoughtfully.

   "Why-"

   "You sure do ask a lot of why questions, Katie Dollar."

   "Why shouldn't I ask them?"

   Jake's eyebrows went up. "Bravo," he chuckled around a bite of ham and bread.

   Neither said anything for a long moment. Then Katie sighed and, brushing off a place to sit near him, slowly sat and unwrapped a sandwich.

   "I'd like to see where my husband and son are buried," she finally said. "You do know how to get back there, I assume?"

   He nodded. "I do. But what good will that do you or them?"

   "I didn't ask to be taken away from there," she said softly. "I wasn't given any choice in the matter."

   Jake's shoulders slumped and he stopped chewing. "Is this what it's going to be?" he asked. "You always talking about how you want to die? Because, if it's what you want, then, yes. I'll take you back there and let you die. But it won't do you or them any good in the long run."

   "I don't want to die," she said, her voice barely audible. "I just want to assure myself they're really dead. I mean, I know they are. I buried them myself. But it all seems like a dream to me, and I...I just have to know. That's all. I can't explain it any better. Is it very far away?"

   "It's about eighty miles in that direction." Jake gestured vaguely toward the east. "And it's a long way from where your map says we want to go."

   "A long way?"

   "A long, long way."

   Katie nibbled thoughtfully at her sandwich. How far could it be from the graves to where the map said the gold was located? They'd followed the instructions exactly. Surely they'd been getting close when the Ford broke down.

   "Are you...are you positive?"

   "I'm sure." He crumpled the waxed paper and tossed it into the river current. "The map said the gold is near Signal Peak. That's way the hell southeast of here, ‘scuse my language."

   Katie frowned at him, dread growing in her stomach. "But weren't we near Signal Peak when you found me?" she asked. "Surely we were."

   "Nope."

   "We must've been."

   "You were nowhere near it, Katie."

   "Then...where...where were we?"

   "Just out on the open desert, almost due east of here."

   Instead of asking to see the map copy he claimed to have - she didn't expect him to show it to her anyway - Katie closed her eyes and mentally retraced their route. The instructions had said to turn right at Quartzsite, and go straight to Signal Peak. Her sensible husband, using his accountant's natural gift for logic and reason, had done exactly that. And, luckily, he'd said, the dirt road which had eventually turned into the rough tracks of horse-drawn wagons had been going in the same direction.

   Unless...

   She closed her eyes and almost fell into another catatonic spell.

   Unless it never occurred to her sensible husband that whoever had drawn the map and written the instructions was traveling east from California, instead of west from Chicago, but wrote it the other way in order to fool anyone who happened to find the map.

   It made sense.

   Her husband said it was a bad idea to ask for directions from strangers because it might make them suspicious; maybe suspicious enough to follow and try to steal the gold. That certainly made sense. Just follow the directions on the map and don't ask anyone, especially in Quartzite, he emphasized, about Signal Peak. That made even more sense. And he'd said as few people as possible should know they were even in Arizona for the same reasons. That made sense, too.

   So, with no one knowing about it but themselves, they'd just driven off IN THE WRONG DAMN DIRECTION!

   And died in the desert.

   "It isn't fair," she murmured. "It's just not fair."

   "Hmm? What isn't fair?"

   "Life."

   "Who ever said it was?"

   Katie drew a deep breath, her shoulders slumping. "Do you know why you found us where you did?" she finally asked.

   "Sure do," Jake said brightly. "Because you went the wrong way. That was easy to figure out from looking at the map."

   Her eyebrows knitted together in puzzlement. "You knew it, but came back for me anyway? Without going on to get the gold for yourself?"

   "I might be a thief and a liar like I told you," he said, shrugging his shoulders, "but I never stole from a widow woman, either. It's something else I'm not starting now."

   Katie stared thoughtfully at the river for a few quiet minutes. Could she trust this stranger? No. But did she have any choice? Sure. She could turn him in, report the deaths of her husband and son, get her name in the papers, and maybe her story would inspire someone to giver her a job so she could get back on her feet and go on with her life.

   But even then she'd still be at the mercy of someone else. At least with Jake, she might stand a chance.

   Or not.

   What choice did she have? No more than she ever had. But certainly more than her husband had given her.

   Damn.

   "Jake," she suddenly said, taking a large bite of her sandwich and chewing vigorously, "eat up. We're going to get that gold."

