“Buenos días, Señorita Hillary,” he said. “You and Ramón will please get down from your horses now and come with me.”
Oh God, oh Gage, she wailed silently, as she glanced frantically over her shoulder at Ramón. His dark eyes were huge, his face chalky, but he began to dismount.
As Eslin kicked her right foot out of her stirrup, her knee bumped the radio lying against the flap. She wrapped her left hand around the pommel and reached for the switches with her right. She tripped them both on and swung her leg over the cantle as the radio blared to life with an earsplitting crackle.
The sorrel mare whinnied, laid back her ears, and shot up on her hind legs. Hanging by her left foot between the stirrup and the ground, Eslin just managed to jump clear as the mare came down and bolted. Eslin’s body twisted as she fell, but the wet ground cushioned her fall. She scrambled around on all fours and watched Marco’s cousin try to leap clear of the charging mare. He didn’t make it, and his rifle flew one way, the radio on her saddle the other, as the sorrel’s shoulder caught him square in the chest. He fell with a cry as the mare lunged past him and jumped through the gap in the rocks.
Pushing herself up on her hands, Eslin ran toward him and beat Ramón, who stopped to pick up the radio. Winded and breathing heavily, Marco’s cousin struggled up on his left elbow and reached for the knife in his belt. With a scream of panic Eslin leapt over him, and in an awkward, half-falling motion, swooped to pick up the rifle. It was much heavier than she’d imagined, but she dragged it off the ground, and spun around in time to see Ramón draw back his arms in a baseball-style swing and bring the radio down on the man’s head.
The man slumped to the ground. The knife fell out of his right hand.
“Did I kill him?” Ramón asked, as he bent over Marco’s unconscious cousin.
The last thing Eslin wanted to do was touch the man, but she placed two fingers on the side of his neck, and felt a pulse.
“No, he’s alive.”
“Now what?” Ramón asked hoarsely.
“Now we get out of here and find Gage,” she replied shakily. “But first we make sure he won’t follow us when he comes to.”
She looked at the guide’s long, wickedly curved hunting knife but couldn’t bring herself to touch it.
“Let me,” Ramón said.
He picked up the knife and used it to cut the decorative straps from the bay colt’s saddle. He carried them back to the guide and Eslin helped him bind the man’s hands and ankles.
“We should gag him too.” Ramón rocked back on his heels, spread his hands on his dirt-streaked denim thighs, and eyed the knots critically. “Just in case.”
He didn’t add just in case his cousins should double back looking for him, but he didn’t have to. The same thing had occurred to Eslin.
“I can’t do it,” she said flatly. “I don’t care what he’s done or planned to do, I just can’t.”
Glancing at her sideways, Ramón swiveled toward her on his soaked, green-stained knees, his spread fingers tightening on his thighs.
“There’s something else I didn’t tell you last night,” he said slowly. “I guess I didn’t because”—his dark eyes slid away from hers a fraction—”because I wanted to pretend I’d never heard it, ‘cause if I had, then I’d have to think about what it meant, you know?”
His gaze, his suddenly shiny, ebony-hard eyes, shifted back to her face, and Eslin shivered.
“I think so,” she hedged, holding her breath.
“When I left the house that day after the old guy split, I went down to the two-year-old barn. Malachi was there. I guess I looked pretty shook up, ‘cause he asked me what was wrong. I didn’t tell him, but I asked him about this guy, said he’d been at the house, that he’d looked real familiar to me but I couldn’t place him. Malachi remembered him, though, and he got a real funny look on his face, kind of puzzled, and said, “What the hell’s he want here after all this time?’“ Ramón paused and drew a none-too-steady breath. “The old guy was Blaine Aldridge, Eslin. You met him that first weekend you came to Roundtree.”
“I remember him.” She nodded, remembering too, the look on his face in Ganymede’s barn, the desperate plea to understand his feelings that she’d overheard from the gallery.
“Malachi told me that he and old man Roundtree were real tight, and I remembered him then, remembered that he and his old lady used to come out from New York every year for the first couple weeks of Santa Anita. Aldridge was on the State Racing Commission. At least he was until Johnny Byrne killed himself. Malachi said he resigned about two weeks later, and that he never came to Roundtree again. Not even when old man Roundtree died.”
