The Jackals

by William W. Johnstone

  Breen spit the bitterness out of his mouth and onto the kid’s chest. He glanced at the woman, still moaning, and looked at the bartender. “You best fetch a doctor, mister.”

  As he moved back to the table, he reached into the pocket of his Prince Albert coat and withdrew the leather purse. Most of the double eagles from Sam Manning’s reward had been spent, but the robber was only worth two hundred dollars. Breen pulled out a twenty-dollar piece and set it on the table near the glass and the bottle.

  “For the doctor.” Breen nodded at the girl. “Her only. Eddie pays his own way. I don’t think there are any damages, do you?”

  Most of the blood could be mopped up, Breen figured. The barkeep’s head bobbed slightly. That was the only thing about him that moved.

  “What are you waiting for?” Breen called out, and the bartender nodded, muttered something underneath his breath, and hurried out from behind the bar and through the small door that likely led to a storeroom and a back door.

  Breen returned the purse to his pocket and found the bottle. He hated feeling like that. Getting upset could ruin his day, but a man had his principles, and there were some things he could not abide. He poured two fingers of Scotch into his glass.

  Glenlivet might settle his temper.

  He brought the glass to his mouth, breathed in the wonderful smell, and started to drink as he looked through the window and saw the hitching rail in front of Diamond Jill’s.

  Swearing, he killed the whiskey, dropped the glass, grabbed his sawed-off twelve-gauge, and moved quickly. He stepped over the unconscious body of Eddie and stopped at the batwing doors. His cold eyes studied the street—to the north, down toward the south, and across from him. Nothing. Crossfire’s Main Street was empty.

  Over at the southern edge of town, the marshal was coming out of his office. Someone must have passed by the Crossfire Saloon while Eddie was abusing the chirpie or while Breen was making the cowhand realize the errors of his misguided existence. The man in front of the marshal’s office kept pointing toward the Crossfire. The marshal looked that way briefly before he turned around and stepped inside his office—probably for his own scattergun.

  But that’s not what really mattered to Jed Breen. He pushed through the batwing doors and headed for his horse in the alley.

  What mattered to him was that the dapple gray horse that had been in front of Diamond Jill’s was gone.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Cuervo Villanueva didn’t have enough time to cross the border into Mexico, so he ran into the mission just north of the Rio Grande. He was trying to pull his horse through the wide door inside the adobe church when Texas Ranger Matt McCulloch put a bullet through the pinto’s head. That dropped the horse.

  “Damn you, McCulloch,” Ranger Sergeant Ed Powell said. “There’s at least a nun and a priest inside there.”

  McCulloch jacked the lever of his 1873 Winchester carbine, sending the empty brass cartridge flying over his head and beyond the stone-piled fence that bordered the graveyard in front and to the east of the mission. He moved closer to the crumbling adobe wall, ruins of the first mission the Spanish and put up a century or more ago, and ignored Sergeant Powell.

  McCulloch turned to the youngest Ranger, Timmy Burns, and pointed. “Get our horses. Take them to the side of the church. And keep a tight grip on the reins.”

  “Damn you, McCulloch!” Powell thundered. “I’m in command here.”

  “Then command!” McCulloch barked and gave the teenaged Burns a sharp nod.

  The kid collected the reins to the four horses and hurried to the side of the mission.

  “Keep your head down!” McCulloch shouted. He knew the other two Rangers, Sergeant Powell and Paul Means, were staring at him, trying to read him, and maybe understand him.

  People couldn’t guess Matt McCulloch’s age. Older than thirty, most would guess, younger than sixty. His hair remained thick, with a wide cowlick that had been, and still was, the envy of many men, even though the deep brown was showing several streaks of gray. His face was deeply tanned, which made his cold blue eyes stand out. His lips were thin, his nose straight, his jaw stern, and his neck long. He stood tall, thin, and harder than the country through which he rode.

  He let the two Rangers stare at him and focused on the church.

