‘Is it? I’d kind of lost track of what day it is. Ain’t banks down here open on Saturdays?’
‘I don’t rightly know, but they’ll be closed tomorrow. If we do put the money in a bank today, we’ll have to wait till Monday before we can leave. I don’t want to spend a whole Sunday here, kicking my heels with nothing to do.’
‘Won’t there be anything to do?’ asked Cootes.
‘I doubt it. You know how religious they are in these parts. There won’t be nothing to do except go to church.’
So they agreed they would spend one more night in Nogales before starting their three-hundred-mile ride down to Guaymas. And they wouldn’t put the money in a bank. They would do what they’d done the previous night, take turns guarding the money while the other went out.
Cootes said he didn’t mind guarding the money first. It meant he’d get it over with, and he wouldn’t have to worry about getting back at any particular time. Sims was fine with that, so he went out about seven o’clock to get drunk on tequila again.
Once again Cootes sat on the bed with his six-gun on his lap, and everything was just as it had been the night before, right up till about ten, when Sims came bursting in, yelling that they had to get out of town quick, on account of he’d just shot a man dead.
Jed Sims had shot the man in an argument over poker.
There were a lot of señoritas in the saloon, but when he saw the four men playing poker, Sims lost interest in the señoritas and wanted to play cards instead.
After a few minutes one of the men had to leave to go home to his wife, so Sims asked if he could sit in, and the other men said they didn’t mind if he did.
He lost the first hand, then he won the next, then he lost the next.
And all the time he drank more and more tequila.
When it got to the fifth or six hand he was pretty certain he was going to win. He couldn’t really see straight, and his mind was a little fuzzy, but he was confident he was going to win the pot, which had grown to a sizeable amount. And when the time came to show everybody what cards he had, he slapped them down on the table, said, ‘Four aces!’ and made to scoop up his winnings.
‘Excuse me, Señor,’ said one of the other players, a Mexican gentleman with a big moustache that he’d waxed at the ends so they curled upwards. ‘You have made a mistake.’
‘No I ain’t,’ said Sims. ‘Four aces. Look for yourself. That beats anything you fellows have.’
The other men looked, but they only saw three aces.
‘Pardon Señor, but you have only three aces, not four,’ said the man with the waxed moustache. ‘I see that the aces you have are diamonds, hearts and clubs. Perhaps you have mistaken the four of spades for the ace of spades?’ He added, ‘It is an easy mistake to make, I am sure, if your eyesight is not so good. . .’ He was being kind. He didn’t want to embarrass the man, or make it sound like he was calling the man a fool, or a drunk. Though Sims certainly was drunk. He’d had five or six shots of tequila just while sitting at the table.
But the man’s kindness was lost on Sims.
Sims was certain he’d had four aces. He had never been so sure of anything in his life. He picked up his cards and squinted at them.
He saw three aces, a queen and a four of spades.
Sims threw the cards down on the table. ‘I’ve been tricked!’ he yelled. He didn’t know how he’d been tricked, but he knew he must have been.
‘No señor,’ said one of the other men, an elderly fellow on his right. ‘You have made a mistake, that is all. Perhaps you should sit down, have another. . . .’
‘Damn you all!’ screamed Sims. ‘I was a fool to have played poker with a load of cheating mongrels! I’ll teach you to mess with Jedediah Sims!’
He pulled his revolver from its holster and shot the man opposite him in the head. The man jerked backwards, taking the chair with him, and crashed to the floor.
Killing the man had a sudden sobering effect on Jed Sims. He’d just killed a man because he’d dared suggest Sims had made a mistake playing cards. And to confound his error, Sims had just announced his name to the whole damn saloon.
Somebody was screaming. Not the other two men sitting at the table, they were stunned, looking at Sims, then at their dead friend, then back at Sims. They weren’t the ones screaming. It was one of the señoritas behind him that was doing all the screaming. And people were running out the door. And somebody was yelling something in Spanish, and though Sims didn’t know Spanish any too well, he was pretty sure it meant something like ‘Fetch the sheriff’, something like that.
