The sun seemed to trail them directly overhead. Still no sign of Steve and the mule train. At last Johnny held up his hand. He was surveying the topmost edge of the canyon wall. Andrea followed his gaze.
“What do you see?”
Reaching behind him, he fumbled in his saddlebag and pulled out a pair of field glasses. He lifted them to his eyes, the horse moved under him, and cursing, he dismounted.
“Well?” Tía prompted.
“There’s a man up there. That’s Devil’s Kitchen.”
Tía looked from Johnny to Andrea, but they didn’t notice her. They both peered up at the tall sentinel rocks. Her nose wrinkled. What was that smell? Her stomach gave a sudden, hard lurch. She squinted into the canyon ahead; something fluttered in the slight breeze. It looked like a black shirt.
Andrea tapped Johnny on the shoulder. “Let me look through those.”
Johnny handed the field glasses to Andrea. Just as her hand started to close around the black metal cylinder nearest her, a woman screamed. It could only be Tía. Panicked, Andrea looked around her, but her sister was not in sight.
“Oh, no!” Andrea cried, turning her horse toward the sound.
Johnny leaped on his horse and spurred it forward, past Andrea. Only seconds later Tía burst out of the thickets, crashing back onto the narrow path.
“Tía! Thank God! I thought you’d been hurt!” The look on Tía’s face stopped Andrea. “Tía! What is it?”
Tía’s hand covered her mouth. She doubled over and retched. Johnny walked his horse back to Andrea’s side.
“What?” Andrea asked, not liking the look on his face.
“The first mule train,” he said grimly. Then, carried on a wafting breeze, the stench reached Andrea. It was unendurable.
“Cover your noses!” Johnny shouted. “We have to go through.”
It was a nightmare. Only the desperate need to reach Steve could have driven Andrea and Tía through it. The men had kerchiefs to keep the flies off their mouths and noses. Tía and Andrea pulled up their blouses. Retching miserably, they tried not to see the buzzard-torn bodies strewn along the path.
Their shiny black eyes glittering beneath hooded lids, the buzzards looked up from their feasting. Some flapped their wings, but none bothered to fly away. No wonder they hadn’t seen buzzards circling. They were too gorged and busy to fly.
If the need for stealth and speed were not so great, Johnny would have shot the ugly black hulks and stopped to bury or burn the gutted bodies.
Tía wept as if her heart were broken.
Suspecting her father had either killed these men or ordered their killing, Andrea was awash in silent fury.
At last they were beyond it. Tía was pale and limp in her saddle. Andrea hurried her along, trying to distract them both with questions about Judy; but the memory of the graveyard of horror would not completely recede.
Johnny stopped them again. Even his sun-browned face looked pale. “I want you to stay at the rear. I think I know where the ambush is going to take place. There’s one more spot up ahead where there’ll be room to do what they did back there, to spread out, hiding in the rocks.”
“How much farther?” Tía asked, her eyes still sick with the memory of death.
“Less than a mile, if I remember right.”
“Let’s hurry! Please,” Andrea urged. “Don’t worry about us. We have to save Steve!”
Nodding his agreement, Johnny spurred his tired horse. Tía and Andrea held back until the last rider passed them. Then they too fell into line. The heat, the stench, the discomfort—all were forgotten. The trap was set.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Once again the lofty cathedral rocks that formed Devil’s Kitchen sheltered Mateo Lorca from the heat that beat down like a stifling blanket on the winding canyon far below him.
His men dotted the canyon floor. From the west the mule train moved steadily toward the point of ambush. He could not make out features from this distance, but he had verified the identity of the caravan hours ago. It gave him great pleasure that the man so blithely riding into his trap was Steven Burkhart: the pampered blond son of the man who had cuckolded him. Even now, eighteen years after the deed, he felt intense hatred for Bill Burkhart. To kill Burkhart’s son was some small satisfaction.
How many times had Rita cheated him in Burkhart’s arms—soft and sensuous, her blue eyes slitted, her lips parted and sighing with ecstasy? How many times did it take for a woman to earn thousands of acres of land for her bastard daughter? Thousands of acres of land that belonged to the Garcia-Lorcas.
