by Jim Nesbitt
It didn’t help much. But it beat getting another narcotic jolt from Mr. Slick and becoming so zombified that he fell out of the saddle. Pride wouldn’t let him do that. Not in front of these vaquero compadres of Spider the Guitar King.
His mount was a big-chested sorrel gelding named Shorty. A bit of cowboy humor in that name since Shorty was bigger than most cowponies, more than sixteen hands tall with the longer legs and heavier build that suggested some extra thoroughbred or gaited saddlebred blood in his veins. Which made Shorty a smoother trail horse that still had plenty of cow sense, the kind they used to breed for the ranch foreman or owner who needed to cover a lot of ground in a day’s time without getting pummeled by the gait of a short-coupled quarter horse. This was fine by Burch.
The two vaqueros were named Silva and Dag, short for Dagoberto. They were cousins out of a long line of Mexican cowhands, flashier and crueler with their mounts than their Anglo counterparts, a threadbare haughtiness to the set of their sweat-stained hats, the way they wore their worn jeans and chaps, their upright riding styles and the touch of tarnished silver on their oil-colored saddles.
Silva was thin, tan and mustached, quick and lithe. Dag was shorter, stockier and darker. Both rode roan cowponies; Silva’s had a white blaze between its eyes. Both were hands for the O2, one of the big spreads, once part of the A.S. Gage empire but now owned by a big Back East corporation that ran a line of freighters and tankers, made luncheon meats, mined kaolin and treated the ranch as much as a tax write-off as a working cattle operation.
They left Spider’s rancho around three, bouncing down off the main road and onto a rutted cow trail that ran along the north bank toward La Linda. They tacked up and slipped over the river in the early morning darkness, letting the icy water slide up and over horse bellies and human thighs, clenching their teeth against the chattering chill as the wind hit their wetness on the other bank.
It would take them a day’s ride to get close enough to the old mining town to scope it out, a backcountry cut through what was once part of Villa’s domain, home to bandits and smugglers, rustlers and prospectors — and candaleria workers, harvesters of the spiky desert plant that yielded a rich wax coveted for its polishing luster.
Forbidding country, rough, arid and isolated. But sparsely majestic and not deserted. Hippy river rats lived upstream in Terlingua and Lajitas. Inside the Big Bend National Park were ghost communities like Solis, La Clocha and San Vincente, now the primitive campsites for the hardy backpacker or river rafter. And on the other side of the river, Boquillas del Carmen, a tourist stop for rafters looking for a cold beer after a run through the rapids, a haven for smugglers who sprung to life in the dark hours.
There weren’t many roads, just a dirt-and-gravel track that ran between La Linda and Boquillas, hugging the south bank of the river. They stayed clear of it, using old cattle and smuggling trails that crisscrossed the promontories that high-walled the Santa Elena, Mariscal and Boquillas canyons, then laced their way down to flatter country that ran between these rocky spines.
The last of the winter rains was still fresh on the land, brightening the dull desert browns and grays with bursts of olives, ochers, reds and yellows, darkening the rocky outcroppings with moisture. The tangy creosote odor of the greasewood was strong in the air — the scent of telephone poles after a thunderstorm. A damp chill hung across their shoulders and seeped into their lungs as they rode.
Burch fumbled in his pockets for Luckies and his Zippo. Shorty’s ears pricked up at the snickering metal sound of the lighter, head rising and alert, then slowly lowering.
It hurt to suck down the first lungful of smoke but Burch did it anyway. Twice. Three times.
He pulled up to the side of the trail and waited for Mr. Slick to catch up, careful not to spur his horse into the cat’s claw and Spanish dagger that reached out from the sides of the narrow sand track.
Mr. Slick was riding a barrel-bodied bay mare named Sue Bee. Because she was slow but would sting you with a quick deep bite if you didn’t keep an eye open while picking stones and mud out of her hooves or cinching up a saddle tighter than she liked.
“You seem to be handlin’ this.”
“Hate it like sin itself, son. Need another pill?”