  The river, flowing mighty wide for that time of year, ran about thirty yards behind the church before cutting sharply to the south. Mountains, mostly tan but dotted here and there with green clumps of mesquite and cactus, rose beyond the Rio Grande. The church jutted out with its façade that resembled that of the Alamo over in San Antonio. The front door was wide, but blocked by Cuervo Villanueva’s dead horse. Two tabled windows flanked the door, the windows shuttered with cutouts of crosses carved into the thick wood. So far, no weapon was sticking out of the crosses. Above the door was the opening to the bell tower, with a rugged wooded cross rising from its apex.

  Another window on the side of the thick adobe faced McCulloch and the Rangers. The rectory was attached to the church, flat-roofed, and stretching about twenty-five feet to the east. Timmy Burns held the big Texas horses on the eastern wall of the rectory. The door, wide open, and the window with curtains hanging out of the opening faced McCulloch and the Rangers hiding behind the adobe walls.

  McCulloch wet his lips, removed his hat, and looked at the Ranger who gripped a Remington Rolling Block rifle and peered over the side of the wall at the church’s main entrance.

  “Hombres!” shouted Cuervo Villanueva from inside the church.

  “Paul,” McCulloch said. “Get behind the building.” He waited for Sergeant Powell to object, but the gray-headed hardcase just glared. Powell was a good man, and in time, he would become a very good Ranger, McCulloch figured. “There’s got to be a back door. Get down by the river so you have a good shot if he tries to make a break.”

  The sharpshooting Paul Means looked at Powell, who confirmed the order with a nod and a sigh.

  “Hombres!” the bandit shouted again.

  “Best answer him,” McCulloch said.

  “Give yourself up, Villanueva!” the sergeant ordered.

  “No sabe,” came the outlaw’s reply.

  Powell looked at McCulloch, who shook his head. “He speaks English better than half the population of Purgatory City. When he wants to.”

  Feeding fresh cartridges into his own Winchester, Ed Powell cursed and shook his head. “Why didn’t he keep riding? Fifty yards and he’d be in Mexico.”

  “River’s wide,” McCulloch said. “Means would’ve shot him out of the saddle before he was halfway across the Rio.”

  Powell thumbed back the hammer on his carbine, and pushed himself up for a better look. Inside the whitewashed adobe building came muffled shouts and bits of conversation.

  “I don’t like this,” he said. “You reckon there might be some parishioners inside?”

  McCulloch shrugged and looked at the entrance to the bell tower.

  He was dressed in trail duds, which was about all he owned anymore, except for a frayed black coat and black string tie that he could wear to funerals. His boots had been made by a Mexican saddlemaker over in Presidio and could stand about four dollars’ worth of repairs. His striped britches were faded, covered with old leather chaps. His shirt was a blue pullover, the bandanna a red calico, the vest brown with one pocket ripped off. His hat a battered gray, covered with dust. He thought about removing the linen duster the color of oatmeal, but didn’t bother with it.

  McCulloch wore no spurs. He had never worn spurs. He wasn’t one to misuse an animal, he had told his sons. If you knew what you were doing, if you could communicate with a horse, a man had no reason to wear spurs. Spurs could hurt a horse, in fact did hurt horses.

  Although he had never been one to mistreat any animal, he had just shot a horse dead. In front of a church. And he felt absolutely nothing about what he had just done.

  A few minutes later, Cuervo Villanueva shouted, “¿Que entre voso
tros habla el lenguaje de mis padres?”

  “What’s he saying?” the sergeant asked.

  “He wants to know who speaks Spanish.” McCulloch said.

  Powell spit between his teeth. “I reckon you’d best answer him, Matt.”

  McCulloch called out, “¡Dime ya! ¿Qué quieres?”

  Cuervo Villanueva responded with a long-winded speech that started with political statements, about how this land did not truly belong to the Tejanos but to the fathers and grandfathers of Cuervo Villanueva, and that he, a poor, peaceful farmer, had been driven out of his home, brutalized by the Tejanos and the law-makers of the norteamericanos and other gringos, and that he did not want to do everything that he had been forced to do, but he had been given no choice. The wearers of the cinco pesos stars, meaning the Texas Rangers, should track down the truly bad men and leave Cuervo Villanueva to tend his garden and attend Mass and live his life in peace, as he had before all the troubles the Tejanos brought to this part of Mexico.

  “What’s he saying?” Powell asked McCulloch when the outlaw paused for breath.

