by Jory Sherman
Then Zak entered the barn.
“Saddle your horse, Jeff. Quick. Then we’ll get our rifles and saddlebags out of the room. But we want to be ready to ride.”
“Where are we going?”
“First, to Fort Marcy. I can’t let Loomis take those troops into the field tomorrow. I think he’ll be marching right into a trap.”
They saddled their horses and then went inside the hotel, leaving the horses rein-tied just inside the barn. Zak went to the front desk, which was empty, and retrieved their keys from the mail slots. The two men entered their rooms in the dark, picked up their rifles, saddlebags, and bedrolls, then, leaving their keys inside the rooms, they returned to the livery stables.
As they mounted their horses, Zak felt the rolled up paper in his pocket and remembered that Clarita had slipped it into his hand.
“Got a match, Jeff?” he asked.
Jeff struck a match as Zak unrolled the piece of paper. There was writing on it.
“It’s in Spanish,” Jeff said. “You understand the lingo?”
The note read, “Cuidado con Jorge Dominguez. Es un matador. Quiere matarte esta noche.” There was more, but the rest of it dealt with a past, a past he had thought he’d forgotten—a past he had tried to put behind him, where it belonged.
“Clarita gave me this note in the cantina. It tells me to watch out for Jorge Dominguez. ‘He’s a killer,’ she says, and is out to kill me. Tonight.”
“Do you trust her?”
“I don’t know. But a warning is a warning. I trust that. Jorge’s brother is a traitor. Maybe it runs in the family.”
The match went out, and the two men sat there, listening to what sounded like furtive footsteps. The sound seemed to come from alongside the hotel.
Jeff cleared his throat.
“Shouldn’t we be going, Zak? If Jorge is—”
“Shhh,” Zak said, and held the bit tight against the back of Nox’s mouth.
The sound vanished.
“There was more to the note,” Zak said. He remembered what Clarita had written. “Recuerdas mi padre, Paquito? Recuerdas mi hermana, Corazon?”
“Yeah? What else?” Jeff whispered.
“She asked me if I remembered her father, Paquito. And she asked me if I remembered her sister, Corazon.”
“Did you know this woman, this Clarita, before?”
“I had forgotten,” Zak said.
“She’s a beautiful woman. Hard to forget.”
She wasn’t a woman then. She was a little girl. A little girl in pigtails.”
“Zak, what about her sister? What was her name…Corazon?”
“Yes,” Zak said. “I remember her sister.” He paused, let out a sigh. “I wondered what happened to her.”
“To Clarita?”
“No, she was just a little girl. Maybe nine or ten. Cute little thing.”
“You’re holding something back on me, Zak.”
“Jeff, my father died in Taos. He was murdered there by a man named Ben Trask. I hunted Trask down and turned him over to the Apache chief, Cochise, who staked him out on an anthill and watched him die, real slow. What they call an Apache Sundown. Trask brutally murdered my father, stole his gold, and…”
“And you got both justice and revenge.”
“Yes. Corazon was my father’s true love. He was going to marry her.”
“What was your father’s name? Paquito?”
“No, my father’s name was Russell Cody. Paquito was Corazon’s father. He’s Clarita’s father.”
“And…you know him?”
“Leo said her father was a judge, but he didn’t tell me her father’s first name, which was Francisco. But everyone called him Paquito.”
“Man, you have a history here in New Mexico, don’t you?”
“I guess I do,” Zak said.
Zak held up his hand. A sliver of moonlight slashed across it like a mercurial scar.
There was a rustling of cloth, something scraping against the adobe wall of the hotel or the building next to it. Then the crunch of a foot on gravel.
“I hear it,” Jeff whispered.
Both men drew their pistols, but did not cock them.
They waited.
She stepped out from between the two buildings, a small figure with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. She headed for the stables, twisting her head from side to side. She stepped into a pool of moonlight and her hair shone like the back of a crow’s wing.
It was Clarita.
“Zak,” she called in a loud whisper. “Are you there?”