“Hell, no. I’m enjoyin’ the pain.”
“That would make you a masochist.”
“So they say.”
“What’s the plan?”
“Well, the boys say we’ll ride up into the heat of the day, find some shade, then take it a little farther in the evening and hole up and dry camp it from midnight till dawn. Keeps us out of the way of any narcotraficantes wanderin’ around that time of night.”
“They with us all the way?”
“Naw, Slick. They’ll get us close in then they split. We’ll have to take it from there by ourselves.”
“Can we trust ’em?”
“Spider does. Too late to ask that question now.”
“Do we know where we’re goin’?”
“Yeah. A little white chapel.”
“It’s been a long time since I went to church.”
Burch laughed then looked down to study the scarred stock of a Winchester lever-action carbine, a short-barreled weapon in .44 Magnum resting in a leather scabbard laced to the left side of his saddle, a brush gun chambered in pistol caliber that looked like something Jimmy Stewart or Chuck Connors would carry. Good for work just beyond shotgun and pistol range, with the same knockdown power as the cannon Dirty Harry carried. But it didn’t have legs long enough to really reach out and touch someone, like you could with a .308 with the heavy Krieger barrel and the 10x scope, the kind that FBI sniper used up on Caribou Ridge, Idaho, to kill the wife of white separatist Randy Wayne Weaver. The press got it wrong when they hung the Ruby Ridge tag on this infamous standoff, but it became the legend that everybody printed instead of the fact.
Burch didn’t have a .308. He had this stubby little frontier brush gun. And the Colt. That was all.
It would have to do.
He spurred his horse into line behind Mr. Slick and Sue Bee, running the image of that white chapel through his mind.
In truth, he had little more than a mental postcard to go on. Silva and Dag had cousins living in La Linda. They spoke of a gringo who came and went sporadically, enjoying the protection of a local patron named Salazar, a man with grand designs but little proof he was able to project his power beyond the boundaries of the village.
The gringo hadn’t been seen in several months. And the cousins had no idea where he holed up when he did visit — abandoned shacks, huts and small houses were scattered through the foothills, the foresaken hopes of miners trying to build homes outside the company barracks, which were also empty, their innards scavenged, their windows broken and gaping.
The chapel and Salazar. That’s all Burch had to go on. Like his Colt and that pistol-calibered carbine, they would have to do.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Cider Jones was two hours too late and couldn’t decide whether this was bad luck or just the very thing he intended all along.
The cop in him doggedly wanted to nail the woman and wrap up the hit man — scumbags who killed citizens living on his turf, during his watch. Didn’t matter that the victims were scumbags themselves, like the Hoghead, twisting naked and dead from the exposed beam of his Houston apartment.
Never did matter — Cider took their killers off the board, avenging them with all the passion of a spreadsheet program.
Until now.
Wrestling with somethin’ else though, ain’t ya, son?
You bet, daddy.
He shook the chaw-and-chew image of his dead daddy out of his mind. But not the point he made. Something else was muscling aside the automatic cop instincts. A desire to sit back and let this one play out — no arrest, no court, no attorneys, no judge and jury. Pulling for a deadly ending for everybody involved — Burch, the bastard he blamed for the death of his partner; that killer cunt girlfrie
nd of his; her crazy-cool husband; this back-in-black New Orleans muscle.
He kicked Burch loose to let this happen but the old instincts slapped at his soul, making him work the trail, tracking the girl, picking up where she had been strong-armed by the hit man, figuring out who the hell he was and how the hell he fit into this puzzle box, factoring in the New Orleans greaseballs and their panicky and murderous attempts to find Crowe and get back their fuckin’ gelt. And extract their measure of revenge.
Beautiful, one side of his mind told the other. Let `em all kill each other. Very dead. Very soon. Just watch it all go down. The only tricky part — making sure Burch, bashed up and shaky, drugs slowing down his driving demons, made it to the ball in time for the last dance.
