Brian Garfield

by Tripwire

  chapter four

  1

  He heard gunfire, a lot of it. From a hilltop that commanded several thousand acres of desert flats he had a long-distance view of people flitting from rock to rock, powder smoke drifting in tufts, a long line of uniformed troops lying along the parapet of a low bluff shooting down into the flitting figures, riderless horses prancing nervously. Evidently a troop of federals had ambushed a rebel column.

  Boag didn’t hang around to see how it turned out. The federals were setting up a hand-crank Gatling gun on its wheeled cart and when he rode back behind the hill he heard the thing begin to stutter viciously. Not much chance for the rebels there.

  Long rays of morning sun slanted across the hills. The racket of battle receded behind Boag; once, a mile or more to the north of him and running parallel with Boag’s course, a horseman riding low to the withers raced through the cuts and gullies and finally disappeared into the ridged badlands—a rebel messenger dispatched for help, Boag judged. It wasn’t going to do them any good, there wasn’t time to bring reinforcements. He gave that outfit back there half an hour to get cut to pieces by the Gatling gun. There wasn’t enough cover in the ambush-ground the federals had picked; the federals had set it up with first-class tactical talent.

  The old woman back on the Colorado had been right; the regular troops would win this one, there wouldn’t be any overthrow of the provincial government. Governor Pesquiera not only had the troops and the money; it was clear he also had the military brains. Boag wondered what kind of suicidal lunacy had persuaded Captain Shelby McQuade to join up with the losing side. Captain McQuade had always been reckless but he’d seldom been stupid. But now he wanted to kick over the pail and he didn’t seem to realize the pail was too full; he wasn’t going to kick it over, he was going to stub his toe against it.

  It took Boag two days to find his way to Caborca town. Distances down here were always endless. The Concepción was as poor an excuse for a river as the Gila; in a lot of places it was only a dry sandy bed with trees on both banks. The river ran underground here and if you had to you could dig down and find it a few feet below the surface. It wasn’t worth the trouble if your life didn’t depend on it because a yard’s depth of loose fine sand was the worst thing in the world to dig a hole in.

  Caborca had very tall palms and a big old battered mission church on a square. There were farms around the town, irrigated by ditch water from the river. Boag passed fat women with burdens on their heads and big farm carts with huge wheels made of solid wood. The huts were painted different pale colors. He bought food for his pack and grain for the horse and moved right on down the river after no more than twenty minutes in the town.

  Halfway through the following morning he found Almada’s hacienda. The patron was a suspicious man but courteous; he accepted Captain McQuade’s introduction and said in a curt candid way that he had heard of Mr. Pickett but had never had dealings with the man. He said it in a way that persuaded Boag it was true. Almada didn’t know where Boag might look unless it was farther to the southeast in the mountain country where there were half a dozen aristocratic manor-lords who had fallen on hard times and had taken to trading with bandits for a livelihood. Almada gave Boag two names, Felix Cielo and Don Pablo Ortiz, and showed Boag the door.

  2

  Two days out of Caborca on his way into the mountains he passed a troop of rurales, provincial dragoons on horseback dragging two little twelve-pound brass cannons on horsecarts. Boag swung wide around them because he was familiar with the tedious suspicions of rurale officers and in the old days riding dispatch during the campaigns he’d sometimes had to spend hours with them establishing credentials. Now he had no credentials and didn’t care to get shot for sport so he cut across behind them and went higher into the timber.

  The air got cooler as he climbed into the pines. Here and there he passed empty tunnel mouths and discolored piles of tailings where hopeful hardrockers had tried to strike it rich. It was silver country up here but most of the mines, even the paying ones, had been closed down toward the end of the Maximilian reign and had never reopened because the revolutions against the Austrian crown had spawned hungry battalions of bandits who still prowled the Sierra like dogs gone wild, hunting in vicious packs for scraps. It was easier to give birth to a litter of bandits than it was to get rid of them; the big revolutions were finished now but the bandits still rode, and the mines were still closed, and the owners of the mines were dead or poor or living in exile with their relatives like the old woman he’d left in Yuma.

