Blood Bond 16: A Hundred Ways to Die

by Johnstone, William W.

  Reuniting with his gang, Gila and the bandits rode off into the night. Their task was to go among the campesinos, heralding the news that their long years of oppression under the yoke and whips of Don Carlos was nearing an end.

  The peasants would arm themselves with what weapons were at hand. They had few firearms beyond shotguns and single-shot muskets, but many machetes, knives, axes, scythes, sledgehammers, and the like. They must then hold themselves in readiness until the morrow, when they would filter into Pago in small groups by drips and drabs, so as not to excite suspicion among Don Carlos’s loyalists until the signal was given to rise and slay the foe.

  The Tombstone raiders had another mission. Their target was Captain Bravo and his troops, garrisoned in the Pago presidio. It was the old strategy of divide and conquer. Matt Bodine planned to lure the soldiers away from Pago and out into the countryside, where they would be unavailable to come to the aid of Don Carlos when the crisis had arrived.

  A decoy lay close to hand, a ripe plum for the taking. It was the patrol camped out on the river bottom in the eastern plains south of the Espinazo, the soldiers whom the Tombstoners had slipped by without being detected when they came off the Goat Trail.

  Victorio and his Apaches had the state of Sonora in an uproar. No one knew where he was hiding out or where he would strike next. Matt was going to put that fear-bordering-on-hysteria to work on the nerves of Captain Bravo.

  The idea was to hit the patrol and make it look like the work of Apaches. To carry out the illusion would require a little stagecraft by the use of some unshod ponies and a few strategically placed arrows.

  Unshod ponies, for Apaches did not put iron horseshoes on their mounts. Yet only a few such animals were needed, since the Apache was a past master at horse theft, with many if not most of the braves having equipped themselves with horseshoe-fitted horses stolen from Anglos and Mexicans.

  The same applied to arrows. Apaches were wizard bowmen, but preferred the repeating rifles of the whites. Some bows were still in use and continued to take their fatal toll during Apache raids.

  Nando had rounded up a string of a half-dozen unshod ponies earlier, bringing them to the hideout. He would go out with the raiders to serve as guide. The Tombstoners could find their way to the soldiers encamped by the river, but Nando knew the landscape with the expertise of a local outdoorsman, having at his fingertips the knowledge of the shortcuts, water holes, hiding places, and the like.

  Midnight was near when the raiders moved into position among the low round mounds west of the river bottom where the troops were bivouacked. The camp nestled in a hollow beside a shallow river ford. Their fires were visible from a long way off.

  It was Friday night and, even though the troops were on patrol out in the field, they were making a big night of it, passing around bottles and canteens filled with tequila and mescal, whooping and hollering. What few sentries they had posted were as drunk as the rest.

  Matt and Ed Dane hunkered down behind the cover of some fallen trees at a vantage point overlooking the camp. Drunk and staggering soldiers were outlined against the firelight.

  “You’d think they never heard of Victorio,” Ed Dane said.

  “Careless of them,” Matt agreed. They spoke in whispers.

  “Say! I just thought of something—what if we run into Victorio and his men?” Ed Dane said.

  “You’ll never know what hit you,” Matt said, “unless you get taken alive, in which case you’ll be plumb out of luck.”

  “Apaches don’t attack at night, though.”

  “Mostly not. Still, the exception is what proves the rule.”

  “Them soldiers must think otherwise.”

  “I reckon.”

  The moon climbed from the top of the sky, sliding west. The soldiers fell out in a drunken stupor and took to their bedrolls. A sentry sat with his back to a tree, rifle across the tops of his thighs, snoring.

  The campfires burned low and smoky. No one got up from their blankets to toss fresh kindling on the fire.

  A bowstring twanged, sounding a musical note like a plucked guitar string. Matt loosed an arrow into the sentry’s chest. It thunked as it hit home. The sentry woke, squirmed, clutched futilely at the shaft protruding from his breastbone, and died, slumping into a heap at the foot of the tree.

  His death passed unnoticed by his fellows. The camp remained undisturbed, no one sounding the alarm.