Where was Rita hiding? No one could elude him. He had a network of men the length and breadth of two territories. But three months after she had left him for dead, he had heard nothing. Not one word. Neither Andrea nor Teresa had tried to find out if he was dead or alive.
He would expect that from Rita, but not from Andrea, not from Teresa. He had loved the bastard Teresa even more than Andrea. Even now, at mention of her name, grief at her loss swelled within him. Rita had cheated him of his love for Teresa and turned Andrea against him. The monster within had also turned against him, made his nights a horror, demanding vengeance. The remorseless hatred he had used against the gringos would now be turned upon his gringa wife and her bastard.
Mateo shuddered. Only one other time in his life had he let his inhumaneness rule him, and that time he had avenged the Garcia-Lorcas against the fat colonel who had murdered his family and sentenced him to death.
At the thought of the colonel, a cold sweat broke out on Mateo’s forehead. He gritted his teeth against the frustration and rage. Wait, he cautioned the rampaging beast within him. Wait, and I will give you Teresa and Rita.
Slowly, the trembling stopped. Mateo put his hands to his face and sagged in the saddle.
After a time he straightened. The mule train was close now. Soon the lead mule would be at the mouth of the trap. He closed his eyes to shut out the memories that had tormented him for weeks, for months.
A vision of the bed he had shared with Rita in Tubac flashed across the surface of his mind. ¡Dios! Not their bed. Mateo wanted to bellow his rage. Eighteen years of blind conceit. That was the real humiliation. Because he had to take Rita every time he came home to her, he had believed she would not go willingly into any man’s bed. Egotistical fool! All he had remembered was that when she finally surrendered to him she became a hungry wanton. After the initial awkwardness, they made love all night, every night they were together. It had always been that way. Short, intense couplings spread over twenty-five years. And even now, remembering her still slender, voluptuous body; her firm, thrusting breasts; her narrow waist and shapely hips, he could feel himself responding in spite of everything he knew about Rita.
The sound of rocks tumbling down a granite slab reined his attention back to the business at hand.
Squinting against the glare of sunlight that shimmered between him and the canyon below, he saw that the lead mule of the Burkhart caravan had already entered the trap. Only a little farther, and he would avenge himself. First the Burkhart whelp, then Rita’s bastard, and then he would deal with Rita the way he should have years ago if he had been a man and not a lovestruck boy.
Rita finished packing the small valise and swung it off the bed. She carried it to the door and put it down.
Sitting at the small dropleaf table, sipping coffee and nibbling on a tea cake, Sherry looked from Rita to the valise then back at Rita’s hair. “That blond mane of yours is a dead giveaway.”
Rita glanced at the black wig Sherry had gotten from a musical company that went broke years ago in Tucson. These last few months whenever she left the house she had worn it; otherwise heaven knew what would have happened to her. She was sick of it. Her head got so hot she thought it would melt.
Rita’s honey-gold mane caught the sunlight and gleamed. “I’m going to find Mateo. I no longer need it.”
Sherry came to her feet, shocked. “Oh, my God!” she cried. “He�
��ll kill you!”
Rita tossed back her long blond tresses with a dainty hand. Even at forty years old, nothing marred Rita’s vibrant beauty. She moved with a lithe, animal grace, and her vibrant, richly colored cheeks, framed by thick gold hair, had a radiance that attracted masculine admiration everywhere she went.
“I got a letter from Tía Andrea this morning. I have to go to him and explain, before he finds Tía.”
“Without the wig, you’ll be recognized. He’ll kill you on sight. You know what a temper he has. What good is that going to do you or Tía?”
“He won’t kill me. At least not right away.”
“No, he probably won’t need to. You’ll be killed by Indians!”
