by Lou Cameron
That took care of one. There was another prick perched on his lap. So Captain Gringo shot his face off, and sat up in time to see the glint of moonlight on steel in the nearby doorway. But Claudette was thinking fast, too, and as he slashed at her she caught his blade with her carpetbag. Then Captain Gringo blew him away from her with a bullet in his kidney.
That made it two down and one to go. As Captain Gringo rose to one knee, he saw that the thug he’d pistol-whipped off him had recovered enough to stagger over to the carbine leaning against the wall, and, even as Captain Gringo aimed at him, the Winchester’s muzzle flashed in his face!
Captain Gringo returned the fire, nailing the guy over the heart as he wondered, dully, how come he was still alive. But there wasn’t time to pinch himself.
He leaped up, snapped, “Follow me!” and hung around just long enough to pick up the still-warm Winchester before heading across the broad calle as, behind him, dogs barked, doors opened, and Claudette still click-clacked like castanets. But at least he knew she was still with him. And when he turned to look back toward the safety of the shadows on the far side, he saw that she still had both their bags, God bless her. He could always get more gear. But it was bad enough he’d left his hat behind for the cops to have a look at when they arrived.
She was breathing heavily as she caught up with him. She asked, “What happened? Who were those men? Why are we stopping?”
He looked around, grabbed her by an elbow, and steered her into a dark narrow slot between two patioed houses. The little passageway between blank walls smelled of stale piss, but, as he’d hoped, a slit of light at the far end showed it led clean through to another street. He said, “As I was saying before we were so rudely interrupted, take off those fucking high heels!”
He holstered his .38, dropped to one knee, and pulled off the shoe he’d just unbuttoned when they’d jumped him. As he was taking off the other, she asked again, “Who on earth were they, Dick?”
He said, “Don’t know. They might have been after me. They might have been after you. They might have just been thugs out to rob anyone dumb enough to be out on the streets at this hour. It’s a good thing they didn’t start out with their own guns.”
“Brrr! I saw! I thought you were dead when he fired that carbine at you back there, dear!”
“I thought I was too. The more I think about it, the more it looks like they were just ladrónes. They were dressed like peons, and nobody misses with a long gun at such close range unless he’s never had much practice. They probably heard those damned heels, took us for a couple of sweethearts coming home late, and figured they could take us with just knives and fists.”
He straightened up, holding her shoes, and added with a grimace, “Come to think of it, one of ’em kicked pretty good. I feel great in the small of my back. Remind me never to get kicked there again after a night of hard screwing. Put these in my bag. There’s plenty of room.”
A police whistle sounded in the distance. Claudette gasped and said, “Oh, we have to run!” but he said, “Only chumps run when people are looking out their windows at a noisy street, doll. Come on, we ease out the far end, like we’ve been tearing off a wall job in here, then we stroll, arm in arm, and … damn, who ever heard of strolling arm in arm with a lady of the evening while packing a Winchester?”
“Can’t we sort of hold it between us, dear? We can’t leave it behind.”
He thought, then said, “Sure we can. I’ll just put it down right here and the first kid cutting through in the morning will make sure the cops never find it.”
As he leaned the Winchester against a wall, Claudette said, “But, Dick, we need that for later, on the stage!”
He took her elbow to lead her out of the slot, saying, “Gaston still has one long gun and we’re both packing pissolivers. I know what you’re thinking, doll. But you have to think faster, in our line of work. The idea is to get you down to Puntarenas unobserved. People observe the shit out of heavily armed travelers.”
“But the bandits, on the coach road …”
“The odds are we won’t meet any bandits. But we’re sure to pass more than one lawman on the Puntarenas Trail. The Costa Ricans worry about bandits, too. They patrol the roads a lot with mounted troopers, see?”
She didn’t argue. All hell seemed to be breaking loose over on the far side of the broad calle. But nobody seemed to give a damn on the narrow side street they were on as he led her down it, silent in her stocking feet.
Gaston was waiting for them in front of the smithy. He was alone. He said, “Eh bien, it’s about time you got here. What happened to your hat, Dick?”