  It was a district that didn’t like questions, any questions about anything, and didn’t like the people who asked them. Boag got strange looks from everyone because he was black, and hard looks from some when he asked how to find Felix Cielo and Don Pablo Ortiz; it took a long time and almost led to two shootings but in the end he got a vaquero drunk enough to direct him to Cielo’s place.

  It was a fortified rancho built back in the days of almost daily Indian raids. It had everything but a moat. The walls of the hacienda were five feet thick and slitted with rifle ports; the house was built square around a courtyard and there was a water well in the center of the courtyard so that the Indians couldn’t lay siege to the place and kill anyone by thirst.

  In that part of the world you measured the age of a town or a rancho by the size of its trees. Cielo’s establishment was out in the middle of a grass meadow several miles long and almost as wide; the house and its fortified outbuildings sat up on a knoll with command of sixty or seventy square miles of buffalo grass, and the trees around the hacienda threw enough shade to make it likely they had been planted by the grandfather of the present don even if he himself turned out to be a very old man.

  There weren’t many cattle in sight, the grass hadn’t been grazed, and Boag saw only two men when he approached the house, both on horseback. They looked less like working vaqueros than like hardcase bodyguards. They converged toward the gateposts so that they had Boag bracketed between them when he arrived. They both had paired revolvers in crossbelted holsters, bandoleros across their shoulders and long rifles across the wide flat wooden horns of their saddles. The rifles weren’t exactly pointed at Boag.

  He said he wished to see the don; he said he had been directed here by Almada of Caborca; he kept both hands empty on the pommel. He said it was a matter of business, there was gold bullion involved. He said he thought the don might be interested.

  They didn’t say much of anything. They took him up to the house and one of them went inside. The other one kept his eyes on Boag and his rifle handy and managed to express the idea that he didn’t think it would be a very hard job to put a bullet through the third button of Boag’s shirt. Boag dismounted and stood in the shade because it was getting on for the noon hour and the sun was pretty damn hot even at this altitude.

  Felix Cielo turned out to be not such a very old man but he might as well have been. He was what remained of an aristocratic horseman, now gone to seed. A thousand gallons of tequila showed in the red veins of his oversized nose. His hands were puffy and his big gut that hung out over his fancy leather belt was not concealed by the intricate woven vest he wore over his stained white shirt. He was somewhere on the sour side of forty and had the eyes of a man who had been kicked more than once and expected to be kicked again. Probably he was drinking up the last of his family fortune and making cheap deals with bandits to postpone bankruptcy.

  Boag knew before he started talking that this wasn’t the kind of man Mr. Pickett would deal with. He cut it short, asked his questions and got his negative answers and in the end asked where he might look for Don Pablo Ortiz.

  3

  The wagon road trickled down into the valley. There was an old mine off the side of the road, slag piles and grey buildings and two tunnels that he could see, rusty railroad tracks coming out of both of them to abutments where the ore carts would be dumped. A rusty tilt cart on one of them. This wasn’t a mine that had been closed down
out of fear; it was a place that was all used up, played out. The earth had been stripped of its goods and the mine had died an honest death.

  That down yonder on the plain must be Don Pablo Ortiz’s outfit. It was bigger than the Cielo hacienda but it shared a lot of its qualities: the adobe Moorish shape, the location on a low knoll surrounded by open flats where you could see your attackers long before they got in shooting range, the fortress sense of the layout, and the quality of decay: there were no big crews of vaqueros out herding cattle and there were no cows to herd and the grass had not been eaten.

  A windmill sprouted from the central courtyard of the house, looming tall above the place on its rickety wooden trestlework. There weren’t any big trees; the place was probably as old as Cielo’s but either someone had cut all the trees down for better visibility or no one had ever planted any. There were abundant oleanders ten feet high and even an orchard of pruned low apple trees beside one of the barns; there was plenty of greenery but none of it was high or thick. The dons here had wanted nothing that would interrupt their field of fire.