   "Good idea, Katie Dollar," he said, realizing that she'd worked out something significant in her mind. "Much better than dying. But I'm not sure this truck will make it all the way."

   "Then we'll just have to steal another one."

   "Wait here." Jake peered in the window of the small grocery store as twilight gave way to the complete darkness of a moonless night. "I'm just going for a look-see. With those lights on he can't see you out here in the dark, so keep the motor running. I won't be long."

   "I wish we'd just go on and forget about this," Katie said. "This puny little store isn't going to have anything worth going to jail over."

   "Maybe," he said. "Maybe not. I won't know until I get a closer look."

   Seeing how determined Jake was, Katie just nodded.

   He eased from the passenger seat and quietly closed the door of the Oldsmobile coupe, and walked casually toward the store through the deepening gloom of a California desert twilight.

   In the two weeks since Jake picked her up at the reservation clinic, Katie had watched while Jake robbed four gas stations, two small grocery stores and a barbershop. A barbershop! He never got more than a few dollars - his single biggest take was a paltry nineteen bucks - but it was enough to keep them in food and gas money, with some left over for the digging equipment Jake said they'd need to get the gold.

   She'd also learned to drive.

   Jake started her out with the big farm truck. But when he found the late model Olds just across the river, parked behind a notorious Blythe brothel, he reasoned the car's former owner wouldn't be particularly excited about reporting it missing. And even if he did report it, Jake explained, by abandoning a farm truck stolen in Arizona at a California location the local law would most likely assume the car thieves were headed west, and probably wouldn't even bother to alert the Arizona authorities.

   So far, Jake seemed to be right. And Katie had to admit the car was much easier to drive than the truck, even though it didn't have anywhere near the power of the larger vehicle.

   The only problem they'd had between them so far was minor, and it came at bedtime. Katie told him the first night that sleeping together was strictly out of the question, and he never once suggested intimate sleeping accommodations. He always either slept in the front seat if they had a car or outside in the back if they had a truck. She didn't rule out the idea in her own mind - she was lonely without her husband's touch - she just had no intentions of getting deeply emotionally involved with a man she knew nothing about. Especially a criminal.

   Inside the store, Katie saw Jake drop a newspaper onto the counter and casually peruse the headlines while he chatted with a grizzled old man standing near the cash register.

   They could have been in the Signal Peak area within a day after stealing the car, but Jake said it would be a bad idea to go directly there. They needed to wind their way around Arizona and California for awhile, he insisted, so that they wouldn't establish a pattern; in case anyone important became interested enough in their doings to start predicting their future moves and take action.

   Also, he pointed out, by stealing only a few dollars here and there, and always in different counties, they could likely go on getting away with it for a long time before anyone but those they stole from really cared. And besides, it would cost the state a lot more than Jake expected to steal before getting the gold to prosecute and jail a couple of petty thieves.

   Jake suddenly jerked the car door open. "Floor it," he barked, just as a shotgun blast came from the direction of the store. An angry cloud of buckshot whistled past overhead, with only a couple of pellets skipping harmlessly off the metal roof.

   Without thinking, Katie stomped the gas pedal while he was still falling into the seat and yanking the door shut. Her feet dancing nimbly between the accelerator and the clutch pedal, Katie advanced smoothly through the gears until she had the car well on its way to full speed. Behind them, she heard another shotgun round go off in the distance, but they were already too far out of range for the buckshot to do any harm.

   "I thought you were just going for a look-see," she snapped when the lights of the store fell out of sight behind them. "What happened?"

   Jake held up the newspaper. "I wanted to know what's going on," he said, smiling, his teeth shining in the dashboard illumination.

   "You could have just bought the paper," she said, watching the road. "What does it cost? Two cents?"

   "It's a nickel, but that isn't important." He rattled the paper. "What is important is this little thing I found on page seven that talks about someone robbing stores and such out here in the California desert."

   "So?"

   "So it says all the robbing is being done by the Katie Dollar Gang."

   "What?"

   She stomped the brake, skewing the car into a severe angle and nearly sending them both through the windshield before she wrestled it under control and pulled off the side of the dirt road.

   "Where did they get that name," she shrieked, stunned. "What are you doing to me, Jake?"

   He calmly met her angry eye. "What do you mean?"

   "This," she shouted, pointing a shaky, angry finger at the newspaper. "The only way anyone could have gotten my name was if you gave it to them on one of the jobs."