Burch didn’t let him down; he didn’t let drugs or pain get in the way of whatever revenge siren was singing in his head. Cider had him tabbed, lurching toward the Big Bend country and the border, his mind always on the bald-headed pee-eye, his bile readily rising at the memory of his dead partner and the man he blamed for that death.
When he allowed himself a gut check, he was amazed at how strongly he reacted to someone he would normally dismiss as a dirtbag. A fallen cop, no doubt crooked. Someone beneath contempt, certainly unworthy of any emotional capital. But the thought of Burch burned him deep. And it went well beyond the death of his partner.
He’s your double, son.
Shut up, daddy.
Think about it. He’s what you would be if you had the same fall from grace. And you wonder if you’da handled it as well as he has. Or fucked it up even worse.
Right.
He didn’t kill your partner but you hate him like he did. He didn’t kill you even though he should have and had the chance. You wonder if you’da done the same, been as mindful of doing the right thing in the same circumstances. You’ll always wonder if you’re as good as he is even though you still have your badge and he doesn’t.
Sure, daddy.
Don’t listen to me but I’m right. You hate this man because he’s just like you but he doesn’t have a rule book to live by anymore. Just what his gut tells him is right. Sometimes he fucks up. Sometimes he doesn’t. And you don’t know if you could live that way, without something in black and white telling you what to do.
Take a hike, daddy.
Cider followed the trail of the hit man and the girl — headed in the same direction. More or less. It was a big state. With lots of ways to get to the same place. They were splitting the difference between Laredo and Del Rio, then running north through Dimmit County and Carrizo Springs with the border on their western flank.
He slipped in behind them, easy and loose. He told himself nothing was different, that he was working the case — cool and slow, confident he’d nail them. Eventually. Once the deal went down. His dead daddy laughed and spat spiritual Red Man in the dust of his mind.
You can fool yourself, son. You can’t con me. I changed your diapers. I know you better than you know yourself.
To prove the voice in his head wrong, Cider pushed to close the gap, acting on a report that the hit man and girl were spotted at a motel near Del Rio, telling himself — and daddy dead man — he’d pop the both of them on sight. With cuffs, not bullets.
Late by two hours. Rolled up on a still-working crime scene southeast of Dryden but the action was winding down, the body already moved to the Terrell County morgue in Sanderson, forty miles away from the two-lane blacktop where the corpse was found stretched out next to the tire tracks of a car long gone.
“Looks like the boy paid the ultimate price for a little roadside sin.”
The speaker was the sheriff’s chief deputy — the pro behind the pol. A short man, whippet-thin, decked out in tan cavalry twill and a Stetson straw with a cattleman’s crease. A small circled star on his chest. No holster, no hog leg. No other talismans of authority. Just a sharp, all-knowing, black-eyed glare from a pockmarked face slashed by a thin, trim moustache.
“Who found him?”
“Rancher heading into town — fella named Roy Booker. Family’s been in this county since Villa was playin’ hide-n-seek with Black Jack Pershing.”
“Solid citizen?”
“You bet. No motive there. So — I take it you know who our friend is and why he’s dead in my county with his fly open and his cock out.”
Cider told it flat and fast. New Orleans muscle after a wayward one of their own. Wifey of the wanted one the probable killer. The bodies in Houston both left behind. He told it all — except for Burch and a lust for revenge rattled by hospital pharmaceuticals.
The deputy, Hicks — his daddy’s name and genetically inherited acne, his Mexican mama’s eyes and olive skin — stared at him the way a cop stares at street scum, bolstered by the barely disguised disgust country folks have for city slicks.
“Been doggin’ ’em long?”
“About three days.”
“Long leash.”
Cider shot the deputy a sharp look. No question mark riding on it. Both men knew what the deputy meant.
“You want to say it plain?”
“Not much point is there? You’re a big-city homicide hombre. Not some hayseed rurale. You don’t stake a lead to the meat for a bunch of killings in your backyard unless you got a reason.”
Cider said nothing. He could feel his dead daddy stirring in the back of his mind, snickering softly, shifting his chaw before hacking a glob of juice into the dirt.