  It was an impressive estate and it got more impressive as he approached. You came up at it from below; the knoll was higher than it had looked from the mountains. The hacienda lofted itself against the sky like a cliff. It wasn’t forbidding, it was imposing; it looked like the kind of mansion you would like to live in after you got very rich. From its eminence it commanded the world beneath it.

  It threw long shadows; Boag had ridden more than forty miles since sunup to get here and it wasn’t far to nightfall. He reached the barn and rode up past the apple trees and wondered why nobody with a gun had come out to greet him; obviously they had watched him approach, he’d been in plain sight for an hour crossing the grass flats.

  There was a semicircle of driveway up to the big oak gate cut into the hacienda’s front wall; there were twenty posts with iron rings in them for the convenience of guests. He tethered the horse to one of them and walked up to the oak gate. It was twelve or fourteen feet wide and at least ten feet tall, cut into halves like the doors of some great church. A small door was cut into one of the gates. Boag lifted the huge brass knocker and the small door opened before he could clap it.

  The man was a very old vaquero with a pinfire revolver in his sash. He wore the kind of leather cuffs cattlemen wore to prevent rope-burns.

  “Yes?”

  “I wish to see the patron.”

  The old vaquero was uncertain. This was no gunslick bodyguard, Boag observed. An old retainer who’d spent forty years in the saddle chousing cows.

  “Cómo se llama?”

  “I am called Boag. It is about gold bullion.”

  The old vaquero hadn’t made any moves toward the pinfire in his sash. He just stood aside and let Boag walk into the courtyard. The wooden lattice of the windmill dominated the square; a second-story veranda ran around all four sides of it and in two of the corners there were steps going up. The veranda formed a covered gallery for the entrances to all the downstairs rooms; it was typically the kind of house where there was no connecting passage from room to room and you had to come out into the courtyard and down to the next doorway if you wanted to go from one room to another.

  There was a profusion of carefully tended flowers in pots and boxes in the courtyard; a great deal of brilliant color and bees rushing around them.

  A young woman was coming down the stairs; Boag picked up the movement in the corner of his vision and wheeled and saw her reach the ground and come toward him smiling. It was a blinding smile on a stunning face. She had a cocked ten-gauge shotgun in her arms and it was aimed dead-center on Boag.

  Boag froze bolt still.

  Behind him the old vaquero spoke. “He wishes to see the patrón about a matter of gold bullion.” Very dry.

  “Gold bullion,” the young woman echoed. She had a smoky voice. Her eyes stayed on Boag when she spoke to the old vaquero. “Did he give a name?”

  “I have forgotten it, Señora.”

  “It’s Boag.”

  “Boag?”

  “My name.”

  “What does this mean, this Boag?”

  “Just means Boag.”

  “You speak with a gringo’s accent.”

  “I come from north of the Border.”

  “And you wish to see my husband about gold bullion.”

  “I only want to ask him something. You could point that thing somewhere else.”

  “You are nervous?” A pink tongue flicked across her lips; she was amused. “The señora knows how to use a shotgun, Señor Boag, and how not to. Let’s make a bargain—you hang your gunbelt on the windmill strut and I shall put down the shotgun and we shall both go and see my husband. You agree?”

  “Seguro que sí.”

  “Very good,” she said and Boag hung the forty-five up and followed her up the stairs. She had handed the shotgun to the old vaquero and he followed them upstairs; it wasn’t quite the bargain Boag had had in mind but if they’d wanted to shoot him they’d have done it by now.

  Suddenly he realized the señora had stopped on the veranda. She was very still, looking at him, not blinking.