   "Right," he said.  

   "So you gave it to them?"

   He could see the shock and hurt on her face in the dim glow of the dash lights. "How else could they get that name?" he asked.

   "Why did you do it?"

   "I didn't give them your name, Katie."

   "But you just said-"

   "Your name is not Katie Dollar." He smiled. "At least, I don't think it is. You've never told me your real name, and I'm pretty sure I didn't just guess it."

   "I-" Katie thought about it for a moment. "But that's the name they know me by at the reservation clinic," she finally said. "It doesn't matter that it's not real."

   "Katie," he said, his voice low and calm, "at the clinic, they think you're a halfbreed Indian - you were suntanned pretty dark, you know. And they surely saw me pick you up. They likely figured I was taking you back home to my reservation. They don't know where that is."

   "But what if they do?"

   "Then they'll send the law out looking for who? Someone named Katie Dollar?" He gently touched her arm. "The law already knows about Katie Dollar, especially since I started leaving shiny new silver dollars with everyone I robbed so far. Except for this big newspaper job, of course. But the silver dollar idea is just a distraction, too. The point is that they don't really know who they're looking for, and that's what we want."

   "So-"

   "So while they're looking for the Katie Dollar gang in towns all over Eastern California, we'll be digging for gold down by Signal Peak, in Arizona."

   She considered this. "No one was looking for me before this started," she pointed out. "I could have been getting the gold in complete privacy this whole time, and the law would have even helped me if I needed it."

   "No, they weren't looking for you" he agreed, "but they were looking for me. Now, they're looking for a couple, and possibly others. I...I might have fibbed a few times about just how many of us there were in the gang.''

   "I see." Well, she thought, it made at least as much sense as anything her sensible husband had ever come up with. "So when are we going after the gold?"

   "We can start right now." He jerked his forehead at the dusty road stretching off into the darkness beyond the reach of the headlights. "Just drive straight into Arizona and we'll find a place to hole up for a day or two. When the heat is off this dastardly newspaper heist-" he chuckled and shook the paper "-we'll head on down to Signal Peak."

   She stared hard at him for a long time. Katie could barely make out his face in the dashboard glow, but she thought she saw sincerity there. At least, she hoped she did. Ramming the gear shifter into low, she eased off the clutch pedal and they were rolling again. It wasn't until the car was up to speed that she glanced over at him.

   "Tonight," she said softly, "I want you to sleep in the backseat with me."

   Later, bundled up with Jake in a clean Navajo blanked he stole for her from the unguarded backroom of a hardware store, Katie watched through the back window as a giant full moon climbed into the eastern sky. In the soft half-light, the desert glowed eerily, and she understood why Indians spoke of spirits.

   "That's lovely," she said.

   "Mmmm."

   "Jake," she said after a few silent moments, "what if the gold isn't there?"

   "Now you've been talking like that for days," he said, giving her a squeeze. "Of course it's there. We just have to go-"

   "Go get it. I know." She recalled her husband saying more or less the same thing so many times. "I want it to be there as much as you do. More, in fact, because it has cost me so much. But...you know. What if?"

   "Then we'll do something else."

   "What else?"

   "Oh, I'd imagine you'll want to go on out to California, and I'll hang around the desert. Robbing a little from here, robbing a little from there."  

   "Is that all you ever wanted to do?"

   Jake shrugged. "No." He didn't say anything else for a long time, and Katie started to ask him what he meant when he started talking again. "Once, I just wanted to be a good husband and provide nice things for a good wife," he murmured. "But that takes more money than anyone in this part of the country who has money is willing to pay a halfbreed like me for an honest day's work. So I tried dishonesty. That worked a lot better, but it didn't help me keep a good wife."

   "You were married?"

   "I was," he said simply. He didn't elaborate, and she didn't pry. Instead, he changed the subject. "What is it you want, Katie?"

   She thought about it. Short of getting her old life back, which was never going to happen, there wasn't much of anything she really wanted anymore.

   "I don't know," she said, blinking back tears. "Maybe open a boarding house, or something." A faraway look came into her misty eyes. "A clean, decent place where I could cook and bake pies. The respectable kind of place where a blessing is said before the meal, and the men only smoke outside."

   He snorted.

   "What's wrong with that?" she asked.

