Widowmaker Jones

by Brett Cogburn

  “I was hoping there was a doctor in Zaragoza,” Newt replied. “They tell me it’s not much farther up the road.”

  “Put him in our wagon,” she said.

  “I think he can make it in the saddle.”

  As if on cue, the judge toppled from his horse, hitting the ground with a solid, limp thump. The dog started toward the judge, growling again.

  “I’d appreciate it if you called your dog off,” Newt said. “I don’t want to get bitten when I get down.”

  She produced a pistol she had kept hidden on her off side, and Newt had no time to draw his own. When she noticed the expression on his face she shrugged and uncocked her gun and shoved it in a holster lying in the floorboard of the wagon. “How was I to know who you were? We haven’t had good luck lately with those we’ve met on the road.”

  Newt looked from her to her brother. Like her, Fonzo shrugged an apology. Newt didn’t think the boy looked like a killer, either. Before he could think of what to say she climbed down from the wagon and started to where the judge lay. She crouched over the fallen man and lifted his swollen eyelids and pried his mouth open.

  “You two come over here and help me get him in the wagon,” she said.

  “Is he dead?” Newt asked.

  “We would be burying him instead of putting him in the wagon if he was. Get off that horse and help me.”

  “Is she always like this?” Newt asked Fonzo as he swung down out of his saddle.

  “Bossy?” Fonzo said as he got down from the wagon.

  Newt nodded.

  “My sister has been accused of that.”

  Newt looked at the side of the wagon again. “Fonzo the Great and Buckshot Annie. I take it you’re Fonzo and she would be Buckshot Annie.”

  “I only break her out for special occasions,” she said. “Today I’m only Kizzy. Are you going to stand there like a dumb ox or are you going to help me lift him?”

  Newt took hold of the judge under his armpits. “You two take his legs.”

  “He looks bad,” Fonzo said as he took hold of one of the judge’s legs.

  “He never was pretty,” Newt said.

  “He’s having trouble breathing,” Kizzy said between grunts of exertion as they carried the judge to the wagon. “His throat is swollen and so is his tongue. I’ve seen this before, although never with a scorpion sting.”

  They placed the judge on one of the two beds in the wagon, and Newt stood awkwardly in the doorway while she tried to make the judge comfortable.

  “Don’t just stand there. We need to get to Zaragoza and find a doctor,” she said.

  “Will he live?” Newt asked.

  “How am I supposed to know?”

  Newt helped Fonzo load the steps and close the rear door, then he mounted his horse while Fonzo took the wagon seat. The sound of the judge gasping and wheezing for breath carried outside the wagon.

  Fonzo started the wagon moving and Newt rode alongside it, leading the judge’s gray.

  “How come you’re after Cortina?” Fonzo asked, even though it was hard to talk over the screeching wagon axle.

  “He shot a man and stole his stake, and then he robbed the judge on his way back to Mexico.”

  “Shot a man?”

  “Yeah, me.”

  “Oh.”

  “You sound like you know something about Cortina, and the look on your sister’s face when I mentioned him gave me the same feeling.”

  “He robbed us, too. Stole six of our white show horses.”

  “Heard about that back in Piedras Negras. You’re lucky he didn’t kill you.”

  “I know it.”

  “What are you two doing down here in Mexico?”

  “Trying to make a living, like everyone else. We’re supposed to do a show in Monterrey next week.”

  “You’re going the wrong way.”

  “We don’t have a show without those horses. They were everything we had—like family to us.”

  Newt tried to put on his best poker face and not to think of the dead white horse he and the judge had left in the middle of the road a few miles back. “You aren’t following Cortina, are you?”

  “We are.”

  “Your horses are probably long sold off by now. They will stick out too much, and Cortina won’t be fool enough to keep them.”

  “I think he might,” Fonzo said. “He strikes me as a vain sort. He’s probably riding one of my horses right now and thinking how good he looks on it. He’ll look like he belongs in a circus himself on a white horse with that spotted vest of his.”

