Part 10 (1/2)
”We sure as h.e.l.l ain't, Jack.”
”We're gonna have to slow down a little here pretty soon. The fifty-six thousand we took out of Saber Creek won't last more than a few months. Not the way we like to drink, gamble, and f.u.c.k.” Considine chuckled. ”So we've readjusted your fee, Captain.”
As Considine reached into his s.h.i.+rt, Chacon and Ferraro tensed in their chairs.
Considine froze, smiled. ”At ease, boys.”
Slowly, he lifted out a rawhide pouch. He jerked his hand, breaking the leather lanyard hanging around his neck, and tossed the pouch onto the table with a dull thud.
”Take it or leave it,” McKenna growled.
Lips pursed, nostrils expanding and contracting angrily, Chacon plucked the pouch off the table and hefted it, frowning. Ferraro stared at the pouch as he held one hand beneath the table, his fingers no doubt wrapped around a revolver.
Finally, with a dubious glance at Considine, Chacon turned the pouch upside down.
Sand and penny-sized stones sifted onto the table, the stones clattering against the planks. Something larger dropped along with the stones, and when the dust had cleared, the two rurales leaned forward, staring down at the black, dust-floured tarantula crawling around atop the debris.
The wh.o.r.e jerked back against the captain's chest, her eyes regarding the furry black spider with revulsion. With a soft cry, she scrambled off the captain's knee and backed slowly away from the table, staring in horror at the tarantula moving its hairy legs about the sand and rocks.
”Muerta!” she rasped, her pleated skirt buffeting about her bare brown legs. she rasped, her pleated skirt buffeting about her bare brown legs.
Cutting a glance at her, Mad Dog snorted. Considine slid his gaze to his partner, then back to Chacon, and chuckled.
Chacon's eyes brightened and his lips stretched back from his rabbit teeth. He chuckled then too, head bobbing, eyes shuttling between the desperadoes and the lieutenant, who appeared baffled. As the desperadoes and the captain cut loose with booming, belly-deep guffaws, the lieutenant grinned. Soon he joined them, laughing and pounding the table with his open left palm.
Behind the bar, Mick's eyes were dark as he stared at the four laughing men.
Anjanette picked up a shot gla.s.s from the bar, raised it slowly to her lips, her hands shaking slightly, and tossed the drink back. When she set the empty gla.s.s on the bar, the men stopped laughing all at once, as though her setting the gla.s.s down had been a signal.
Silence.
The fire snapped, echoing in the adobe-lined room. Outside, a horse nickered. Sensing trouble, the fat wh.o.r.es, the dice players, and the dog scuttled outside.
The wh.o.r.e backed up against the bar, between Mick and Anjanette. Slowly, staring toward the four men at the table, she lifted her hands to her ears.
Chacon's laughter had faded without a trace. His eyes hard, his lips set in a grim line, he shuttled another glance between Considine and Mad Dog. Then he leaned back in his chair and snapped his right hand to his side.
At the same time, the two desperadoes fired beneath the table-Considine at Chacon, Mad Dog at Ferraro. Chacon screamed and dropped both hands straight down toward his crotch as Ferraro bolted up, hands crossed beneath his belly. Throwing his chair back, he twisted around and fell. The lieutenant rolled to his side, raising his knees toward his chest, yowling, blood oozing down the insides of his thighs.
On the floor to his left, Chacon screamed as a great cacophony of gunfire sounded outside, like a sudden army battle or an Indian attack. His misery-pinched eyes rose to Considine's, and his jaw hardened as his right arm jerked again toward his holster.
Casually, as the gunfire continued outside, men and horses screaming, Considine slid his chair back, extended his revolver straight across the table at Chacon, and drilled a neat round hole through the middle of the captain's forehead.
To his left, Ferraro bellowed and fumbled his Colt Navy from its holster. He bellowed again, lay back, and extended the revolver toward Considine.
To Considine's right, a gun boomed, and the lieutenant's head jerked back. He fired a round into the ceiling, dropped the gun, and grabbed his b.l.o.o.d.y throat with both hands, gasping, choking, his eyes bulging from their sockets.
After several seconds, his body relaxed, his hands sagged to the floor, and his eyes glazed with death.
Considine glanced at Mad Dog, who still held his silver-plated Smith & Wesson out before him, smoke curling from the barrel. He arched an eyebrow at Considine.
”What?” Considine said. ”I never covered your a.s.s before?”