“Believe me, if there were any other way, I wouldn’t go, but I have to.” Even if he kills me. Even if I kill him, and his men kill me. At least then Tía will be safe…
Rita bowed her head, too angry and defensive to explain. The problem and its solution were hers and hers alone. She had made one mistake when she was fifteen, which had led her to make another mistake, and then another. And every time Andrea and Tía paid the price. Because of her impulsiveness, Tía had lost Mateo’s love and incurred his wrath. Mateo was fully capable of extracting his vengeance on her daughters, and Rita could not bear the thought of it. She was tired of paying and tired of watching her children pay for her mistakes. It had to stop!
Sighing in resignation, Sherry reached out to touch Rita’s hand. “You’re so stubborn!”
“I’m a mother. No more, no less.”
“When are you leaving?”
“As soon as my guide arrives. I contacted a friend of Tía Andrea’s. He agreed to escort me to Mateo’s hideout.”
“You are insane!”
Helpless and resigned to her fate, Rita grew quiet. There was no sense talking about it.
“Rita! He will kill you!”
“Not right away,” she said knowingly. “He always has a problem he wants taken care of first.”
“At least you’re as crazy as he,” Sherry said grimly. Buxom, with a shapely figure that had expanded slowly over the years, she now only slightly resembled the girl she had been when she and Rita had met in Tubac twenty years earlier. She had been married to a soldier, one of three dozen who guarded the small border town from Indians. They’d met in the general merchandise store.
Rita had stopped beside the shelf where bakery goods were displayed and, hearing a strange lamentation, had turned to the plump stranger.
“Are you all right?” Rita had asked.
The woman had raised her eyes from the big glass jar of cookies to Rita’s face. “Of course not! I’m starving to death! All my life I’ve been starving. How do you stay so thin?”
Enjoying the antic gleam in the stranger’s eyes, Rita had laughed. “The secret is to chew your food for a long time,” she had said, sounding completely serious.
“How long?” the woman had demanded, as if her desperation to be slim would give her the strength to do anything.
“Till it spoils.”
They’d laughed, and then they’d talked. Rita learned that Sherry had only been in Tubac two days and that somehow no one had warned her yet about Rita. Before that could happen, the two became friends. Later, Sherry told her that one of the officers’ wives tried to correct the oversight. She invited Sherry to tea and explained, china teacup in hand, that Rita was not fit company for decent folks, that she preferred the company of common Mexicans. Sherry listened politely, then went directly to Rita’s house to tell her exactly what the woman said.
It took them only moments together to find out they were both from upstate New York—Sherry from Rochester and Rita from Albany. Rita was so homesick for a woman from her own world, that bond alone would have been enough.
Sherry’s husband, Captain Howard Greenfield, had been transferred several times during those early years, but the two women always stayed in contact. The last transfer took them to Fort Huachuca, fifty miles from Tubac. Sherry was the only white friend Rita had, and Rita had told her the truth about Mateo only after she’d promised that she wouldn’t talk to her husband. Rita trusted Sherry, but she did not trust Sherry’s soldier husband. Sherry had never betrayed her.
Rita never quite understood why she kept Mateo’s secret. She should have told the captain herself. Mateo deserved to hang, to have his head paraded like a trophy of war through towns and villages by the soldiers. But she could not be the cause of it; she shuddered at the sheer barbarity of men. While she might fight Mateo on a purely personal level, she could not betray him to the soldiers.
“Why on earth did you marry him?” Sherry had asked after she’d learned the truth.
“I was fifteen. What girl has good sense at that age?”
Rita saw her guide, Abuelito, and picked up her valise.
Sherry saw him and closed her eyes in despair. “You’ll be lucky to survive the first hour with that animal.”
“Tía Andrea vouched for him.”
Grudgingly Sherry pursed her lips together. “This makes as much sense as a barbed-wire fence full of knotholes.”
“Wish me luck?”
“You’re going to ride a hundred miles through Apaches with a man who looks like a vermin-infested escapee from Devil’s Island to see a loco bull who may kill you in a fit of infantile temper, and you ask me to wish you luck? You’re as crazy as he is.”
Rita hugged her loyal friend.
“Rita, please be careful.”