   "You could be happy just cooking and cleaning and baking pies for strangers?" Jake shook his head, disgusted. "Katie Dollar, you can always tell the decent man because he's the one who's broke. I don't intend to be broke anymore." His eyes became cold chunks of black desert crystal glinting in the gathering moonlight. "And I don't ever intend to try and make a woman happy by being a decent man again."

   "Jake, I can be happy anywhere," she said, meeting his hard look. "I don't need to be rich. I don't need fancy things around me. All I need is a reason to go on. To live. My reason was taken from me, but I can find another one." She wiped her eyes on the blanket. "I can."

   Jake stared at the rising moon for a long time. Finally, he squeezed her again.

   "Let's see about this gold," he said softly, "then we'll talk about what can and can't be done off in the future. Okay?"

   She returned his hug, and a kiss, and the passion that followed.

   "This isn't right," Katie said, eyeing the well-used dirt road winding through the narrow valley between steadily constricting slopes. "You really think we should almost be there?"

   Jake shrugged, a guarded expression on his face. "I already told you twice," he said, "that's what your map says." He studied the steep hillsides, figuring they'd soon compress to either an even narrower pass, or come to a point at the end of a box canyon. Either scenario was bad news, because it meant there were other people around. Lots of them, by the tire tracks and well-maintained condition of the dusty road. Either the spot pinpointed on the map was hidden up a side canyon, or it was straight ahead before the main canyon ended. Meaning, of course, that someone had already beaten them to the gold a long time ago.

   "I'm not sure of all this," she said. She knew Jake was thinking the same thing. "Something is wrong."

   "Let's go look anyway."

   Two blind curves later, they came to a closed, iron-barred gate across the road. It was attached to strong fencing that stretched the rest of the way across the skinny canyon. Jake braked to a stop less than ten feet from the bars. The only sign in sight was bolted to one of the gateposts, and it claimed that trespassers beyond that point would be shot without warning.

   "They can't do that," Katie said, staring at the sun-faded sign and reading it over and over. "This is not-"

   A rifle shot from somewhere to Jake's left echoed off the canyon walls, and a bullet, a big one from the cloud of dirt it threw into the air, gouged an impressive furrow in the ground about halfway between the car and the gate.

   "Just back it up and get the hell out of here, boy," a bullhorn-amplified voice called from somewhere among the rocks on Katie's side of the car. "You're surrounded, and the next shot won't miss."

   "Well, that's that," Jake said, throwing the transmission into reverse and looking over his shoulder to back the car into a tight turn. "It's no use pointing out how we aren't anywhere beyond the sign yet."

   Driving away from the mine entrance, peering intently through the thick dust cloud they'd raised on the way in - dust that was still hanging motionless in the relatively cool canyon air - Jake kept scanning the tops of the cliffs. At one place, without pointing, he told Katie to, without turning her head, look at the rocks near the top. She did, and saw a man with a rifle.

   "He's probably got a flag or something up there to signal the next guard down the line," Jake said. "They knew we were coming before we'd got within two miles of that gate."

   Katie bowed her head and nodded. "I had a feeling someone else found the gold years ago," she said. "That made sense to me. It just never made sense to my husband."

   Jake nodded. "It takes a lot of money to pay all these guards and keep this road open. And there's no telling how extensive the actual mining operation is without getting a look at it. They must be taking a fortune out of there."

   "A fortune," Katie agreed. "Oh well, it's not ours. It never was."

   "No, but just one shipment of what they must dig out of there is all we'd need to take care of us as for long as we live."

   "Yes," she agreed. "But we might as well wish for the whole mine, since they're not going to give us any of it."

   Jake suddenly slowed the car. Then, glancing at the surrounding cliffs again, in case they were still being watched, speeded back up.

   "Why don't we just wish for one shipment, then," he said, grinning. "In fact, why don't we do a lot more than just wish?"

   "Jake?"

   "You know what I'm saying, Katie Dollar."

   Shocked, she turned to stare at him. "This isn't like stealing a few bucks from some little grocery store," she said slowly. "Jake, these people have an army just to guard their entrance. What you've got in mind makes no sense. No sense at all. None."

   "Being sensible is what got you where you are today, Katie," he said. "No offense, but maybe it's time to try something that doesn't make any sense for once?"

   Katie drew a deep breath and slowly released it.

   "What do you have in mind?"

   Jake told her.

Keyword: THE LEGEND OF KATIE DOLLAR Part 2

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