.45-Caliber Cross Fire

by Peter Brandvold

  Just after sunup, they crossed a broad, sandy flat that stretched away from them in all directions and held their horses to trots, so they wouldn’t lift dust that might be seen by the Yaqui, if there were any still behind them. Cuno had tramped a broad circle around his and Camilla’s camp the night before, and he’d spied no sign of anyone out there but a hunting bobcat whose large, clawed prints had been freshly stamped in the mud around a run-out spring.

  On the other side of the flat, they slipped into a shallow arroyo that meandered along the base of the low, rocky hills on whose slopes grew only sparse clumps of brown brush and cacti. Near the arroyo, however, mesquites, paloverde, and greasewood offered cover. Just after noon, they followed the floor of the arroyo to the crest of a hill and checked their horses down.

  Camilla looked at Cuno but said nothing for several seconds. Then she turned her head to stare out across a vast expanse of rocky desert hemmed in on all sides by steep bluffs and mesas. “You see that notch to the south there?” she said, pointing. “Between those two highest ridges?”

  “I see it.”

  “A trail there leads to the mountain range in which Uncle Tio built his ranch. You can’t see it from here, but there’s another trail that will take you through a notch in those western mountains. If you keep following it, you will ride through several pueblitos before you finally, after three or four days maybe, reach the Sea of Cortez.”

  She leaned over and kissed him, then glanced at the faint horse trail that followed the ridge they were on almost due south. “We separate here, amigo. Tio’s ranch is deep in the mountains and too far out of your way.”

  “Hell, I’ll ride with you to Uncle Tio’s. Those Yaqui could still be followin’ us.”

  She pursed her lips. Her eyes grew bright, and she shook her head sharply. “No. It’s best like this.”

  Cuno wrapped his arms around her and kissed her, fighting the knot in his throat. She returned the kiss, passionately, then pulled away from him, jerked her horse around, and spurred the bay on along the ridge crest.

  “Hyah!”

  She did not look back before she disappeared around a towering knob of rock, leaving only her sifting dust and dwindling hoof thuds.

  Cuno stared at the rock. The dust settled. His belly felt like a well being slowly drained of water through a fissure. Suddenly, he became aware of Renegade canting an incredulous glance back over the stirrup at him. The horse’s expression demanded to know why he’d let such a good woman get away.

  “Ah, hell,” he said, booting the horse westward down the hill, following a meandering Indian trail. “Might as well disappoint her now as later.” He rode too tensely in the saddle, and his back started aching in addition to his belly. Annoyance tugged at him. “What the hell would you know about it, anyway?”

  Renegade merely twitched an ear and continued walking.

  No longer worried about the Yaqui, Cuno booted the skewbald paint into a lope across the sage- and cedar-stippled bench toward a series of tall sierras foreshortening against the western horizon. Strips of ragged-edged pancake clouds gave the ranges a mysterious, brooding look. He glanced around him as he slowed Renegade to a walk and saw little life but a jackrabbit sitting in the shade of a rock shelving out from a gravelly slope, munching something in its paws. A few hawks hunted the nearer ridges.

  A while later, a flock of blue quail raced onto the trail before him, their odd, gaudy plumage jouncing as they disappeared into the thorny brush on the trail’s other side. A young coyote dashed after them, and then there was a loud peeping as the flock dispersed.

  Then, for a long time, except for the breeze and the thuds of Renegade’s shod hooves, there was only silence.

  Cuno looked around at the vast Mexican sky bowling over the near and distant ranges. His chest felt as hollow as an old gourd, and he half wished he’d ridden on with Camilla. So many people had passed through his life; first his mother, and then his father’s second wife, Corsica, whom Cuno had grown to love like an older sister.

  Then his father.

  And then, a year later, just when they’d been building a life together, a family, July had followed them all over the Divide. There was no one left. No family that Cuno knew of.

  He was as alone as the first and last man. If he should fall prey to Yaqui or a stalking wildcat, no one would know or care. His body would rot slowly in the dry desert air, the bones strewn far and wide by predators. Soon, they’d end up white as porcelain, bleached by the sun, and strewn along the bottom of a dry arroyo to be moved later by the floods of the next summer monsoon.