A rooster crowed in the distance. Captain Gringo said. “It’s a long story. Let’s get the hell out of here. Where are the burros?”
“In the corral, out back. Merde alors, have you lost your carbine, too?”
“I said it was a long story, dammit. I’ll tell you about it on the trail to Heredia. Would it make you move any faster if I told you we just left three bodies and half the cops in town less than a mile from here?”
Gaston whistled under his breath and took the lead. As he led them around the apparently deserted smithy he confided, “Pedro is awake inside. He said he did not wish to get involved. We’re to leave his burros with a kinsman in Heredia. That’s all he wants to know about our business.”
Captain Gringo muttered, “Good old Pedro.” But then he spotted the three mounts waiting for them in the moonlight behind the smithy and growled, “I’ll get the bastard for this! Are those things supposed to be burros? They look like coyotes. Small ones!”
“I told him his mother and sisters are all whores, Dick. He still said these were all he had. But consider the alternatives, hein? Even a baby burro beats walking.”
The three burros did beat walking. Just. Even the shorter Gaston’s boot tips scraped the ground if he let them as they rode out together. Claudette, riding sidesaddle, had better luck. They’d let her put her shoes back on and her toes cleared the road by about a foot. Captain Gringo had to bend his knees a lot to keep from walking in step with his little mount as he rode it. He could have walked faster. He would have been tempted to, if he hadn’t been so tired and Heredia had been a little closer.
The sky was already getting lighter as they left the outskirts of San José. By then he’d brought Gaston up to date on the street fight. When he praised Claudette’s own fighting skills with a carpetbag, Gaston frowned and turned to look back thoughtfully at the blonde, saying, “I admire savage women, m’mselle. But I find it curious that such an adventuress does not carry a gun of her own. Does not it make you nervous to lead such an active life without so much as a derringer in your possession?”
She said, “I’ve always been afraid of guns. I know it’s silly, but I can’t help it. I’ve only fired a gun once or twice in my life, and I’ve never been able to hit anything. The noise makes me flinch.”
Captain Gringo chuckled wryly and said, “Drop it, Gaston. She’s got other weapons to fall back on in a pinch.”
*
Considering how complicated life had been up to now, things went smooth as silk in the little town of Heredia. It was just waking up as they rode in. But nobody seemed curious enough to bother them. Gaston left them by the stage stop while he got rid of the burros. The arcaded two-story building included a one-table café that had just opened. So they ordered coffee. The fat, mustached woman who served them was still half-asleep and didn’t seem interested in what they were doing in her place so early in the morning. Gaston joined them and had coffee, too, as they waited for the stage from San José. Their luck held out. The mule-drawn stage arrived on time, and the only other passenger was a little old lady in a rusty black dress who didn’t take up enough room to matter. The jehu and his shotgun rider took their dinero and told them to pile aboard. They didn’t even ask why Gaston was packing a carbine.
That was something to think about as the stage rolled out of Heredia. Maybe there had been talk of ba
ndits on the trail, after all. Captain Gringo decided he’d better stay awake as he sat by the right-hand window, facing backward, while Gaston of course faced forward, with his carbine braced out the sloping sill of the left-hand window on his side. The two women sat across from each other on the facing seats The old lady rode facing forward while Claudette shared her seat with Captain Gringo. As the mules trotted monotonously ahead of them, Claudette engaged the old woman in conversation, bless her. Captain Gringo and Gaston could tell the blonde was pumping the sweet old thing, but the woman who’d ridden the stage out of San José didn’t know that. Claudette was soon able to establish that, yes, there had been another awful street crime back in San José and, no, the police had no idea who’d shot those three unfortunates in the wee small hours. The old woman said, “Los pobrecitos are always killing one another at night around the Barrio Viejo. I was told one of the men killed last night had a reputation for violence. It is thought it was a gang fight.”
Captain Gringo restrained himself, and, sure enough, Claudette was smart enough to ask, very casually, “Oh? Don’t the police have any idea who might have done it?”