“I am here,” Zak replied, and Clarita ran toward him, her small feet flashing in the dark like tiny black birds.
A great sadness welled up in Zak as he thought about his father, about Corazon Mendez and her father, Paquito. And a little bright-eyed girl with a dazzling smile named Clarita. It hit him all at once, like a sledgehammer in the chest, and he felt something brush against his cheek. A memory, or his father’s ghostly hand.
And the night turned cold and the moon painted silver baubles on the ground, lighting the small pebbles so that they gleamed like precious gems, flickered like so many lost souls left voiceless on the ruined earth of his past.
Chapter 19
Clarita ran up to Zak and pulled on his leg.
“Let me up, let me up,” she said in English.
Zak reached down and took her arm, slipped his foot out of the stirrup so that she could step into it. He hauled her up behind him.
“Quick,” she said. “We must go. I will show you where.”
Zak touched Nox’s flanks with his blunted spurs and the horse stepped out of the barn.
“Turn here,” she said, pointing to their left. “Go up the alley.”
“What’s going on, Clarita?” Zak asked as they passed behind the Silver Cup and headed for the next street. The cantina was dark. All the lights inside were out. Zak did not hear any music, or the rivers of conversation, rising and falling like a tidal surge of gabbing bullfrogs or the singsong conversations of sawing insects. The building was like a flaming cinder that had been doused in the sea. It was dead quiet, and Zak knew that wasn’t natural or common. In the space of a few minutes, the saloon had closed and dozens of men and women had slipped silently into the night, as if ordered to do so, as if the desertion had been practiced, rehearsed, more than once, like a fire drill in a school or an “abandon ship” exercise on a passenger vessel during an ocean voyage.
“They come for you,” she said. “Jorge and Ralph. They come to kill you.”
“Where are we going?”
“To my father’s house. Paquito wants to see you. Did you read my words on the note?”
“Yes,” he said, turning his head so that she could hear him. “I remember.”
“There is big trouble,” she said in his ear. Her arms wrapped tightly around his waist as Zak put Nox into a gallop. He felt her soft breasts flattening against his back, smelled the scent of her perfume, felt the caress of her hair on the back of his neck. Jeff saw the burst of speed and spurred his own horse until he came up alongside Zak and Clarita. They reached the end of the alley.
That’s when Nox ran into a tightly stretched rope that was strung across the opening. The rope struck the horse midway between the knees and hocks.
Nox tumbled, hurling Clarita and Zak to one side as he crashed to his side, legs flailing the air like a turtle on its back.
Jeff’s horse hit the rope and went down, hurling Jeff over its head. He landed on his left shoulder. His neck snapped and his head smashed into the dirt.
Clarita went sprawling almost in the path of Jeff’s horse. Zak hit on his belly. He felt the wind knocked out of his lungs, but he reached out for Clarita and pulled her away from eight hundred pounds of horse.
He covered her body with his own and drew his pistol. Nox righted himself and kicked until he got his legs underneath him, then stood up, dazed but not seriously injured.
“Git,” Zak hissed as he p
ulled off his hat and waved it at Nox. The horse galloped into the dark street and turned the corner, running hard. His hoofbeats faded just as a shot rang out from the top of an adobe building across the street, directly opposite the rope that was still swaying to and fro, like a plucked string on some giant musical instrument.
Zak saw the muzzle flash, an orange flower that blossomed and died in an instant.
Jeff’s horse screamed as the bullet smashed into its right shoulder, at the top of its leg. The wound exploded in blood and slivers of bone and the horse’s leg collapsed.
“Put a bullet in that horse’s head, Jeff, and crawl in behind it,” Zak said, drawing a bead on the shooter.
Jeff crawled up to his horse, threw an arm over its neck to pin it down. The horse was thrashing in pain, blood streaming from the hole in its crippled shoulder. Jeff put his pistol barrel behind the horse’s ear, cocked the weapon, and squeezed the trigger. The shot was muffled by the horse’s head, and the animal stopped moaning and kicked twice, then lay still.