Rita laughed. After all Sherry had said, being careful sounded like a waste of time. “I will. I promise.”
She picked up her valise, stepped out the door, and closed it firmly before Sherry could say anything else.
Rita didn’t slow her pace until she reached her horse. She refused to think until she was mounted and unable to turn back even if she wanted to. It was all decided. She knew what had to be done.
The horse moved swiftly through the town and out into the desert. The blazing sun beat down on her head in spite of her wide-brimmed hat. The fear she had denied to Sherry prickled along her spine, coiled in her belly like a cold fish. The letter from Tía Andrea had begged her to stay away, warned her Mateo wanted to kill her and possibly Tía as well.
So why was she going? Did she think she could change his mind? Could anyone short of Mateo himself change that cruel, implacable mind?
Tía Andrea’s letter had told her that Tía and Andrea were back in Arizona. But she suspected that Tía Andrea had not told her everything. If Tía was in Arizona, Mateo knew where they were. That was what drove her. She had to reach Mateo before he found Tía.
Leaning forward, she called out to her guide to hurry. If she was to save her daughter, there was no time to waste.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The Chiricahuas were behind Rita now. The Peloncillos loomed ahead like pale blue knuckles shoved up through the rust-colored earth. She began to recognize landmarks she thought she had forgotten. Things she hadn’t seen in many years. Landmarks burned into her memory…
She had been fifteen the first time she’d ridden this way. Mateo and his men had swooped out of the hills, killed the men in the caravan, and spirited Rita and five other women away from the burning wagon train.
Because the bandits had been traveling fast, the women were tied onto stolen horses. Ankles chafing against bristly ropes tied underneath her horse’s belly, clinging to the cantle of a horse led by a bearded, dirty Mexican who leered at her from beneath his wide sombrero, Rita rode until well after dark that first night.
From the looks on the other women’s terrified faces, no doubt existed in any of their minds about what lay in store for them. But Rita was not paralyzed by fear, even when they were pulled roughly off the tired horses and dragged to a torch-lit central quad, surrounded by squat adobe houses carved into the walls of a steep limestone cliff. Screaming, sobbing, moaning, the women were poked and pinched and prodded by the animals who surrounded them. Only Rita did not cry.
“Get your filthy hands off me!” she screamed.
One of the laughing, half-drunk men lifted a torch out of its holder and held it close to her face, causing her to draw back. The men laughed boisterously.
“Gringa slut!” Menacingly, they moved toward her. The other women cowered, but Rita stood her ground.
“Filthy animals! Swine! Sons of brood sows!” she screamed at them. They laughed and grabbed at her breasts, making clumsy, lunging movements with their hands, not touching her, just threatening to. One of the men tripped her, and she fell. Another ripped her gown. Even tormented as she was, she noticed that they seemed to be holding back, waiting for something or someone.
A murmur started at the back edge of the crowd and spread forward. Men scrambled aside, fell silent. Her gown in tatters, crouching like a cornered animal, Rita looked up into the coldest black eyes she had ever seen. They were set in a young, smooth-shaven face that was so classically handsome it could have been called beautiful; under any other circumstances she would have been awed. Her pulse throbbing wildly against her throat, she looked into eyes so steely and cruel that her blood ran cold. Even his obvious youth did not mitigate the effect.
His gaze raked over her. For the first time she was aware that one of her breasts was exposed.
“Stand up.”
Too terrified to refuse, gathering her tatters around her, Rita slowly came to her feet. Before she could step back, his hands lashed out and ripped her gown and the shift under it from neck to navel. One more savage, lightning-quick slash of his lean brown hands, and she was naked in front of five crying women and a hundred leering men.
For a moment no one made a sound, not even Rita. She was too shocked. Frozen, she watched his cold black eyes as he leisurely surveyed her body. A thousand thoughts could have formed in the space of his long and insolent scrutiny, but her mind was paralyzed.
Anger brought her chin up even higher. His cruel lips curled down into a wry smile. Shaking his head, as if shaming her for some act she could not even imagine, he snapped his fingers. Four men rushed to his side.
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