  Boag’s eyes rested on the pulsing hollow at the base of her throat. Then they slipped down and he caught himself staring at the downed cleft between her breasts. She wore a sunbonnet and a man’s shirt open to the third button and a pair of black riding breeches; she was a tall woman with smooth dark skin and proud quivery breasts and a good flare to haunch and rump; and there was vibrant provocation in the way she was looking at him. There was a secret amusement of some kind, and a bold speculation. More like the eye of a girl at a whorehouse bar than ah aristocrat’s wife.

  “Miguel you may see to your duties.”

  “Sí, Señora.”

  She turned to a door, passing Boag with a slow flirt of the shoulder. She opened it and spoke into the dimness:

  “Querido. We have a visitor who wishes to discuss gold bullion with us.”

  Laughter rang from the darkness within.

  4

  Don Pablo Ortiz laughed so hard he brought on a fit of coughing which he concealed behind a fragile handkerchief. The señora pushed the door shut behind her and Boag tried to get a better look at the man’s face but he was just going to have to wait for his eyes to adjust to the bad light. A fish-oil lamp burned on the table beside Don Pablo’s chair but it didn’t give much light.

  The room smelled stale, as if its air hadn’t moved in a long time.

  “Gold bullion,” Don Pablo said again, and chuckled. “Yes, well tell us about this gold bullion, Señor.”

  “His name is Boag.”

  “Boag?”

  “Just so. Or so he says.”

  Boag said, “There is a man called Mr. Jed Pickett.”

  “Ah yes,” Don Pablo murmured. “So there is. So there certainly is.”

  Boag could make him out now. A thin young man gone to waste, the white gentleman’s shirt lying wearily against washboard ribs. The pale skin of the Spaniard, a full head of hair that was shot thick with grey and tangled very fine as if he hadn’t bothered to comb it in days. Deep brackets of sickness creased his face on both sides of the pale lips; Don Pablo’s eyes were dull as slate.

  Boag said, “I am looking to find him.”

  Don Pablo looked him over and burst into laughter again. It doubled him over coughing.

  Boag glanced at the señora. There was anguish in her eyes but she did not stir.

  Don Pablo straightened in his chair, with effort. “Querida, a little drink for us all, por favor.”

  Boag watched her move across the room. When she brought glasses to the table beside her husband he rested a proprietary hand on her rump, a casual and natural intimate gesture; and the señora who was no young child of the woods made as if to smile, trying to hide the pain in it. Boag wanted to leave this house of death as fast as he could.

  The whiskey moved like a soft warm hand over the saddle-worn muscles of his body. He l
ooked around the big room and thought it bare; there were only a few pieces of furniture, the massive divans and chairs; there were no ornaments on the mantelpiece over the great fireplace and he saw discolored rectangles on two walls as if paintings had hung there but had been removed.

  Don Pablo smacked his thin lips. “It is good. Even the dying have a few pleasures, no es verdad?”

  It was consumption of course. It wasn’t the first time Boag had seen it.

  The señora said, “Are you chilled?”

  “You might make a fire now, querida.”

  A slantwise look at Boag, and she went out of the room; he couldn’t read the meaning of her glances.

  Don Pablo said, “Now this gold bullion. What has it to do with you?”

  “Some of it was mine. A little piece of it.”

  “And you came all this way trying to get it back.”

  “Well it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “Have you ever seen a small dog chase a herd of horses around a corral, Señor Boag? Did you ever stop to wonder what might happen if the horses decided to stop and let the small dog catch them?”

  It gave Boag a very graphic picture of a small mutt being trampled to death by iron-shod hoofs. He smiled over the rim of his glass.

  Don Pablo said, “Mr. Jed Pickett has something of mine as well. You and I have that in common.” And broke off to cough into his lace.

  The señora entered with an armload of wood and kindling. She built a fire quickly and well. When the flame caught at the edges she stood up. “It is time for your soup.” The eyes came at Boag: “Will you take dinner with us?”

  “Grácias.”

  “I shall bring it up here then.”

  Don Pablo’s shoulders moved. “I can still walk to the dining room.”

  “You should conserve your strength.”

  “For dying? No, I can still eat at the table where my father and his father ate.”