“Jesus,” Jeff said and ducked his head as Zak fired at the figure on the rooftop.
The bullet was high and the man ducked.
Clarita started to whimper.
“Just lie still,” Zak whispered to her.
“I do not want to die,” she said.
“Then pray,” he said.
“Me muero de morir,” she breathed, and Zak felt her trembling body nestling against his, and her hand clutching his shirt.
Out of the corner of his eye, Zak saw a figure emerge out of the darkness next to the nearest building, on Zak’s right. The moon poured molten pewter light on the man’s shoulders, glinted off the pistol in his hand.
Zak recognized him, just from his shape and the way he stood. He had stood the same way when he was at their table in The Silver Cup.
It was Jorge Dominguez.
Zak swung his pistol toward the man.
“You’d better stop right there, Jorge,” Zak said.
Jorge stopped, went into a fighting crouch.
Zak heard a click as he cocked his pistol.
“Do you see this chisel in my hand, Jorge? It’s chipping out something on a stone.”
“What?” Jorge said.
“That’s your headstone right in front of you. You take one more step and your name goes on it.”
“You go to hell, gringo,” Jorge hissed. He brought his pistol up.
It was a fatal mistake.
Zak’s gun barked and fire exploded from the barrel, propelling a lead bullet at the speed of a thought straight toward Jorge’s crouching figure.
The bullet struck Jorge just above his belt buckle with the force of a twenty-pound maul, driving him back on his heels as if he had been struck with a pile driver. He let out an ugly grunt and squeezed the trigger of his pistol. It bucked in his hand and drove a bullet straight into the ground in front of him. The pistol dropped from his hand and he grabbed his belly, trying to stanch the flow of blood that gushed out of him, with the stench of his bowels attached. A terrible odor filled the air.
“I do not see no chisel,” he spat. “I do not see no fucking chisel.”
“No, and you never will, Jorge,” Zak said and fired again. The bullet ripped into Jorge’s chest and ground his heart to a bloody pulp. He never uttered another word. He only sighed and slumped to the ground, his lips turning cherry red with the blood that bubbled from his mouth.
The man on the roof fired another rifle shot and the bullet smacked into Jeff’s dead horse, raising dust and hairs in a gust. Jeff cracked off a shot and they heard the man scoot away from the edge of the roof, scraping his clothes on grit and adobe brick.
“Any more of ’em?” Jeff asked.
“We’ll wait a minute,” Zak said.
He heard more scraping, then a thud as the man jumped down from the roof at the back of the building. Then running footsteps.
“You wait here, Jeff,” Zak said. “Watch over Clarita. Clarita, get over there with Jeff, behind that horse.”
Zak jumped up and ran alongside the building where Jorge lay dead.
“Where do you go?” Clarita called after him.
“Be right back,” Zak said, then disappeared down Esperanza Street.
Zak huddled against the storefront, listening. Then he saw what he was after, standing hitched to a rail in front of the next store. He sneaked up to the horse, unwrapped the reins, and was about to step around the rail when he heard a voice from across the street.
“You do not steal Jorge’s horse.”
Zak recognized the man but could not see him. The accent, the way he spoke.
It was Ralph Zigler, and the only thing between them was Jorge’s horse.
“You have got a tombstone, also, Cody,” Zigler said. “I write your epitaph on it, yah.”
So, Zigler had heard what he’d said to Jorge.
He was probably the shooter up on the roof.
A damned bushwhacker.
A killer.
The street was empty. There was only one horse tied up in front of the saloon down the street. Probably Zigler’s. He and Jorge had been left behind to lay a trap for him and Jeff. That rope across the end of the street. They had probably known Clarita would take them that way, and just waited in ambush. Two killers. One of them dead. The other just deadly. Deadly as hell.
Zigler laughed.
It was a dry guttural laugh. He was sure of himself. He was in shadow. Zak was bathed in dusty moonlight, out in the open.
The German’s laugh told Zak where he was, but he could not see him.
