Herrera squared his shoulders, assuming an air of jauntiness and forcing a cocky grin, once more the feisty bantamweight.
Sam glanced at his front splattered with ruby teardrops, blood droplets that had sprayed him when he made his kills. Well, there was nothing for it but to keep on making his play. His dark eyes glittered intently; his face was a mask of stolidity.
Along the cross corridor they went, into the under-stage area and its maze of rooms where the captive girls were penned. Three men loomed ahead, burly stagehands in denim overalls, six-guns in hand.
“Our men,” Herrera said quickly.
He, Sam, and Remy joined the others. They exchanged knowing nods, and tight grins.
“What of the other crew members, Sebastiano’s people?” Herrera asked.
“In there,” one of the stagehands said, indicating the door accessing the big barnlike room directly beneath the stage. “They had an accident. They fell down and broke their necks.”
His companions’ smiles widened.
“Sebastiano?” Herrera pressed.
“Up in the theater. Pablo will warn us if he starts to come downstairs,” said the spokesman for the crew.
Herrera nodded, and turned to Sam and Remy. “We had best secure the girls now.”
“Are the back doors open?” Sam asked.
“No, but I have the keys,” the crew chief said, pulling a key ring from a hip pocket and holding them up for the others to see, jingling them. “I took it off one of Sebastiano’s loyalists after I killed him.”
“We didn’t want to open up too soon, for fear of guards entering before we were ready,” another stagehand said.
“We’re as ready as we’ll ever be,” Sam said. “Open the door.”
“Hands up!” Duenna Dulce, the matron assigned to guard the Arizona girls, stepped out of the greenroom with gun in hand, pointing it at the conspirators gathered in the hall outside the under-stage door. A big-caliber horse pistol was held level at her ample hip.
Her eyes were dull black buttons and her mouth a narrow slit with vertical lines at the corners, all set in a brown doughy face. “Ho! What treachery is this? I knew something was afoot,” she said, moving forward. “I’ll kill the first one that moves.”
“She’ll do it, too,” Herrera cautioned. “Easy, men, easy . . .”
Sam raised his hands along with the others, his right hand stealing to the back of his neck to reach for the throwing knife held on a rawhide cord down between his shoulder blades.
An old woman slipped out of the green room where the American girls were being kept, coming up behind Duenna Dulce. The old one had long silvery hair tied in a knot at the back of her head, a wrinkled birdlike face, and weighed less than a hundred pounds. A withered clawlike hand clutched a clublike lead weight of the type used to secure the rigging, raising it to strike.
“Don Carlos will have you flayed alive, traitors,” Duenna Dulce said, smirking.
“Easy,” Herrera repeated.
The old one brought the weight down suddenly, savagely on the back of Duenna Dulce’s head. There was a crunching sound. Duenna Dulce’s black button eyes rolled up in her head, only the whites showing.
The old one was poised to strike again, but it was unneeded. Duenna Dulce collapsed like a poleaxed steer, hitting the floor with a thud of too-solid flesh. Happily, the pistol did not go off.
“Hit her again. That one takes a lot of killing,” a stagehand said.
“Not any more. That did for her. She’s dead,” Pepe Herrera said, bending over the body and prying the gun from her hamlike fist.
“La Vieja, the old woman, a cleaning woman—and one of ours,” a stagehand whispered to Sam and Remy. “Her granddaughters were taken and sold on the block.”
“Best secure the rest of the women guards now,” Herrera said.
“Give me the gun, I know what to do with it,” the old one said.
Herrera handed her the pistol. She handled it lovingly, slitted eyes undimmed with age, alight with malice and eager expectation.
Pounding noises came from the under-stage area.
“Someone’s knocking at the back door,” a stagehand said.
“Vincente, Miguel, come with me. We’ll take care of the women guards,” Herrera said. “Hector, unlock the door and see who it is. I pray it is our friends who are knocking.”
He glanced at Sam and Remy. “You had better go with them.” Hector, the stage crew chief, ducked through the doorway into the under-stage area, Sam and Remy following.
Vincente and Miguel, the other two stagehands, drew their guns and went to Herrera and La Vieja, the old woman. Gun in hand, La Vieja crossed to the next room where captives were being held, rapping the bony knuckles of a free hand against the door panel.
“What?” a woman’s voice gruffly demanded.
“Cleaning woman,” La Vieja quavered. The door opened, a burly matron sticking her head outside. La Vieja stuck her gun in the other’s bulldog face, backing her into the room.
Vincente went in with her. Herrera and Miguel moved to the next room to continue the process.