  “The usual wagonload of dung.”

  The lesson continued. Cuervo Villanueva had not killed that man in that store in that village south of Cienega. And he had asked the padre with him to pray that the Texas Ranger he had been forced to shoot on his way out of the village would be able to dance with a pretty girl in a few months. He said killing his horse was a terrible and mean thing to do and the padre and the two sisters were extremely annoyed with the Rangers who had done that terrible thing.

  The more Cuervo Villanueva spoke, the more McCulloch studied the mission and the rectory. He also checked the position of the sun.

  “What’s he saying now?” Sergeant Powell asked.

  “He wants us to send in some tequila,” McCulloch said. “Communion wine only cuts so much dust. Enchiladas would be nice. Maybe a beefsteak.” McCulloch pulled on his left earlobe and knotted his forehead. “I couldn’t quite understand that last part.”

  Villanueva said something else. McCulloch’s head bobbed. “And we owe him for his horse. He will take two of ours, but only one needs to be saddled and we can keep the saddle on the horse that we—I—shot dead.”

  Powell muttered a curse and reminded McCulloch, as though he needed any reminding, that Cuervo Villanueva had stolen that horse from outside the saloon in Cienega.

  Eventually, after maybe fifteen minutes, Cuervo Villanueva fell silent.

  “What do you reckon he’s doing in there?” Powell asked.

  McCulloch shrugged. “Probably dragging some pews in front of the front door. Maybe checking around, seeing how he can get out.”

  “He don’t need to build no barricade,” Powell said. “You did a fair job of that killing that horse.”

  “Means he can’t get out in a hurry that way,” McCulloch said. “And he has no horse to ride if he gets out.”

  “And that thing’s gonna start ripening real quick,” Powell said.

  “Exactly.”

  McCulloch leaned the rifle against the crumbling wall and drew the long-barreled Colt from his holster. He opened the loading gate, rotated the cylinder, and pushed a .44-40 shell from the loops on his shell belt. After sliding the cartridge into the empty hole, he pulled the heavy pistol to full cock and gently lowered the hammer, then shoved the Colt into the holster. Glancing at the sergeant, McCulloch found him staring hard in his direction.

  “You shot a horse in front of a church door,” Powell said. “Don’t that bother you, McCulloch? Didn’t you use to raise horses?”

  McCulloch found his hat. “That was another lifetime, Ed. Another man.” Again, he raised his eyes and considered the church roof.

  “Tell him to come out or we’ll come in,” Sergeant Powell ordered after a lengthy silence.

  After McCulloch relayed the message, the outlaw promptly responded.

  “Well?” Powell asked.

  It was the answer McCulloch expected, but repeating it was far from palatable. “He says if we come inside the church, he will kill the priest, the two nuns, and the young woman and her baby.”

  “He ain’t got no baby,” Powell said.

  But the wailing of a child told the Rangers that Cuervo Villanueva was not lying at all.

  Powell swore.

  “Sarge!” young Burns called out from the side of the rectory. “That’s a little baby.”

  “I hear it, boy! Shut up.” The sergeant swore, spit again, and scrutinized the front entrance to the church. “Well,” he said finally. “Mexican standoff. We just wait him out. He ain’t going nowheres. We can outlast him.”

  McCulloch shook his head. “Come dark, he can walk out of here with a priest or a nun or that young mother or her baby. It’d be too dark for Means to chance a shot with that long gun of his. Too dark for any of us to shoot.”

  “You said the river’s running high,” Powell said.

  “I said it’s wide for this time of year,” McCulloch corrected. “It’s never deep. At least, not here.”

  “Well”—Powell was trying to think—“maybe he won’t try that. Maybe—”

  “Then he’ll send one of the nuns out,” McCulloch interrupted. “Over the horse and toward us. Before he puts a bullet in the back of her head.”

  “He wouldn’t do that.” Again, Ed Powell tried to convince himself of something he could not imagine and wiped the sweat off his brow with a dirty shirtsleeve. He saw McCulloch’s hard stare.

  “What do you want us to do? Go charging in there like the Mexicans on the last day of the Alamo?” He pointed at the door. “That horse you killed not only will make it hard for that Mexican to come out, it’ll mean he can pick us off as we try to climb over its stinking carcass to get inside.”