The old woman sighed and said, “No. I do not think they care. None of the dead men were of any importance. As I said, the poor brutes are always fighting among themselves, and as long as nobody wearing shoes was hurt, perhaps the whole disgusting affair can be forgotten.
Captain Gringo nudged Claudette’s ankle with his own to shut her up. She’d asked enough and it was time to change the subject. He knew that one of the first arrivals on the scene had helped himself to the lost hat and had doubtless been wearing it when the police arrived. The cops would never see the carbine he’d left in the alley slot, either, so what the hell.
Claudette either figured all that out herself or just took nudges well, because she changed the subject to the small talk about cooking and sewing that women indulged in instead of sports. He was glad she was handling the old woman so well. But he saw it was sure going to be a long, dull trip.
It was, for a while. An hour after setting out, they stopped at some dinky town to change mules and drink some more coffee. Neither helped a hell of a lot. The trail was still uphill, so even fresh mules moved less than six miles an hour, and Captain Gringo could have jogged along beside the coach and likely passed it with a little effort. And the coffee didn’t do that much good for him. He was in no shape for jogging, walking, or even keeping his eyes open for God’s sake. He wondered dully how Claudette could sound so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as she chatted on and on with the old lady about nothing much. He knew she’d been on the bottom most of the time, and that side trip to Maria’s brown body had only been rough on him. But it still didn’t seem fair. Whoever had first declared that women were the weaker sex couldn’t have laid many of them in his time.
He rubbed a hand across his face. It didn’t help. He was watching the downhill side now as the trail swung around a higher rise. Nobody was going to lope a pony up such a grade at them. Gaston and the shotgun rider, topside, were doubtless watching the uphill side. So what was he trying to prove? Would it kill him if he closed his damned eyes and just went with the feeling?
It probably would, as he’d learned the hard way in times past. He shook his head to clear it and sat straighter in his swaying seat. He’d sleep when they got to Puntarenas. Boy, would he sleep when they got to Puntarenas!
But he was dozing off again, despite himself, when Gaston suddenly yelled, “Regardez! Up the slope ahead!” and fired his carbine out the windows of his side.
Captain Gringo’s pistol was out of its shoulder holster before his eyes were open. But when he stared out his side, there was nothing much going on. Then a distant rifle spanged, and the body of the shotgun rider fell limply past his window to land like a sack of potatoes on the shoulder of the trail, rolling down the slope, flopping limp dead arms and legs as it just kept rolling. Captain Gringo yelled, “Down, Claudette! Take care of the other lady, too!” as he rolled over her to the uphill side. He got to the window next to Gaston’s as the little Frenchman fired again. He didn’t ask questions. He could see the sonsofbitches among the rocks up there now!
There were at least a dozen, though it was hard to tell just how many were hidden. The wily bastards had left their mounts on the far side of the ridge and hunkered down among the trailside boulders to ambush the stage. And they were ambushing it pretty good!
He could tell by the way they were rolling that the driver had let go of the reins and the spooked mules were bolting, paying no mind to the ruts and bumps as they dragged the coach wildly after them at a dead run. Captain Gringo knew they could all wind up dead if somebody didn’t control the runaway team pronto. He fired his pistol at a big hat aiming a rifle over a rock at him, then kicked open the door and yelled, “Cover me, Gaston!” Captain Gringo didn’t wait for an answer. He was too busy climbing up the side of the swaying stagecoach as Gaston fired round after round out the window below. As Captain Gringo swung up into the boot to find the driver’s seat blood-smeared and vacant, a bullet tore slivers out of the wood between his legs, close enough to sting his balls. He clung to the brass baggage rail with one hand, firing his pistol with the other, and yelled down, “God damn it! I asked you to cover me, you blind ass Frog!”
Gaston yelled back, “I can’t shoot through rocks, merde alors, and this triple-titted coach will tip over if you don’t do something soon!”