  A January chill rippled through him. Staring at the ridges leaning away from the vast, brown-and-lime-green desert that swallowed him like an ocean swallows a single fishing boat, he felt as though the air were being sucked out of his lungs. He gripped his braided leather bridle reins and shook his head against the dark, turgid thoughts.

  “Be nice to reach the ocean,” he said, taking comfort in the sound of his own voice.

  Where would he go after that?

  It would take many years for the law to forget about him and his escape from the federal pen during which many guards were killed and Warden Castle was seriously wounded. Tortured, even, by Mateo de Cava, who blew the tip of the man’s nose off. Then, fleeing south, Mateo’s gang had shot up a town and nearly an entire contingent of bounty hunters as well as Sheriff Dusty Mason, who had been riding with the old deputy U.S. marshal Spurr Morgan.

  Cuno and Camilla were accessories to those crimes if for no other reason than they had been riding with the desperadoes. Cuno and Camilla had left behind the loot the gang had stolen from a stagecoach, but they’d still taken part in stealing it. Most likely, bounty hunters and lawmen north of the border would be gunning for Cuno for many years to come.

  Maybe forever.

  When the sun had set, Cuno made camp in a dark hollow. He took a shot of tequila from the half-empty bottle in his saddlebags that he and Camilla had shared several nights before, celebrating their border crossing and a new life in Mexico.

  The tequila tasted sour, and it made his head ache. He tossed the bottle into the brush, kicked dirt on the fire, and lay back against his saddle. For a long time, he listened to the coyotes.

  He rose early the next morning but rode slowly west, sparing his horse, not in any hurry. In the midafternoon, he crossed a low pass and cast a look behind him to see five Yaqui galloping toward him from the rocks and brush on either side of the trail, just below the pass.

  His heart jumping, he looked around. There were two more groups of the small, dark riders galloping toward him from straight out on either side of the trail, on fleet-footed mustangs. Closing on him quickly, the Yaqui started to whoop and holler like banshees.

  4

  SPURR MORGAN OPENED his eyes and stared for a time at the stamped tin ceiling, frowning, blinking, rolling his dry tongue around in his mouth, trying to remember where in hell he was. He could hear a rooster crowing and the slow clomps of a horse or a mule, and the clattering of rickety wheels. Someone yelled in the street beyond the dusty, cracked window to his right—“¿Clara, usted tiene tacos alla?”

  Clara, do you have any tacos over there?

  Spurr blinked, ran his wrist across his broad nose that was tanned to the color of ancient whang leather by over sixty years of the frontier sun. He was in Mexico. What the hell was a deputy United States marshal—especially an old one with a creaky heart—doing in Mexico? And where in Mexico was he?

  Someone sighed to his left.

  He turned his head and saw a long, tan body lying beside him, black, sleep-mussed hair hanging down her back and across her shoulders. The bed’s single sheet was pulled down to her waist. Her round hip curved up beneath it, drawn so taut against her buttocks that he could see the crack between them. Her upper arm lay against her side, her forearm curving down out of sight against her belly. Spurr rolled onto his side and stared at her tan arm that showed three small, white scars on the outs
ide of it, just above her elbow.

  Cigarette burns.

  He’d seen those burns last night, as he’d been toiling beneath the puta’s spread legs and she was pretending that he was giving her the ride of her life when he’d long ago stopped giving any woman much of a ride at all—though for some reason he had never stopped enjoying it himself—and it all came back to him.

  He was in Mexico. He’d crossed the border illegally but for good reason—a pack of outlaws who’d been calling themselves cavalry soldiers had sacked Fort Bryce near the Mexican line and stolen the fort’s entire cache of weaponry it had been storing in advance of its planned distribution to the other forts around Arizona Territory in the hopes of finally quelling the Apaches. Spurr’s good friend, Colonel Abel Hammerlich, had been gut-shot by his own second-in-command and left to die in the house Abel had shared with his only daughter before the daughter had been kidnapped by the conspirators.