  McCulloch said nothing.

  “We could let him go,” Powell said. “Give him our word we won’t shoot.”

  “He wouldn’t believe you.”

  “We could ride off. Tell him he’s free to go. We’ll catch him and hang him next time.”

  McCulloch’s head shook. “He’ll remember Means’s Rolling Block.”

  “We can leave that gun behind. And our long guns.”

  McCulloch stared hard. “You going to leave Cuervo Villanueva with three women?”

  “By G-God, man,” Powell stammered. “He wouldn’t . . .”

  “Have you forgotten what he did at Embarrado?”

  Inside the church, the baby began yelling louder.

  “Well, damn it, man, do you have any better ideas?” Sergeant Powell shouted.

  That’s all Matt McCulloch needed to hear. He moved the Winchester, drew his Colt, came to his knees, looked once at the church door and windows, and bolted across the ground toward Ranger Burns and the horses.

  An adobe column protruded from the rectory’s eastern walls, all the way from the ground to about a foot from the flat roof. It was curved, more for design than function, but it was wide enough and heavy enough to support McCulloch as he climbed up it, laid his Colt on the rooftop, and then pulled himself up. He found the Colt and trod quickly but lightly across the rooftop toward the mission. When he reached the edge, McCulloch wet his lips and surveyed the roof of the church. It was flat, too, covered with gravel, sand, and the droppings of rats and birds from too many summers to count.

  He was not a heavy man, but the church was at least a century old. If dust started drifting from the ceiling onto the church floor, Cuervo Villanueva would be ready. And angry enough to maybe pop a cap on a nun, a priest, or a young mother. Probably not the baby, though. Villanueva would be smart enough to save the baby as his bona fides, his passport into Mexico.

  McCulloch frowned at the bell tower. He had hoped to find a door, but now that he thought about it, there was no need for a door. He did not look at the ground or anywhere near Sergeant Powell. McCulloch rose, moved his left leg up and over the adobe, and then pulled his right behind him. He was standing on the church’s roof.

  Listening intent
ly, he took a tentative step toward the façade, and another. He felt nothing giving beneath his boots, so he moved faster, but still with precision and a dove’s touch, and came to the tower. Grabbing the adobe with his left hand, he leaned over the front of the church and looked inside. It smelled of dust. Piles of guano covered the flooring beneath the bell, and he saw the rope that led through a hole. He also saw the trapdoor.

  “No,” McCulloch whispered, and moved away from the tower.

  Cuervo Villanueva would be somewhere in the front of the mission, closer to the door. McCulloch had thought about opening the trapdoor, dropping himself into the church, and letting the chips fall where they may.

  But that was no good. To kill or capture the Mexican outlaw, McCulloch needed to come in behind the killer. He sniffed, rubbed his left hand over the graying stubble on his face, blinked away the sweat, and looked down the roof. From there, he could see the river, the mountains of Mexico, and purple-necked sheartails darting around the flowering cactus between the church and the river. He didn’t see Paul Means or his long rifle, but he saw another trapdoor.

  McCulloch moved down the long rectangular roof.

  When he reached the door, he knelt. Would it be locked from beneath? McCulloch took the handle and lifted, letting out a light breath when it opened. Seeing the rays of light shining from the roof to the floor, he stopped. He could hear the baby crying, the nuns praying, and the priest talking in hushed Spanish to the killer holding them all hostages. Villanueva yelled something that silenced the priest. McCulloch deftly eared back the hammer on his Colt.

  Cuervo Villanueva began yelling again, screaming out his demands at Sergeant Powell. It was the final threat. If the Rangers did not lay down all their arms and ride away, he would be sending the oldest and ugliest nun out to the Rangers, and the Rangers would soon see what kind of man they were dealing with. Cuervo Villanueva was not a man to make idle threats.

  This will be as good as it gets, McCulloch told himself.

  He flung open the door and leaped through the narrow opening. Hitting the hard-tiled floor, he felt his right knee buckle—horse wranglers and horse breakers never healed completely—and slammed hard against a dark, unmoving pew.