Captain Gringo ignored a bullet whizzing by his ear as he looked down in the boot for some trace of the reins. There weren’t any. The damned driver had dropped them when he’d been blasted off his seat. They were trailing in the dust between the mules ahead, and the mules were almost to the top of a rise. If they were going this fast uphill, they’d be going a lot faster down the far side, and the damned fool mules didn’t know that an unbraked heavy coach would overtake them and wind up in a hell of a tangled mess, muy pronto!
Captain Gringo holstered his .38 and grabbed the brake handle with both fists. He locked the wheels with no trouble. But it didn’t slow the mules enough to matter. If he dropped down between them to retrieve the reins, he’d have to let go of the brake. Another bandit bullet made his mind up for him by thudding into the leather cushion an inch from his ass and spraying him with horsehair stuffing. He said, “Oh, shit,” and let go of the brake.
The coach of course leaped forward again as he dropped over the dashboard between the rumps of the rear mules. One foot missed the wagon tongue. The other didn’t. So, by kneeling between the sweaty mules, groping in the dusty confusion with one hand and hanging on to the harness with the other, Captain Gringo managed to gather the loose reins. Another bullet tore splinters off the dashboard as he forked himself back up into the driver’s seat. He braced himself with one heel against the dash to haul in on the reins. He got his other heel against the brake rod and shoved hard. But not too hard. The idea was to slow down enough to keep from turning over, not to come to a dead stop in the middle of a bandit fusillade!
It seemed to be working. They topped the rise and were out of range by the time he had the team under control again. He looked back and saw a guy in a big hat waving a fist at them as they went over the rise. He sighed and muttered, “Up yours, too! Okay, mules, you’ve had your romp, and it’s all downhill to the next stage. So behave yourselves, dammit!”
They did. They trotted sedately ahead, relieved of their burden as he controlled the downhill roll of the heavy coach with his boot on the brake handle. They’d gone maybe half a mile when Gaston climbed up to join him, saying, “Sacré bleu that was trés noisy, back there, non? Where are the people who usually ride up here, Dick?”
“Back with the banditos. Hopefully, feeling no pain. When we get to the next stage, we’ll tell ’em what happened and let them worry about it. Are the women all right?”
“Oui. Both alive and well by some miracle. Considering how much lead they were throwing back there, I am overjoyed to see you looking so well, too.”
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“They aimed first at the crew. I doubt if they expected the team to bolt on an uphill grade. Did you hit anything but rocks back there?”
Gaston shrugged and asked, “Who looks behind rocks at such a time? I emptied this carbine at them and my pistol, too. If I didn’t hit anyone, I certainly made them duck, non?”
“Yeah, I think I emptied my .38 at ’em, too,” said Captain Gringo, letting go with one hand long enough to draw his revolver and hand it to Gaston as he added, “Check it for me, will you? I may need a reload.”
Gaston broke the .38 open and said, “You do, you noisy child. I still have plenty of spares in my pocket. I have already reloaded. Reloaded my pistol, that is. M’mselle Claudette says there are no spare .44-40s in her adorable carpetbag.”
Captain Gringo frowned as he watched the slopes on either side and went on driving. He said, “That’s stupid. Why did she buy two carbines without picking up extra ammo, dammit?”
“Ask her. She said she was unfamiliar with guns, as I recall. But at least we have plenty of pistol rounds. Here, yours is loaded, so put it away. Perhaps we can pick up carbine ammunition in the next town, non?”
Captain Gringo reholstered his sidearm as he thought about that. Then he said, “I’ve got a better idea.”
He called down to Claudette and, when she stuck out her blond head, told her, “Toss that Winchester over the side, doll. There’s no point answering questions about a goddamn gun nobody can shoot!”
The conversation was in English, of course. The other passenger might or might not ask Claudette why the useless carbine had gone out the window to land in some cactus. Gaston had that part figured out, but asked, “What if we run into more bandits, Dick?”
Captain Gringo shrugged and said, “We’ll have to make do with our only loaded guns, of course. We’re going to be stuck in the next town awhile. They’ll probably send us on with an armed escort, if they don’t arrest us. The fewer odd questions we have to answer, the less chance they’ll be suspicious, right?”