  “Spotted vest?”

  “Some kind of cat hide. He was wearing it both times we ran across him.”

  “The judge will love to hear that.”

  “Is he a real judge?”

  “Depends on how finicky you are about what you call a judge. I met some Texas Rangers that thought so.”

  “That must be Zaragoza up ahead,” Fonzo said.

  “I reckon.”

  The town lay sprawled on a brushy flat with the church bell tower rising out of the scrubland. There was a haze in the air, probably dust, and it made the place look more like a distant, smoky painting than something real.

  Fonzo leaned out around the side of the wagon to check their back trail. Newt followed suit and was quick to notice the dust cloud worming its way along the road a mile or so behind them.

  “Friends of yours?” Newt asked.

  “Not so you would notice.”

  “Folks back in Piedras Negras told us about Cortina stealing some circus people’s horses.”

  “I’ve already told you about that.”

  “Yes, but those Piedras Negras folks also said that those same circus people killed a rurale captain and left town on the run,” Newt said. “Now might be the time to be honest.”

  Fonzo urged his mismatched team up to a trot and the wagon screeched louder. “Have you told us the truth? About everything?”

  “Mostly the truth.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you mostly the truth. I sure hope those rurales don’t get close enough to us to make out who we are before we can get this wagon hid somewhere in town.”

  Newt twisted in the saddle and looked at the road behind them one more time while he rubbed the whiskers on his chin. “Was it you that killed that rurale, or was it your sister?”

  “I did it.”

  Newt noted the defiant quaver to Fonzo’s voice. “I guess there’s a story that goes with that. You two don’t strike me as the kind that goes around killing policemen.”

  “They came up on us right after Cortina robbed us. We asked them for help, but they didn’t care,” Fonzo said. “And then they stole our mules.”

  “And you killed one of them while they were at it?”

  “No, that was later. We followed them to Piedras Negras. Kizzy said we should forget about the mules and go after Cortina and our horses, and I intended to listen to her. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “I saw him and I couldn’t help but go talk to him.” Fonzo paused for a while, the look on his face making it plain that he was back in that moment. “He was drunk, and when I told him to give us our mules back he laughed at me. He laughed and then he asked where my sister was. Said that as soon as he was through with me he was going to find her and teach her a lesson, too.”

  Newt tried to imagine the little man facing up to any kind of bad man and couldn’t wrap his head around the image. This Fonzo didn’t seem made of that kind of metal. “So you shot him?”

  “He had a knife. I shot him before I had time to think about it.”

  Newt nodded. “That rurale captain should have known better. It takes a damn fool to bring a knife to a gunfight.”

  “Are you going to help us? I’m afraid we’re in bad trouble.”

  Newt ignored the question, looking back again at the dust cloud behind them. “Where did you ever manage to find six matching white horses?”

  “My father gathered them over several
years.”

  “Where’s he at?”

  Fonzo looked straight up the road over the team’s backs. “Some vigilantes hung him over a year ago.”

  Newt threw a quick look at Fonzo. “Seems like you’ve got the outlaw blood.”

  “I’m no outlaw.”

  “You are now.”

  “It’s my sister that I’m worried about,” Fonzo said. “She had nothing to do with me killing that rurale.”

  The judge cried out something Newt couldn’t understand. At least he was still alive.

  “You never said if you would help us,” Fonzo added.

  “You’re asking a lot, and you don’t have a clue what kind of man you’re asking it of.”

  “Hurry, Fonzo,” Kizzy said from inside the wagon. “I think he’s getting worse.”

  Newt tried to guess how far behind them that dust trail was. The dust was big enough that it looked as if there were several riders making it. They were going to be hard-pressed to get to Zaragoza ahead of them. Yes, indeed, it was going to be close.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  They parked the wagon behind the low adobe wall of a set of abandoned corrals in the middle of town, and Fonzo went to try and find a doctor while Kizzy remained with the judge. Newt rode back to the edge of town to a small cantina and took a cheap glass of some kind of Mexican brandy and a place at the bar where he could see the street through the open front door.