If Jorge’s horse moved, Zak knew he was a dead man.
He looked at the hitchrail. He looked at the horse. Just those two things between him and Zigler. Between him and certain death.
“Just one thing you forgot, Zigler,” Zak said. The seconds ticked by. Slow as a garden slug.
Seconds that seemed like an eternity.
Precious seconds that gave a man time to think.
Seconds that gave a man a little more time to live.
Or die.
Chapter 20
Zak’s hand tightened around the reins. Jorge’s horse was still his only protection against Zigler, the only thing standing between them that was large enough to stop a bullet. His left arm rested on the hitchrail. He held his pistol in his right hand and his palm was beginning to sweat, even in the coolness of the evening.
Zigler was just waiting for the right moment to gun him down.
And Zak wasn’t going to give him that moment. “Zigler,” he called to the man across the street.
“Yah?”
“Do you still have that candle?”
“What candle?”
“The candle God gave you.”
“You are crazy, Cody. Nobody to me gave the candle.”
“Yes, God gave us all a candle. It burns only so long and then goes out.”
“Oh, so you are a poet, yes?”
“No, Zigler, I’m the wind.”
“Was ist? The wind?”
“Yes, I’m the wind that’s going to blow your candle out.”
With that Zak jerked hard on the reins, pulling the horse to his left, away from the hitchrail. Then he stepped around the rail and hugged the horse’s rump, shielding himself from Zigler.
Zigler took a step toward the moving horse, lifting his pistol for a shot at Zak.
Zak heard the scuff of his boots, poked his head around the horse’s backside and saw the glint of moonlight on the barrel of Zigler’s pistol.
A split second to make a decision.
A fractured moment in a lifetime of moments.
Zigler moved his pistol from side to side, looking for an opportunity to fire it at Zak.
The horse sidestepped away from the pressure on its hip and Zak went into a crouch. He saw Zigler at the same time as the German saw him. Both fired their pistols almost at once.
Zigler’s pistol roared. Sparks and flame burst from the barrel. The white smo
ke turned to gossamer in the moonlight. The bullet sizzled over Zak’s shoulder like an angry hornet, smacked into the adobe wall behind him.
Zak aimed at a point just below Zigler’s chin, allowing for the peculiarities of night vision. The bullet smashed into the center of Zigler’s chest, splitting the breastbone, shearing off splinters of bone, smashing flesh and one lung to pulp before caroming off his spine and lodging in a rib. Zigler twisted into a grotesque shape as his legs gave way beneath him. He held onto his pistol, but could not summon the strength to thumb back the hammer. The hammer assumed the weight of an anvil, while his thumb was a useless appendage turned to soft sponge.
Zak ran over to the man, cocking his pistol. The horse sidled a few feet, turned its head to regard Zak’s movements. But it stayed put, curious eyes glazed over with soft moonlight.
“Gaaah,” Zigler said as he looked up at Zak. Smoke curled from the barrel of Zak’s pistol, a diaphanous snake of light.
“That candle,” Zak said. “It’s about to go out.”
“You bastard,” Zigler croaked.
“Where’s Pete?”
“Ha. You never catch him, Cody. They ride to the Jemez. Many guns to kill the American soldiers.”
Zigler started to raise his gun.
Zak kicked it out of his hand, and it went spinning away, a metal whirligig.
“Too bad,” Zak said. “I’d like to blow out his candle, too.”
“I not die,” Zigler said, his voice laced with arrogance.
“You don’t feel the pain yet, Zigler. You’re in shock. Like a rabbit. Pretty soon now you’ll beg for me to put a bullet in your brain.”
“I spit on you, Cody.”
But Zigler could not summon up spit, nor did he have the strength to even purse his lips.
Zak walked over to Zigler’s pistol. He picked it up and stuck it in his belt.
Zigler groaned in pain.
“That’s the start of it, Herr Zigler. Just a little pinch of pain and then it’ll tear through your body like a firebrand and you’ll scream like a woman. And nobody will hear you. Just me, and I won’t give a damn.”