Got ya, son.
Shut up, daddy.
“You got your reasons but you’ll forgive me if I don’t like ’em worth a shit. You runnin’ a long leash on these two means I got a killin’ on my books. Mine. Don’t matter we know who the victim is and don’t give much of a damn he’s dead. Don’t matter that we know who did it. Don’t even matter that you’ll run down this killer bitch. What matters is I got a mess I gotta clean up. Thanks to how you’re playin’ this deal. I got questions to answer from people I don’t want askin’. Chief among them is this shitheel bubba I got for a boss. Man thinks it’s 1870 all over again and he can get away with hatin’ Meskins while smilin’ and ignorin’ ’em. Thinks he can forget most everybody in this county has some brown runnin’ in their blood. Him too. Man hates me a whole lot. Knows I’ll have his job come next election. Knows the old-time deal between the bubbas and the patrons is about over. Knows the next sheriff will be a Tejano not so beholdin’ to the old guard and he wants to make sure it’s anybody but me.”
Hicks quit talking and turned his hard eyes toward the long nowhere of road that ran toward the border. The heat was starting to rise, the night wind dying down, the light filling in the shadows of the broken and blasted country south and west of the Dryden — parched arroyos, sun-shattered rock, dry creek beds that were wet only in winter, sand the ancient color of something long dead, fit to grow only what had the power to punish someone foolish enough to walk its surface. Like the stunted Spanish dagger waiting to slash the flesh of horse or man.
The squawk of the radio in the deputy’s cruiser broke the moment. Hicks walked over, reached through the rolled-down driver’s window and snaked the mike to his lips, looping the chord over and past the wheel with a practiced flip of his hand. He talked with his back toward Cider.
Cider walked over to the roadside sand where the hitman’s body was found, squatting by the edge of a rough rectangle of yellow police tape that staked out where a deadman’s blood made a dark streak that was drying fast in the heat. No eyes to look into. Nothing to tell him anything other than the marks of a body roughly spun out of the front seat of car, landing face down, dead toes gouging the soil as they bounced to a rest.
He stood up, his knees cracking in protest. He walked over to his gunmetal gray LTD, reached through the open driver’s window and dug a Motorola cellular out of his briefcase, glancing at the numbers scrawled on a business card taped to the back of the clunky plastic unit. Never could remember the access code.
No signal. No surprise. Not thi
s deep in the West Texas outback.
He’d have to wait and hit the next sun-blasted small town and hunt down a pay phone. Strictly old school. And that was fine by Cider, who used to rely on his dead partner, Cortez, to keep track of the latest technological wizardry, but now had to fend for himself.
A few hours back, he hit the outskirts of Comstock and dove into the lot of a darkened Shamrock gas station with a Southwestern Bell pay phone hanging on the whitewashed cinderblock side of the building, shielded by an battered and open-faced aluminum box.
He reached his contact with the Rangers and got an update on the loose tail they were running on Burch, his good buddy. Holed up in a strip motel on the outskirts of Alpine for two days. Calls to a local who built custom guitars and rode hard with the big outfits that still ran cattle through unforgiving country. Saddled up to be border bound. Lost in the miles and miles of deserted ranchland that ran south toward the river.
Lost and impossible to track. Unless the trackers also saddled up. No need. Cider and the Rangers knew where Burch was headed. A little white chapel. And a date with someone everybody wanted to see dead.
Cider needed to get gone and call the Rangers about this latest killing. He waved to Hicks.
“Headed to the morgue.”
Hicks nodded and started to turn away. He stopped.
“Gonna shorten that leash?”
“No.”
“Bodies are gonna pile up.”
“Not on our side of the river.”
Cider cranked up his car, heading for a long gaze into the eyes of a dead killer from New Orleans. And a hunting lodge with a clear view of a little white chapel above a blasted little Mexican mining town called La Linda.
He was no longer a cop. He was a watcher now, unhappy with his choice but no longer listening to the snickering voice of the dead man in his head.
TWENTY-NINE
The easy part was the action. The play.