  Spurr, who’d been on the trail of the Mateo de Cava Gang after they’d sprung a firebrand named Cuno Massey from a federal pen in Colorado, had been in the area when he’d heard the news of the fort’s sacking by a good third of its own soldiers. When Massey and his girl had drifted over the border into Mexico, Spurr had picked up the trail of slave traders he’d once thought to be heading for the Indian Nations but who’d turned and headed into New Mexico Territory, where he and Sheriff Dusty Mason had run them down. Spurr had ridden from Las Cruces to Fort Bryce—what was left of it after the massive fire that had all but demolished it, leaving most of its honest soldiers either dead or dying—where he’d picked up the thieving killers’ wagon trail.

  No U.S. lawman was allowed to cross over into Mexico without special written permission by his own government and that of Mexico, but Spurr had made a career of not following rules—at least not following the rules he hadn’t himself made up.

  Spurr was a rawhide-tough, craggy-faced old lawman—he rode for Chief Marshal Henry Brackett out of Denver—and his best years were far behind him, but he was a sentimental cuss, and seeing those cigarette burns on the puta’s arm the night before had twisted his heart and broken his concentration. Now he leaned toward the girl and pressed his lips to the burns, as if trying to heal them.

  The girl gasped and jerked with a start. She drew her hand away and rolled onto her back, sitting halfway up and curling her legs beneath her, as though she were about to leap out of bed and flee.

  “It’s all right, darlin’!” Spurr said, holding his hands up, palm out. “It’s just old Spurr and I was only givin’ you a good-mornin’ peck.”

  The girl’s bare breasts rose and fell heavily as she studied Spurr, then gradually her muscles relaxed, and she reached up to sweep her hair out of her eyes. “I apologize, senor,” she said in broken English. “Sometimes… I am jumpy.”

  “Me, too. I should have known better.” She had other scars on her—some that looked like knife scars. It wasn’t easy being a whore in Mexico. “Pardon?”

  Slowly, he stretched his hands out and drew her leg down before him. He lowered his head and pressed his lips to her knee.

  She looked down at him, her breathing slowing, and she smiled. She stuck a finger in the corner of her mouth, and wagged her other upraised knee coquettishly. “Spurr,” she said as though just now remembering his name and remembering his drunken devilishness from the night before. He and the girl, whose name he couldn’t remember if she’d ever told him, had danced at a little cantina down by the creek that angled through the pueblito, whose name he also couldn’t remember—if he’d ever known it.

  It had been a slow night, and the owner had bought Spurr several drinks in addition to the cups of bacanora Spurr had bought for himself and the girl. When Spurr had tired from the dancing, he and the girl had staggered up the stone steps from the cantina and taken a tumble in the lumpy corn-shuck bed they were in now, and which must have a goodly supply of bedbugs, because Spurr could feel the pinprick-like stings.

  She spread her legs for him now and ran her hands along the insides of her thighs. “You want to go again, senor?”

  She wasn’t exactly pretty, but she wasn’t missing too many teeth, and her breasts were nice and full. If Spurr had been about fifteen years younger and not quite as hungover—the dirty window was firing javelins through his eyes and deep into his skull—he might have taken her up on the offer. If he remembered correctly, she wasn’t cheap, but he could afford her even on his lawman’s pay.

  Spurr chuckled. “Girl, you flatter this old mossy horn.” He kissed her knee again, ran both his knobby, brown hands appreciatively, affectionately, down her leg, then rolled over and dropped his feet to the floor. “Next time I’m in town, darlin’. Next time I’m in town.”

  He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and ran his hands through his red-brown hair liberally stitched with gray that, badly in need of a trim, hung down past his neck. It was still a thick head of hair, if age-silvered and greasy. At least he still had that.

  “How about breakfast, senor?” the girl said, scuttling up behind him and wrapping her arms around his neck, pressing her breasts against his back. “Tortillas and chorizo? Café?”

  Spurr saw a half-empty bottle standing on the floor beside his bare feet. He reached down for it. “I reckon this’ll do me.” He tipped back the bottle, took a long swig. The liquor burned his tonsils and seared several layers of skin as it plunged down his throat and into his belly, which jerked upon impact. He swallowed several times to keep the liquor down, then eyed the clear bottle appreciatively. It reflected his lilac-blue gaze. “Mescal,” he rasped. “Best tanglefoot invented by man.”