Behind him, someone whistled. Considine and Mad Dog turned to see Cal Prewitt-a strap-thin former cow waddy in a high-crowned Stetson and patchy beard- hanging like a devious schoolboy between the half-open batwings. He had an arm draped over each door, knees bent, boots about a foot off the floor. His eyes were round with excitement.
”Hey, Jack! Mad Dog!” Prewitt swung back and forth between the batwings. ”What you want us to do with the carca.s.ses?”
Considine holstered his revolver and fastened the keeper thong over the hammer. ”Drag 'em off so ol' Mick doesn't have to live with the stench. Lead the horses off and let 'em go. And, for Pete's sake, get off those doors, less'n you wanna pay for 'em!”
”They stink as bad alive as they do dead,” said the roadhouse owner, staring down at the two dead rurale leaders. He turned to Considine, rubbing his hands on his ap.r.o.n. ”But I appreciate the gesture, Jack.”
Considine walked over to Anjanette, standing back against the bar, her eyes on the dead men, one hand holding a recently refilled shot gla.s.s before her lips. Considinetook the drink out of her hand, threw it back, set the gla.s.s on the counter, and wrapped his left arm around the girl's shoulders.
As he grabbed the bottle off the table and began leading Anjanette toward the stairs at the back of the room, he said, ”Are you having an adventure yet, Chiquita?”
Chapter 12.
By the time Yakima had climbed the ridge above the posse, leaving Speares to soil his trousers among the boulders, it was late afternoon. He caught up to the sorrel grazing along the opposite slope and traced a winding course through the darkening canyons, hooking up with the desperadoes' trail a few miles southwest of the burned-out village.
He rode for a couple of hours and camped that night under an overhanging lip of layered limestone. He built a small fire and a makes.h.i.+ft spit, upon which he roasted the two large jackrabbits he'd killed with a Jesus stick. The fire was well concealed by boulders lining the bivouac. Waiting for the meat to cook, he hunkered on his haunches, his Yellowboy standing between his knees, and stared down the slope and across the valley cloaked in velvety darkness at a pinp.r.i.c.k of flickering orange light growing brighter as the darkness thickened.
The posse's fire.
They were a persistent bunch-he'd give them that.
Yakima sat staring across the star-capped desert, hearing the fire crackle and the rabbit skins sizzle and split. Absently, he fingered the rifle's smooth barrel.
An idea occurred to him. He'd been wondering how he was going to rescue Anjanette and Wolf from so large a group. Why not let the posse try to take them down first? While the desperadoes were distracted by Speares and Patchen, Yakima would steal up behind them, grab Anjanette and the horse, and hightail it back toward the border.
The tactic made as much sense as anything else he'd come up with.
When the rabbits were done, he ate one hungrily, tearing off large chunks with his hands and licking the grease from his fingers, was.h.i.+ng the meat down with hot black coffee. He wrapped the other rabbit in burlap, stuffed it into his saddlebags for tomorrow, then enjoyed one more cup of coffee before kicking dirt on the fire and rolling up in his blankets.
The distant keen of a cougar lulled him to sleep.
He woke at first light to a fine layer of frost on his blankets and on the hat brim pulled low over his eyes, his breath puffing in the gray dawn air. Flinging his blankets aside, he rose, grabbed a spygla.s.s from his saddlebags, and leapt atop a flat boulder at the edge of his campsite.
Squatting, he trained the gla.s.s down the slope, toward the cactus-studded valley below. Two hundred yards away, a tiny pink flame guttered amid the scrub. Shadows flickered around the fire, and in the misty gray light, Yakima saw the horses tied to a picket line between two cabin-sized boulders.
Since the posse was taking time for breakfast, Yakima would, too.
He went back to his fire ring, built a low blaze with crushed sage branches, and made coffee, which he sipped while he nibbled on the bones of the cooked rabbit. He kept a close eye on the posse. Ten minutes after they'd moved out, heading southwest along the trail of the dozen hoofprints scoring the desert floor, he doused his fire, packed up, saddled the sorrel, and followed.
He trailed the posse from five hundred yards throughout the morning, slowing when they slowed, stopping when they stopped. Near noon, trouble. When pulling the sorrel away from a small spring bubbling around mossy rocks, a loud, ironlike clatter rose from below.
Dread scalding his gut, Yakima glanced down. The horse's left front shoe dangled from its hoof. Slipping out of the saddle, Yakima crouched to inspect the shoe. Only one nail remained, and the shoe itself was cracked. What was worse, after examining the hoof, he found that the frog was swollen and tender. The horse couldn't be ridden until the hoof was wrapped for at least six hours with a cool mud pack and then reshod.