Sims ran out of the door, into the street. He ran all the way back to the rooming house, burst into the room, yelling that they had to get out of town quick, on account of he’d just shot a man dead.
‘What the hell did you do that for?’ shouted Ben Cootes, jumping off the bed.
‘Damn Mexican was cheating me.’ Sims scooped up the two saddle-bags that were full of his share of the money.
‘But did you have to kill him?’
‘Don’t quiz me, boy!’ He ran out of the room.
Cootes holstered his gun, picked up his two saddle-bags and ran out after him.
A whole load of Mexicans were coming up the stairs of the rooming house, and they all had guns. Sims could see there wasn’t any use in trying to kill all of them, so he ran the other way, smashed a window and jumped out.
They were one floor above the ground, a drop of some ten feet. Sims hit the ground and rolled. He wasn’t as young and fit as he’d once been, and the landing near enough knocked all the wind out of him. He was lucky he hadn’t broken something. But adrenaline was pumping through his veins, and he didn’t want to get himself hanged after all the trouble he’d gone to getting here to Mexico, so he picked himself up and ran in the direction of the livery stable, two doors down from the rooming house.
Behind him he heard Cootes hit the ground. There was a gunshot from the smashed window. Sims turned and saw a Mexican leaning out the window, pointing a six-gun at Cootes. But before he could fire, young Cootes had shot the Mexican square in the forehead.
Together they ran to the livery stable. As they got there, Cootes said, ‘I don’t know why I’m running – I didn’t kill no damn Mexican!’
‘Well, you have now!’ replied Sims.
They found their horses, but they didn’t have time to put the saddles and reins on them. Sims yelled, ‘Forget all that! We’ll have to ride bareback!’
‘I ain’t never ridden bareback,’ said Cootes.
‘This here is a good time to learn,’ replied Sims.
So they climbed onto the backs of their horses and rode bareback out of the livery stable, each man with his saddle-bags over his shoulder and clinging onto his horse’s mane.
A rifle bullet skimmed Sims’s arm and he dropped his saddle-bags. For one moment he considered stopping and picking them up, but then another rifle bullet zinged past his head, and he thought better of it.
They kept riding hard till they were in the hills south of Nogales. Then they left the road and cut west, and walked the tired horses a while till they found a ghost town sitting there silent in a valley.
‘What is this place?’ asked Cootes.
‘How should I know?’
Cootes sat on the ground in the lee of an adobe house that was just walls, the roof gone. Cootes noticed that Sims wasn’t carrying anything. ‘Where are your saddle-bags?’ he asked.
‘Lost ’em,’ replied Sims, examining his wounded left arm. It wasn’t much of a wound. The bullet had grazed his flesh, was all. Stung like hell, though.
‘That’s half our money gone!’
‘You think I don’t know that?’
‘What are we going to do?’ asked Cootes. ‘I don’t rightly know we’ll have enough to buy ourselves a saloon.’
Sims gave a shrug. ‘Guess we’ll have to rob some more banks.’
‘But the idea was, we’d rob banks and trains in America, then come to
Mexico where American lawmen can’t reach us. If we hold up banks here, then we’ll have Mexican lawmen after us, too.’
‘Guess that’s just the way it’ll have to be,’ said Sims. ‘It’s fate, that’s all it is. Weren’t my fault I got cheated at cards.’
That was the version of events that Jed Sims was most comfortable with, that he had been cheated. He would keep telling himself that, and eventually he would believe it. The version of events in which he’d been a dumb drunk who’d thought he’d had four aces when he only had three, and had killed a man for nothing, was a version he found intolerable. It was intolerable, therefore it couldn’t have happened that way. And that was that.
‘I don’t know what it is with you,’ said Cootes. ‘Everywhere you go, you cause trouble. And never for any good reason. It’s always on account of something stupid.’
‘What would you have done, some Mex cheats you at cards? Just let it go?’
‘Yes I would,’ said Cootes. ‘We had four saddle-bags full of money, now we only got two. We were set up for life. Yes, I would have just let it go.’