  The Tombstone raiders fell on the camp from all directions, shooting and slaying. It was necessary for the ploy to be a success that no survivors should escape to tell that it was not the Apaches who struck the camp. None did.

  It was a massacre. The troops were slaughtered, while the raiders suffered not a single casualty.

  Now came the work of planting false clues to make the killings look like the work of Apaches. The unshod ponies were run back and forth, in and around the camp, leaving their tracks.

  Matt had slain several soldiers by bow and arrow when the attack came. He shot some more arrows into others of the dead to make the deception look good.

  To be really realistic, some of the corpses must be scalped and mutilated, the Apache way, a terror tactic that was a hallmark of theirs. It was nasty work. The men from Tombstone were a hard bunch, but some of them shrank from doing what had to be done.

  Not so Geetus Maggard. “Hell, you done killed them dead already. What difference does it make what you do to ’em after they’s dead?”

  “You do it. It don’t sit right with my stomach,” Dutch Snyder said. Even under waning moonlight he looked a little green around the edges.

  Pima Joe was notably unconcerned about taking a hand in this stern duty. For generations, the Apache had slain, scalped, and mutilated his people of the Pima tribe. It was fitting to lay this slaughter on the Apaches, further inflaming the wrath of Mexican soldiery against Victorio and his braves. Joe set to work with a will.

  So did mountain man Vern Tooker, veteran of countless Indian fights. Among the warrior tribes of the Great Plains, Northern Range, and Southwest desert, torture and mutilation were a given, a way of life. He plied his bowie-style knife with the cool hand and practiced eye of a huntsman skinning and quartering a deer carcass.

  “Four legs or two, meat’s meat,” he cheerfully philosophized.

  “I like how you handle yourself, big fellow,” Geetus Maggard said. “Not like my lily-livered pardner Dutch, who’s off getting sick somewhere.”

  TWENTY

  It was opening night. The Pago slave auction was about to begin in a half hour, promptly on the dot at eight o’clock Saturday night.

  A crowd of opera buff swells in black-tie formal wear and evening gowns would have been hard put to outdo the enthusiasm and anticipation displayed by the pack of vice lords and ladies, their bodyguards, and hangers-on, as they came down the aisles to take their seats in the prime center orchestra seats of the theater.

  Buyers and bidders, whoremongers and madams, pimps and procuresses eagerly awaited the opening of the curtains for the unveiling of all that fresh, young female flesh destined for the auction block.

  Any moment now, the red velvet curtains stretched across the proscenium arch screening the stage would part to reveal the first lot of nubile captive girls.

  Close to a hundred-and-fifty favored customers and their entourages filled plush, maroon-velvet, cushioned seats facing the stage.

  Many of the flesh merchants looked like respectable businessmen, indistinguishable from the big city bankers, lawyers, brokers, traders who were the bulk of their clientele. Most were Mexican nationals, but more than a few came from Guatemala, Honduras, Salvador, and even farther south.

  Not all were professional flesh peddlers. There were many rich men in the provinces, dons and hi-dalgoes, masters of great estates, plantations, ranch lands, and landowners whose holdings of necessity isolated them from the comforts of civilization and its alluring honeypots. They hungered for a bit of fresh young comfort to warm their beds and exc
ite their jaded senses, providing diversion from their lonely exile and old wives and mistresses grown shapeless, stinking, and stale with the passage of time. Some came themselves, journeying great distances, making a pleasure trip of it.

  Others sent their purchasing agents.

  If there were next to no norteamericano vice lords here, it was not for any moral reason but simply because the great North American continent supplied them with an ever-fresh crop of new recruits fresh from the farms and factories every season. Besides, the trek to Pago in Sonora was hard and dangerous.

  The buyers brought their protectors: strongmen, violent men, gunmen able to protect the large sums of gold and silver with which their principals traveled and traded.

  Yet other flesh merchants were out, and thugs glorying in their toughness and ability to protect themselves and their property from all comers.

  Women, misnamed the “weaker sex,” were well-represented at the conclave, making up between one-fifth and one-quarter of the assembled guests. And why not? The vice trade runs on women—who better to run it than women themselves?