  “Senor?”

  The girl leaned down to peer into his face.

  “I was just complimenting your people down here on a job well done.” He swallowed again, cleared his throat. “A job well done…” Spurr patted the girl’s hand on his chest, then rose from the bed and walked over to the window, holding the bottle by its neck.

  He cleared the film of dust and flyspecks from the glass and looked down at the narrow street meandering between adobe shacks and stock pens. The sun was well up, and blue smoke drifted over chimneys. A man in a frayed straw sombrero was pulling a cart loaded with mesquite branches, and several shopkeepers were sweeping their wooden boardwalks.

  Spurr looked west along the street and then east, hoping for a glimpse of one of the men he’d been tracking. Likely, they were still asleep. He’d followed them into the pueblito last night, but he’d been too beat from the long trek across the desert to try to throw down on them alone. A man of Spurr’s experience knew himself well enough to know when to hold back and replenish his energies, which, he thought now with a chuckle and a backward glance at the naked girl curled on his bed, he’d done last night.

  The men he’d been tracking had split up from the rest of the group south of the border, probably knowing it would be harder for three or four sets of wagons hauling stolen ammunition to be tracked than the entire group together. They were probably expecting a contingent of soldiers from Fort Huachuca to fog their trail—or bounty hunters—but if a posse had been sent out, Spurr had seen no sign of them. Likely, the soldier in charge was awaiting permission from both his own superiors as well as from the Mexicans, and that could take weeks or even months.

  Spurr knew he couldn’t take down all the murdering thieves himself. He just wanted to find out where they were headed and maybe, if possible, rescue his friend’s daughter. No telling what kind of horrors the girl was enduring at the hands of the killers.

  Spurr took another pull from the bottle and when he could speak again, enjoying the mescal’s incredible mind-clearing and painkilling properties, he shambled back to the bed. The girl was sitting in the middle of it Indian-style, no sheet covering her, closely inspecting her right big toe.

  “Senorita, ole Spurr has a question for you.”

  She looked up from her foot.

  “Did you happen to see two big freight wagons pull into th
e pueblito yesterday afternoon, about two hours before I showed up? They would have been driven by three gringos, with two other gringos on horseback.”

  She pursed her lips and nodded. “Si. They were a… curiosity,” she said after flailing for the right word.

  “Wasn’t a young lady with ’em, was there?” Spurr ran a hand across his shoulder. “A rubia?”

  “I saw no rubia.”

  Spurr scowled. He’d figured it was a long shot that he’d followed the outlaw contingent hauling Hammerlich’s daughter, but, being only one tracker, he’d had to choose one set of tracks.

  “Can you tell me where they lit? Where they may have spent the night?”

  “Si, si. They are over at Senora Corazon’s place, across the street from St. Xavier’s.” The girl crossed her naked breasts quickly and glanced imploringly at the hammered tin ceiling.

  “Muchas gracias, senorita.” Spurr held up the bottle. “A morning libation?”

  The girl shook her head. “My uncle never lets me drink before noon. It makes me sleepy and causes me to dance funny.” She jerked her head back and laughed adorably despite the one tooth missing from her smile.

  “A wise man, your uncle.” Spurr tossed back another shot, lowered his chin against the burn as he swallowed, then shook his head, stood, and pressed his fist to his chest. “A wise, wise man, but I’ll be damned if that don’t invigorate a tired old ticker.”

  Spurr set the bottle on the small wooden table, which was the room’s only furnishing besides the bed and a small wooden crucifix hanging from a nail over the door. With a grunt, he bent over and began grabbing up his clothes from where he’d tossed them on the floor in his drunken, lusty haste the night before. He dressed in his threadbare balbriggans, patched buckskin pants, hickory shirt, beaded elkhide vest, recently darned socks, and the high-topped fur moccasins he preferred to stockmen’s boots. The moccasins were more comfortable for both riding and walking, and lawmen sometimes had to walk or even run, though Spurr had never been good at the former and, due to his ailing ticker, was now even less effective at the latter.