‘Well, you weren’t there!’ yelled Sims.
Cootes was silent for a while, sitting with his back against the wall of the half-ruined adobe, staring at the dirt. And then he said, ‘What do we do in the meantime?’
Sims said, ‘What do you mean, “what do we do”?’
‘What do you intend you live on?’
Sims noted that Cootes had said you, not we. He stared at Cootes and said, ‘We share the money.’
Cootes noted that Sims had said the money, not your money.
Till now, Cootes had been sitting with his arms resting on his knees. But now he lowered his arms so that his palms were flat on the dry earth. Also so that his right hand was close to his holster.
‘We’re partners,’ said Sims, his voice low and even, like he was the most reasonable man who ever lived. ‘Partners share what they got, you know that.’
‘That wasn’t the deal,’ said Cootes.
They stared at each other in the darkness of the Mexican desert, each one wondering if the other was going to make the first move.
CHAPTER TEN
When Jack got back to Tucson he handed Virgil Deakin over to the sheriff, together with the body of the man Deakin had killed, who somebody recognized as Caleb Murphy, a man who worked at the saloon and was well known for being a drunkard and a fool.
It turned out Murphy had rented the mule from the livery stable that Jack headed to next. Jack told the man there to take good care of his horse while he was down in Mexico, and paid him in advance for a month. And then Jack bought a second horse, a fresh one, on account of he had a lot of hard desert riding to do, and his horse had done enough of that kind of riding for a while.
‘Why don’t you just exchange your horse for a new one?’ asked the man. ‘It’ll be cheaper.’
But Jack explained that he was kind of attached to his horse, and wanted it back when he returned from Mexico. The man thought that was just plain loco, but kept his mouth shut. If the fellow wanted to throw his money away, let him. Especially as he’s throwing it my way.
Then Jack went to the newspaper office and asked if they printed Wanted posters, too. The editor, who seemed to be the only person who worked in the place, said yes, they printed Wanted posters, too.
‘I want you to print a Wanted poster with my description on it,’ said Jack. ‘I want you to put on every last detail. The scar on my eyebrow and everything, so it can’t be anybody else but me. Not my real name, though. We’ll think of a name.’
The editor didn’t rightly know what to make of this. But he kept his mouth shut, thinking if this young fellow wanted to throw his money away, it was his business. Especially as he’s throwing it my way.
‘How many you want printing?’ asked the man.
‘Just the one,’ said Jack.
‘What price you putting on your head, may I ask?’
‘I figure five hundred dollars, dead or alive.’
‘And what crimes did you commit, exactly?’
‘Robbed a couple of trains and a few banks. And killed a couple of men, too.’
The editor wasn’t too sure if the young fellow was crazy or not, but he’d seen him talking to the sheriff, so reckoned the man must be all right. ‘You sure five hundred is enough? They offered five thousand for Jesse James and each of his gang, and that was over ten years ago.’
‘I ain’t nearly a match for Jesse James,’ said Jack. ‘I’m only one tenth the villain he was. Five hundred will be plenty.’
The next morning Jack left Tucson a second time, but this time on a fresh horse and with the Wanted poster, printed on cheap paper, like such things usually were, folded and tucked into his shirt pocket.
He rode to the mission and picked up the saddle-bags stuffed with Virgil Deakin’s share of the gang’s money, and continued south. The following day he arrived in the border town of Nogales.
He crossed the border into Mexico, simply by crossing the road. No trouble at all.
Jack found a rooming house. When he signed the register he looked for American names, but there weren’t any, only Mexican. So he asked the woman who ran the rooming house if any other Americans were staying there, or had stayed there the previous night, and she said, ‘No, señor. There have been no Americans here for a month. See. . . .’ She flipped back the pages of the register, letting him see for himself.
Jack figured the woman had guessed he was some kind of lawman.
Sims and Cootes weren’t here. And if they’d stayed in Nogales the previous night, they hadn’t stayed in this rooming house.