  Brothel owners, whorehouse madams, procuresses, some old and ugly, others young and fair, took their seats in the Theater of the Damned. Some, not many, but some, had come up through the ranks of whoredom themselves.

  Conspicuous by his absence was the supreme slave master himself, Don Carlos. The padrón felt it was incumbent on his dignity as a titled aristocrat and landowner to maintain a certain distance from the enterprise which had brought him wealth, power, and an official patent of nobility.

  He was safely and comfortably ensconced at home at his rancho outside town, secure in the knowledge that his punctilious overseer Sebastiano would ensure that the proceedings went aright.

  Servers, liveried flunkies, went among the guests, proffering crystal flutes of champagne from silver platters. Few if any of the guests discerned that the “champagne” was in reality sparkling wine. “Real champagne is too good for those pigs,” Don Carlos had carefully and confidentially instructed Sebastiano during pre-auction preparations.

  Don Carlos’s pistoleros served as armed guards posted along the theater’s side and rear walls; riflemen kept watch in the balcony.

  When one’s clientele consists of crooks, cutthroats, and killers grown fat on the vice trade, one must ensure that they maintain proper standards of decorum. The house rules, enforced at gunpoint, were the only law such criminals respected or understood.

  The hall buzzed with loud talk, high spirits, and alcoholic spirits. Yet nowhere among the assembled were New Orleans vice merchant Jules Duval, nor his bodyguard, Cherokee, to be found.

  Sam and Remy were in the house, if not the audience. Decked out in stuffy formal wear rented that afternoon from a Pago tailor, they had entered the opera house with the other guests when the entrance doors were first opened to receive them.

  Gliding sharklike along the edges of the crowded lobby, they slipped downstairs into the under-stage area, where Pepe Herrera conducted them to a hiding place, an unused storeroom on the right-hand side of the corridor stretching the length of the building from front to rear.

  Performing his task unobserved by prying eyes, Herrera rushed away to rejoin the stage crew and carry out his appointed duties, both professional and personal.

  Despite the formal wear, Sam and Remy were well armed. Sam had a pistol stuck in the top of his waistband at his right hip, worn butt out. His sheath knife hung below his left arm. Gun and knife were covered by his jacket, which he’d gotten in a too-large size to help conceal the telltale bulge of weaponry. Remy, too, had a pistol stuck in his belt, along with the sleeve gun hidden in his right cuff and a derringer in his left jacket pocket.

  There were no lights in the storeroom. Sam and Remy waited in darkness, broken only by the wan glow of lights shining through the crack under the door and a slitted vertical crack where the door stood slightly ajar from its frame, open a half inch.

  Remy pressed his face to the crack, peering through it, keeping watch on the comings and goings in the corridor. Sam kept watch, too, not with his eyes but with his ears (listening for untoward noises and disturbances), and with his skin (sensitive to changes in air currents caused by bodies in motion and alert to vibrations quivering through the floor).

  Remy checked his pocket watch by the sliver of soft light shining through the crack of the open door. “Seven-forty. Herrera is ten minutes late. The auction starts at eight o’clock.”

  Sam made a noise, acknowledging the other’s comment. He remained silent. Nothing he could say would affect Herrera’s progress in keeping their appointment.

  Remy watched the second hand make its sweeping circuit of the watch dial ticking off another minute, two, more. He grew ever more anxious as the minutes ticked away, each second another turn of the screw drawing his nerves tighter and tighter. He breathed gustily. Sam laid a calming hand on his shoulder.

  “It’s getting late, just short of seven-forty-five now,” Remy whispered. “Fifteen minutes to curtain—”

  “Someone’s coming,” Sam said, quivering with alertness.

  “I don’t hear anyone,” Remy protested. But a few beats later, he did. There was the scuff of shoe leather on stone, footfalls approaching the hiding place. “It’s him!”

  Pepe Herrera paused beside the door, and coughed. Remy eased the door open.

  “Sorry,” Herrera said. “Sebastiano was making a bother of himself under-stage with last-minute preparations, making sure that everything will be just so, the sharp-eyed little wretch. I had to wait until he went onstage upstairs.”

  “Anyone keeping an eye on him?” Sam asked.