“My God,” Eslin said, horrified, cupping her right hand over her mouth.
Oh, Johnny, poor Johnny, Rachel had murmured. Real soft, like she was surprised, or sad, according to Ramón. Aldridge had been one of the commissioners who’d found Johnny Byrne guilty and exonerated Edward Roundtree. Aldridge was his friend. He hadn’t come to his funeral, but he had come when Johnny Byrne’s son had stolen Ganymede. Oh, God, oh, God, Eslin moaned to herself.
“That’s what I didn’t want to think about. I didn’t want to ‘cause the only way it makes sense is if Johnny Byrne was telling the truth.”
“He must’ve been,” Eslin murmured, her fingers slipping away from her mouth and curling against her chin. “He must’ve been the scapegoat.”
“I think so, too, but I don’t think Gage or Ethan or even Rachel knew anything about it until Aldridge showed up.”
“Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t,” she said to Ramón, wondering why no one had told her the truth. “But that’s really not important now. What is, is that Marco has always known his father was innocent, and what we have to decide—and fast —is where that leaves Ethan.”
“In damn big trouble, I’d say. People who don’t intend to hurt you don’t carry rifles.”
“Agreed.” Eslin hiked up her sweater, untugged her shirttails from the waistband of her jeans, and tore off two inches. “Gag him.”
Chapter 30
Twenty minutes down the narrow trail he’d picked up again outside the canyon, Gage reined the chestnut gelding and looked back over his shoulder. He had a clear, almost half-mile view of the empty track behind him, and smiled, satisfied that Eslin and Ramón hadn’t followed him as he’d feared they might.
They still could, he supposed, but he doubted it. Eslin was sensible, and the fear he’d read in her eyes at the sight of Marco’s two cousins and their rifles had been genuine. As he heeled the gelding forward again, he raised his hand to his neck chain and closed his fingers around the horseshoe nail.
It felt warm, and as the gelding picked his way along the rocky trail, it grew warmer still. The gelding snorted suddenly, threw up his ears, and balked halfway through an abrupt right-hand curve in the trail. Huge boulders reared on both sides of the rutted track, screening what lay beyond them. Gage rose in his stirrups to get a better view—and a fraction of a second later went flying out of his saddle as something hard slammed him viciously between the shoulder blades.
He hit the ground on his left side, felt the breath rush out of his lungs and his cracked ribs grind as he rolled onto his back. His head spinning and his vision blurring from the impact of the fall, Gage tried to push himself up on his weak right arm, but it buckled and he fell back on his elbow, gasping for breath and blinking at the dark-skinned man in the sheepskin jacket who stood on top of a boulder with his rifle aimed at the bridge of his nose.
The chestnut gelding reared and whinnied as the cousin in the camouflage fatigues stepped out of the rocks on the other side of the trail and caught his reins. Barking something in sharp, guttural Spanish, the cousin in sheepskin motioned at Gage with the rifle as he jumped down from the boulder.
Gage tried to move, but couldn’t. His chest and his ribs were on fire, his right shoulder numb. While the cousin in camouflage led the chestnut away through the curve, the one in sheepsk
in strode across the trail, snapped at him in Spanish again, and jabbed at him with the barrel of the rifle. All Gage could muster was a curse and a halfhearted, left-handed swing that earned him a swift kick in the kidneys. He doubled over.
Rough, strong hands lifted him, jerked his arms behind his back, and lashed his wrists together. His stomach lurched as he swung in midair, then his whole body wrenched as he collided with something hard and cold. His eyes blurring, Gage shoved himself up on his left elbow, saw that he was in the dirty rear deck of an open Jeep, then froze at the gleaming blue-black rifle bore shoved in his face and the malicious, white-toothed grin behind it. He fell against the back of the passenger seat on his right shoulder, and except for his labored breathing, lay motionless as the cousin in the fatigues lashed the chestnut gelding’s reins to the right side roll bar.