Crossing the threshold of the under-stage area, Sam glimpsed from the corner of his eye four corpses heaped in an untidy pile against the wall to the left of the entrance, the bodies of the freshly slain, loyalist stagehands. He, Remy, and Hector rushed to the back door.
“Let’s not take any chances,” Sam said, raising his gun and flattening his back against the wall to one side of the double doors. Remy did the same, taking up a similar stance on the other side of the doors, so that he and Sam flanked them.
The knocking sounded again, coming in a series of three raps.
“Three, two, one. That’s the recognition code—let them in,” Sam said.
Hector fitted a key from the ring into the doors, unlocking them. He opened one door, swinging it back against the inner wall.
Outside, five men stood grouped around a wheeled serving cart, three outfitted as guards and two in white jackets and servants’ livery. The guards wore broad-brimmed sombreros, ponchos, and serapes of the type worn by Don Carlos’s vaqueros, the garb of the rancho pistoleros, not the uniforms worn by the opera house guards. The sombreros were worn with brims pulled low in front, partially covering their faces.
The waiters wore short black jackets, white shirts, and black pants. They were bareheaded, faces in plain view: Juan Garza and Howling Jeff Howell.
“They belong to us,” Sam told Hector. Hector opened the other double door wide. “Come in, men,” Sam said.
Garza and Howell entered first, one pulling and the other pushing the four-wheeled serving cart through the doorway. Its tablelike upper surface held open crates of sparkling wine, set atop a white linen tablecloth whose sides fell almost to the tops of the wheels, screening the underside of the cart. The three guards followed in their wake.
Sam and Hector closed the doors, Sam delaying long enough for a quick scan of the grounds outside. The sun had set, the sky was darkening, though some afterglow was still showing.
The grounds behind the back of the building stretched some fifty yards to an eight-foot–high, iron-spear fence. A complex of several small, one-story outbuildings stood in the middle ground to the right. One of them was the kitchen and food storage area, from which the wine and cart had come.
Guards with shouldered rifles marched back and forth along the inside of the back fence. They evinced no sign of alarm or even interest in the proceedings at the rear of the opera house.
The back doors were closed but not locked. The guards took off their hats, ponchos, and serapes, revealing themselves as Matt Bodine, Ringo, and Polk Muldoon.
“How goes it, brother?” Matt greeted Sam.
“Better, now that I see you,” Sam said, flashing a grin.
Howell and Garza each took hold of a rope handle at opposite ends of a wine crate, hefting it off the top of the cart, and setting it down on the floor. Polk and Ringo did the same with the other wine crate.
Jeff Howell gripped in both hands a bottom edge of the white linen tablecloth covering the cart. With the air of a stage magician performing a feat of sleight of hand, he whisked off the cloth, baring the underside of the cart.
On a lower shelf stood the Montigny Mitrailleuse machine gun, its stand, and olive-drab canvas pouches filled with cartridge plates full of ammunition.
“For my next trick, I’m gonna make a bunch of slavers disappear,” Jeff Howell joked.
“See if you can make those guards along the back fence disappear first,” Sam said.
“We already did,” Matt said. “We took care of them before coming through the back gate. Those’re our boys walking the wall, Curly Bill and Dutch Snyder and some of the others. The rest are inside, too, waiting for the go.”
“Bill wanted to come in for the turkey shoot, but I convinced him it was more important for him to stay outside and cover our retreat with the girls,” Ringo said.
“The rebels had the serving cart and these waiters’ outfits waiting for us, just like we planned. Me and Juan put ’em on and here we are,” Jeff said.
“You have made a grave error, my friend,” Remy said, solemn faced, holding up a wine bottle.
“I did?” Jeff said, face falling. “What—?”
“Sparkling wine must be served chilled. This is warm.”
“Why, you son of a b—, er, that is, you golderned son of a gun, you!”
“Take a look at these appetizers, though,” Matt said. He started taking wine bottles out of a crate and setting them down on the floor. Below the top layer of bottles were repeating rifles, six-guns, and bandoliers of ammunition. Polk and Juan Garza pitched in, doing the same.
Remy set the machine gun’s tripod stand on top of the serving cart. Sam helped him haul the Mitrailleuse out from under the cart, lifting it and lowering it so that its base support post was fitted into the socket at the top of the tripod stand, clicking into place.
Ringo’s twin ivory-handled Colts were holstered on his hips. He picked up a Winchester rifle and a couple of bandoliers from a wine crate, putting the bandoliers on over his shoulders so they crisscrossed his torso, making an X.
Matt hauled out a gun belt with a holstered gun, proffering it to Sam. “Your gun, hombre.”
“Much obliged,” Sam said, buckling on the gun belt and settling it down low on his hips, the way he liked it.