  “Pablo, one of the stage crew. He’s one of us,” Herrera said. “We lost precious time. Now we must hurry. Eight o’clock draws nigh.”

  Sam and Remy stepped into the corridor. Herrera set off toward the rear of the building, the duo following. They walked side by side, shoulder to shoulder, traversing the passage to the under-stage area at its far end. The still air was thick with the rank smell of too much flesh, too much fear.

  As they neared the end of the passageway, two men rounded the corner, stepping into view. Guards: One was short and stocky with a paintbrush mustache; the other tall and handsome, glossy silver hair styled in an oily pompadour. They stopped short when they saw Herrera approaching with Sam and Remy in tow.

  “Keep going,” Sam said from the corner of his mouth, low voiced. The trio continued to advance, not slowing their steps.

  Sam took a cigar from his inside breast pocket, biting off the tip and spitting it out, all seeming nonchalance. He ignited a lucifer match, striking it into flame with his thumbnail. He lit up, puffing hard, venting smoke, cigar tip a bright orange disk. The smoke was good, masking the sickly, overbearing fleshy smell.

  The guards moved to bar the way, Silvertop smiling, his partner dour. “You must go upstairs, señores. No guest allowed down here now, it is prohibited. The auction is about to start,” Silvertop said.

  Herrera showed a leer and a sly wink. “These gentlemen are friends of Sebastiano, very generous gentlemen. They want one last look at some of the girls, to be sure their money will be well spent. They have plenty of gold to spread around. . . .”

  The sour, stocky man shook his head, unyielding. “The under-stage is closed, señores. You must go—”

  Sam thrust the lit end of his cigar into the stocky man’s eye, grinding it in with a shower of sparks. The stocky man shrieked.

  Remy drew the gun from under his jacket, slashing its short stubby barrel across Silvertop’s face. Silvertop staggered, crying out. Remy backhanded him in the mouth, breaking teeth, stifling the other’s outcry. Silvertop’s hand shot out, closing on the wrist of Remy’s gun hand. They locked up, struggling for control of the gun, blood droplets venting with each of Silvertop’s explosive pain-laced breaths.

  Sam pulled the knife from under his arm, cutting the stocky man’s throat with a stroke that came close to decapita
ting him. Blood jetted as the stocky man fell backwards, crashing to the floor.

  Sam sidestepped him, thrusting the knife into Silvertop’s chest, stabbing him in the heart. Silvertop died that instant on his feet. Remy caught him, easing him down.

  “Caramba! The fat’s in the fire now,” Herrera said, sounding excited by the prospect.

  Sam wiped the knife blade clean on Silvertop’s pants leg, returning it to its sheath.

  Herrera peeked around the corner. “Here come two more!”

  Sam heard them coming, his gun already in hand. “Don’t shoot if you can—”

  The newcomers advanced, in quick time—not running but hustling along, jogging. Round the corner they came, coming up short under the drawn guns of Sam and Remy and the sight of bodies and the blood fast pooling on the floor. The guards’ eyes bulged, and their jaws dropped.

  Remy circled around to the side of the one nearest him, clubbing him behind the ear with the gun in his fist.

  The other guard clawed for his gun. Sam lunged, thrusting the gun muzzle hard and deep into the guard’s belly in the soft part just below the breastbone, knocking the wind out of him. He doubled over so that he was bent far forward from the waist, clutching his middle with both hands.

  Sam laid the gun barrel down smartly across the back of the guard’s neck, knocking him out cold.

  “Any more?” Sam asked, not even breathing hard.

  Herrera looked around the corridor, and shook his head. “All clear for now.”

  The two guards were stunned but alive. Sam cut their throats with his knife. “Can’t risk them giving the alarm and besides, we don’t need any more foes at our back. We’re playing for high stakes, not just our lives, but those of the captive girls,” he said.

  Remy risked a quick glance at his pocket watch. “Less than ten minutes till curtain time,” he agonized.

  Sam put away the knife and stuck the pistol in the top of his pants, covering it with the black jacket. Remy tucked away his gun in likewise style. They made a right turn at the corner, entering a cross passage that met the long corridor at right angles.