  The proprietor of the cantina wore no hat or shirt and only a soiled and stained white apron covering his hairy chest. He looked more like some kind of butcher than a bartender and was the only occupant of the cantina besides Newt. After a few failed attempts at some conversation in Spanish, the bartender finally gave up and left Newt alone to nurse his drink and watch the street.

  Newt didn’t have long to wait, for the rurales—ten of them—came riding by before he could finish his drink. They were leading a horse, and he recognized it as the one belonging to the bandit he had killed. Furthermore, the same dead bandit was draped across its back.

  Newt finished the drink and waved off the bartender when he paused with the clay jug poised over the empty glass. He hitched his pistol to a more comfortable position and went to the door to watch the rurales go down the street. They soon disappeared from sight around a corner. Confident that they were gone for the time being, he went back to the bartender and took the jug from his hands, slapping the last of his money down on the bar top before he took a table in the back corner of the room. It was a seat where he could still see out onto the street.

  Not that he considered himself a thinking man, but he had plenty to think on. There was the dead bandit the rurales had found; there was the judge mortally sick or dying; there were the circus people with the rurales after them. And most of all, there was Cortina somewhere close by. Newt didn’t like complications, and at that moment there were too many of them. He was no do-gooder, and he had plenty of troubles of his own. A man who took on the weight of others’ troubles only ended up with a broken back.

  The rurales would soon learn of the new gringos in town and want to question them over the dead bandit they had found. The girl’s brother would likely get an impromptu firing squad for killing the rurale captain, he might get the same for killing that bandit back up the road, and Cortina was going to get away with everything he had done. Yaqui Jim had been a good man. A little wild when in his cups, but Jim hadn’t deserved killing.

  In Newt’s opinion, few got what they deserved, not really, in the end. Maybe he hadn’t deserved to find that gold. Lord knows, he wasn’t a good man like Jim, but that made the gold all the more precious—when you get something that maybe you shouldn’t. It was a chance to make right the things he had done wrong. He knew where he was headed and how his kind ended up—lying in some ditch with their own skull caved in or a bullet in their brainpan, and nobody to care how you came to be that way.

  Cortina was somewhere nearby. The thing to do was to find him before he had a chance to run. That’s what he had come to Mexico for. Keep it simple. Hard things were better done without thinking. Those that thought too much or talked too long were usually the first to take it on the nose and end up under someone’s boots. Ever since he had found the gold back in New Mexico, he kept telling himself to be a winner for once.

  He had been a fool to listen to the judge. Anyone who found the bandit’s horse, even a blind man, could have followed the broken trail through the cattails and water grass to where he had dumped the body. What were the odds of those rurales taking his word that the dead man had been a bandit and that the whole matter was one of self-defense? The best thing he could do was get on his horse and ride. There was a chance he might be long gone before the rurales had time to put things together and come hunting for someone to blame. Go find Cortina, get the gold back, and then kill the son of a bitch. Simple. Plain. Be a winner.

  She was such a pretty thing to have to face up to those rurales. What he had seen of those Mexican lawmen at a glance, they were a rough bunch. She and her fancy brother having to face up to them was like feeding mice to the house cats. It wasn’t going to be pretty.

  The bottle was half-finished by the time he made up his mind and got up to head for the door and his horse. He was a little surprised to find that his legs were unsteady. The sticky-sweet concoction he had been drinking tasted like some kind of kid’s drink, and he had been thirsty enough to let it sneak up on him. So lost in his thoughts was he, he hadn’t even realized he had sat with the bottle so long.

  He put a hand out to the table to steady himself and to adjust to the feeling. He was standing that way when the riders rode up to the cantina. There were a lot of them by the sound of it. He assumed it was the rurales coming back for him, and that was more of a faith in his usual bad luck than it was a guess. The first man through the door headed straight for him and stopped a few feet away. Five vaqueros filed in behind him and lined the front wall behind him and to either side of the door. Their attention locked on to Newt.