As he hurried around the side, hopped behind the wheel, and started the engine, the cousin in sheepskin caught the top of the bar, hiked himself over the tailgate, and sat on top of it with his rifle pointed at Gage’s throat. The barrel never wavered as the Jeep bounced over the rutted track and the chestnut gelding, his ears back and his eyes bulging, did his best to lurch along behind.
Despite the shrieking pain in his ribs and the nausea shuddering his empty stomach, Gage refused to let the man see how badly he was hurt—or how scared he was. He kept his eyes open and bit his bottom lip between his teeth to keep from crying out every time the Jeep careened over a rock or through a rut.
His right shoulder began to ache like a boil, his ribs ground with every jolt, and to top it all off, it began to rain. He heard the transmission drop into a lower gear as the Jeep slowed and whined through soupy mud. The game little chestnut all but staggering behind managed a snorting breath through his nostrils, and the telltale fleck of lather on his chest and neck disappeared under the mud spewing in his face. If the Jeep didn’t speed up again he might just make it. The thought stirred the banked rage deep inside him, and Gage swore that if Marco’s cousins ran the gelding to death, he’d somehow get himself out of this, lash them both to the back of the Jeep, and drag them from here to hell and back.
Within minutes, though Gage couldn’t tell exactly how many, the track petered out on a stony hillside. The Jeep shifted into a still lower gear, and the chestnut picked up his ears a little as the footing and the pace improved. Gage shook his head to clear the rain out of his eyes, instantly wished he hadn’t as his neck wrenched and bile rose in his throat, then slammed on his throbbing right shoulder into the back of the passenger seat as the Jeep took a nose-dive and he heard another horse whinny.
For half a second he froze, then looked over his right shoulder and saw Ganymede tossing his head over the top rail of a corral. He was a mess, his mane and forelock matted and snarled, but he was alive. Hoping that Ethan was, too, he thrust himself up on his knees, but the cousin in sheepskin shoved him down again with the muzzle of his rifle.
Gage fell against the back of the seat again on his right shoulder, the force of the impact setting fire to the half-healed ligaments and the bone-deep fury constricting his throat. Marco’s cousin grinned at him. Gage pushed himself up on his elbow, lunged at him, and rammed him in the solar plexus with his left shoulder. Caught off guard, he toppled backward off the tailgate.
He was on his feet again in seconds, the barrel of his rifle slicing toward Gage. He ducked, his chin scraping and burning across weathered metal, but the muzzle whooshed harmlessly past his head. Ganymede whinnied again, the gelding nickered in reply and shied as the cousin behind the wheel bailed out of the Jeep and grabbed his rifle from the seat. Gage twisted away from him and the full-arm swing he aimed at his groin with the butt of the rifle.
“Enough,” Marco Byrne said, and both cousins, their dark faces flushed, backed away from the tailgate.
Struggling up into a sitting position, Gage leaned against the back of the seat, breathing shallowly and blinking to focus his eyes through the black spots swimming dizzily in front of him. As his vision cleared, he saw Byrne step out of a crude wooden door-frame in a mud-splattered white stucco house and walk up to the Jeep. He wore dark indigo jeans, a white open-necked shirt, and a maroon V-neck pullover. He smiled, leaning one hand on the seat-back above Gage’s head and the other on the side of the bed.
“I apologize for Eduardo,” he said, nodding at the man in the sheepskin jacket. “He’s tired and wet from spending the day in the hills looking for you.”
“Eduardo, huh? You’re Marco, Alberto’s in the clink in Puebla, so he”—Gage jerked his chin at the cousin in the camouflage fatigues—”must be Zeppo, and Harpo’s the guy you planted at Monte Alban, right?”
“Very clever,” Byrne said, his smile never wavering. “Let’s see how clever you are when Harpo, as you call him, returns with Miss Hillary and Ramón from the canyon where you so gallantly left them.”
Eduardo chuckled, opened his sheepskin jacket with his left hand, and patted the two-way radio clipped to the belt of his trousers. The cousin at Monte Alban had carried a radio, too, and Gage’s mouth went dry as he looked back at Byrne.
“They will be here soon,” he said, “and then we will finish this.”