Jack was dog tired. He went up to his room and slept till ten o’clock that night, when he was woken up by the sound of gunfire coming from across the road.
Jack leaped out of bed, pulled on his clothes, and ran out into the street.
There were a whole load of men out there, firing down the road. Most of them were firing six-guns, but one of them had a rifle.
‘What’s the commotion?’ he asked the rifleman in Spanish. Jack’s Spanish wasn’t fluent exactly, but it was serviceable.
‘Two Americanos,’ said the rifleman. ‘One of them killed a man in a saloon, the other one killed the sheriff.’
‘You know their names?’
The man shook his head.
‘What did they look like?’
‘One young, the other around forty.’
They sounded like Cootes and Sims.
‘They friends of yours?’ asked the rifleman, looking like he had half a mind to start shooting at Jack.
‘Not me. They were part of a gang that killed my folks. I’ve chased ’em more than two hundred miles to here.’
A group of men were carrying a body out of a building across the street. Jack saw the sign outside the building. It was another rooming house. He cursed his luck. He’d picked the wrong place to spend the night. In fact, he’d been so tired, he hadn’t even noticed the other rooming house was there. For the last few hours he’d been sleeping less than thirty yards from where Sims and Cootes had been.
The riflemen said, ‘We’re getting up a posse. You want to ride with us?’
‘I sure do,’ said Jack.
Sims was standing up, and Cootes was sitting on the ground, his back against the wall of the old adobe.
Sims figured that sitting on the ground with your back against a wall was a bad position to be in when it came to drawing your gun. In fact, he couldn’t think how you could properly draw it at all. So when Sims pulled his gun and aimed it at Cootes, he didn’t expect Cootes to be able to fire back.
But Cootes was smarter than Sims gave him credit for. He didn’t draw his gun. Instead he squeezed the trigger while his six-gun was still in the holster, Cootes angling his leg so it was aiming at Sims. The bullet cut a groove down the length of Cootes’s thigh, and the flame that shot from the barrel scorched his leg bad. The bullet hit Sims in the left shoulder and knocked him clean
over.
Cootes got up onto his feet and limped over to where Sims lay on the ground, not moving. Blood was coming out of the wound, making a pool in the dirt. The blood looked black in the moonlight. Cootes stood over Sims and looked down at the man’s face. Sims’s eyes were closed. Cootes sighed. ‘We should never have stopped in that town,’ he said.
He thought he was talking to a dead man, but he wasn’t.
Sims opened his eyes, lifted his gun and shot Cootes in the head.
The bullet hit Cootes under the chin and blasted out of the top of his skull, taking Cootes’s hat with it. The young man’s body fell back and crashed to the ground.
‘Young fool,’ muttered Sims. ‘You should’ve learned by now, you can’t trust anybody in this life.’
Sims wondered how many people ever came out here to this ghost town. Probably not many. But he didn’t want to risk anybody stumbling on Cootes’s body, so he dragged it inside one of the half-ruined adobes and threw some mud bricks on top of it. ‘Rest in peace,’ growled Sims.
He went back outside and sat against the wall, much as Cootes had been doing a few minutes ago.
Sims was beat. All the tequila and excitement had left him exhausted. He felt like he could fall asleep right here, seated against the wall. He dropped his head and closed his eyes.
Then a voice he didn’t recognize said, ‘Don’t move.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
By the time Jack had run to the livery stable and got his horse saddled, the posse had already ridden off along the road Sims and Cootes had taken.
Jack figured he was three, four minutes behind the posse. He went after them, riding hard, wondering if he’d ever catch up. Then he heard the gunshots.
Two of them. First one, then another a few seconds later. Then no more. The gunshots had come from somewhere over to his right.
He left the road, and his horse had to climb an incline, about twenty feet higher than the road. Once he’d got to the top of the incline, Jack could see down into a shallow basin of dust, surrounded by rocky outcrops. In the middle of the basin was a ghost town, still and silent in the moonlight. Saguaro cactuses, some of them ten or more feet high, stood around the outside of the deserted town as if guarding it from intruders.
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