  None of them were the rurales Newt had seen earlier, and although a cleaner-cut lot, they struck him as men you wouldn’t want to fool with. One of them was slapping a riding quirt on his leg while his other hand rested on his pistol. All of the men were wearing too many guns to suit a man so outnumbered as Newt was.

  The man who had come through the door first was the oldest of the lot and obviously their leader; he was neatly dressed with a fancy black sombrero and a white silk scarf around his neck. His vest and his flare-bottomed charro pants were embroidered in some kind of fancy silver thread. He was the only one not wearing a gun, but the look he gave Newt was the hardest one in the room. There was steel in that look and in the stiffness of his posture.

  “I get the feeling there has been some kind of misunderstanding,” Newt said.

  The leader shook his head. He didn’t bother with Spanish, and his English was impeccable. “I have two questions for you, señor. Were you on the road from Piedras Negras this morning, and where did you get that horse you have tied out front?”

  Newt took a glance to see if the room had a back door. It did, but it was closed and too far away.

  “I would suggest that you answer both my questions very carefully,” the man added.

  There was no way things weren’t going to go from bad to worse. The liquor was working on Newt and he felt that old stubbornness working its magic inside him. He never had liked to run from anything.

  “Who the hell are you?” he asked.

  The vaqueros started forward, but their leader stopped them with a lifting of his hand. He smiled, but it wasn’t meant to be friendly.

  “I am Don Carlos Alvarez, and who might you be?”

  Newt assumed that he was supposed to be impressed with the man’s title. He knew just enough Spanish to know that a don was some kind of big-shot landowner down Mexico way. “I’m a man minding my own business and wanting no trouble at all.”

  “For a man who wants no trouble, you have an odd
way of showing it.”

  “Why don’t you get straight at whatever’s eating at you?”

  Don Alvarez sighed as if he were dealing with a child. “The rurales found a dead man left in the lake to the east of town. You were seen coming from that direction less than an hour ago.”

  “I came from Piedras Negras.”

  “This dead man I speak of, he was one of my vaqueros.”

  “He was a thief and a killer.”

  “My guess is that you are one who can hardly make such accusations.”

  “That dead man you speak of rides with an outlaw I’ve been after, or did until he tried to kill me out on the road this morning.”

  “So, you confess to killing him?”

  “He and two others pulled on me. They got away, but he didn’t. Simple as that.”

  Don Alvarez made a sweeping gesture at the men behind him. “These men live by few rules. One is that they serve me and my family without question, and the second is that they look out for their own.”

  Newt understood all too well, and nodded grimly. That was the way it had been back in the mountains where he came from. All wars and blood feuds were predicated on such. You hurt one of ours and we hurt one of yours. Simple as that. Eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and killing to offset other killing. Showing weakness was the same as losing.

  “To wrong one of my men is to wrong me,” Don Alvarez said. “It is a matter of respect. You have done this thing, and I must do this other thing. Examples must be made.”

  “Do you know a man named Javier Cortina?” Newt tried to keep his voice level.

  Don Alvarez shared a look with his men. “We know of Cortina.”

  “Well, your vaquero was one of Cortina’s bunch and was coming here to meet him.”

  “What makes you think Cortina is nearby?”

  Newt smiled, trying to match the man for pure sarcasm. “Why, I imagine he’s with your daughter right now while you stand here bothering me over nothing.”

  Don Alvarez flushed, and Newt could tell that he had struck a nerve. It was apparent that the man was aware of the rumor that Cortina had a thing for his daughter.

  “Speak of my daughter again and I will have you flogged before I have you killed,” Don Alvarez said, and then he said something else in Spanish to one of the vaqueros. The man he spoke to went rapidly out the door and mounted his horse and left in a run.