Byrne nodded to his cousins and said something in Spanish. The one in camouflage leaned his rifle against the Jeep, untied the chestnut from the roll bar, and led the exhausted, mud-caked gelding toward the corral. Ganymede did not back away as he approached, and as he reached for the top pole to slide it back, the stallion snorted, shook his head, and took a firm, challenging step toward him.
Though he couldn’t tell how much from this distance, Gage could see that Ganymede had lost some of the weight he’d gained in maturity. He wasn’t as sleek as he’d been in his racing days, neither was he gaunt, and except for his ragged and badly overgrown unshod hooves, and the deplorable condition of his coat, he seemed well enough. As the cousins finished closing the corral and turned toward the Jeep, Ganymede nickered, rubbed against the gelding, and lazed on one quarter beside him.
Zeppo stood with his rifle while Eduardo grabbed Gage’s left arm and jerked him toward the house. He fell heavily against the weathered doorjamb on his right shoulder, felt bits of splintered wood gouge at his jacket, and shook his head to clear it as he raised his chin and caught his breath.
Dirt and disarray did not become Ethan. He sat with his arms tied behind him, in a straight white chair backed against the rear wall of the house. Another chair stood empty beside him. There was a small fireplace in the near corner, a low flame licking and smoking over the logs, but Ethan, in his navy slacks and short-sleeved blue shirt, trembled visibly with cold and clenched his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering. White splotches mottled his throat, his chin and cheeks were blue-black with whiskers, and mud splattered the lenses of his glasses as he looked up at him.
In the corner of his eye Gage could see Marco Byrne standing beside a wooden table in the center of the one open room. Behind him and the gloating smile on his face, Gage had a vague impression of a leather recliner, a shelf of books on the wall, and a bed heaped with quilts on a square, shag-piled orange rug.
“I don’t suppose,” Ethan said hoarsely, “that you have my toothbrush in your pocket?”
“Sorry.” Gage smiled weakly. “It’s at the motel with your razor.”
He winced then and gasped as Eduardo shoved him between the shoulder blades with the butt of his rifle and sent him stumbling across the dirt floor. Jerking him up by his right elbow, he spun Gage around, pushed him into the chair beside Ethan, and yanked his arms over the back. Gage’s ribs wrenched, his shoulder flared, but he gritted his teeth and did his best to glare defiantly at Byrne as Eduardo untied his wrists. The second or two of relief he felt when the blood flooded back into his fingers turned into agony when Eduardo, with vicious jerks that cut the circulation off again, lashed his wrists to the chair.
“I advise you to relax,” Byrne said with a smile. “Resisting only tightens the knots, and we haven’t lon
g to wait now.”
Chapter 31
Once they’d gagged Marco’s unconscious cousin and dragged him clear of the canyon entrance, Eslin picked up the two radios—the hopelessly smashed one Ramón had hit him with, and the one that had been clipped to the guide’s belt. The casing was cracked, but hoping the insides were undamaged, Eslin fiddled with the switches for a good five minutes before she gave it up as irreparable.
“I do good work, huh?” Ramón asked glumly, as she sighed and walked to the mossy edge of the pool.
“Let’s just hope that when we don’t call Doc in half an hour he’ll send the Mounties out to look for us.”
The reflection of just her face, just her disembodied head, looked back at her from the pool as she dropped the two radios into it. As she turned away, a slicing pain jabbed her between the eyes. Wincing and rubbing at the headache that hadn’t bothered her since Gage had made love to her in Mexico City, Eslin looked at the rifle propped against the rock she’d been sitting on.
“Do you know anything about guns?” she asked Ramón.
“I know you point at what you want to hit,” he answered, “and then you pull the trigger.”
That was about all Eslin knew too.
“I suppose we should take it with us anyway.” She sighed again. “We don’t want to leave it here.”
Ramón nodded, picked up the rifle, and slung it by its strap over his shoulder. Leading the bay colt, he followed Eslin out of the canyon. She looked back only once, not at the unconscious figure lying on the rocks, but at the dreaming pool and the eerily quiet waterfall. The pain in her head flared again, but eased as she turned away and slid cautiously through the narrow, rock-walled funnel.
The ill-tempered sorrel mare stood no more than twenty yards away, quivering beneath her saddle, her reins dragging the ground.
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