“Yours, too, Remy,” Matt said.
“Thank you, my friend.” Remy paused in his labors over the Mitrailleuse long enough to strap on his gun, sticking the pistol he had in the top of his belt on the opposite hip.
The others armed themselves with rifles and bandoliers. When they were done, there were still some extras left. “For you and your friends, amigo. Help yourself,” Matt said.
“Gracias,” Hector said, quickly possessing himself of a Winchester. With his big, work-roughened hands, he caressed the piece’s polished wooden stock and long barrel, then began loading it.
Remy started wheeling the cart with the Mitrailleuse on top of the elevator lift platform directly under where center stage would be. The ammunition pouches lay on the bottom shelf. Juan and Jeff pitched in, lending a hand, rolling the heavily laden cart onto the platform.
Polk Muldoon knocked off the head of a bottle of wine against the wall, loosing an explosion of shattered glass and foamy golden liquid. Brushing the top clear of any glass shards and splinters, he drank long and deeply, draining half the bottle before pausing for breath.
“Don’t get drunk,” Juan Garza cautioned.
“Drunk? On this sod’ypop?!” Polk said, scoffing. “Talk about ‘teach your grandma to suck eggs!’”
“From what I’ve heard, Polk might be more dangerous drunk than sober,” Sam said.
“Yes, but to whom?” Remy said.
“Don’t you worry none, Frenchy. Drunk or sober, I never shot nobody I wasn’t aiming to,” Polk said.
A commotion sounded beyond the under-stage area of stirring movements, and shrill voices of young females.
“I’ll make sure things’re squared away,” Sam said. He went into the hall, Ringo and Hector following.
Herrera and friends had the situation in hand. The duennas had been rounded up and were being herded at gunpoint into one room. There were a half-dozen of them.
They were marched to a supply closet, and shoved inside. It was a tight fit—they were big women and it was a modest-sized closet. Vincente and Miguel put their shoulders to the door to force it shut, cramming the duennas in like sardines in a can.
Hector used a key from his ring to lock the door. Muffled protests and squalls of outrage sounded from within.
“Silence!” La Vieja said, knocking on the closet door with the barrel of her pistol. “A few bullets perhaps will stop your complaining!”
The clamor inside the closet ceased, not a murmur coming from the other side of the door.
“I know how to handle such as these.” La Vieja smiled grimly, spicing the word “these” with contemptuous relish.
Open doorways lining the hall were crowded with girls in white nightdresses looking out, talking rapidly in hushed, excited tones among themselves. Duenna Dulce’s corpse lay on the floor where it had been struck down, nobody having bothered to move it.
“Where’re our girls?” Ringo asked.
“They’re all our girls now, John,” Sam said gently.
“Point taken,” Ringo said with a tight grin. “The American girls, the ones Jones took, where’re they?”
“There,” Sam said, indicating the room from which Duenna Dulce had emerged.
Ringo went through the doorway, his quick reflexes only keeping him from being brained by a wooden stool held high in the hands of a teenage girl who stood beside the door, ready to club the next man who entered.
“Whoa,” Ringo said, sinewy brown hand shooting up to grab a side rail of the stool, arresting its swift downward progress in midair. With a twist of his wrist, he wrested it from the wielder, lowering it to the floor.
“I’m on your side, girls. We’ve come to take you home,” Ringo said, grinning wryly.
Disbelief warred with exultation among the girls in the room. One of them, Rowena Whitman, came from a ranch in the Sulphur Springs Valley outside of Tombstone.
“It’s Johnny Ringo!” she cried, recognizing the newcomer.
“At your service,” Ringo said, touching the tip of his hat brim between thumb and forefinger.
The others may not have known him by sight, but all knew the name of one of the West’s most famous gunslingers. Gasps, squeals, and shouts came up from them.
“Is it possible, can it be true—?!”
“We’re saved, thank the good Lord!”
Ringo raised his hands palms out, motioning for silence. “Hush up, you all. We’re not out of the woods yet, not by a long shot.”
“You’re going to have to cooperate and do as you’re told to make this thing work, girls,” Sam said from the doorway. “A bunch of us came from Tombstone to bring you home. Sorry I couldn’t identify myself when I came through here yesterday and let you know what was in the works, but we couldn’t risk tipping our hand to the slavers.”
He surveyed the young femmes, matching them with the faces he’d seen on Friday during his inspection tour with Remy. It looked like they were all present, but he wanted to be sure.
“Is this all of you? Any others of you being kept elsewhere?” Sam asked.
Several of the girls spoke at once, confirming that this indeed was the full complement of females stolen from north of the border.
“We’ve got wagons waiting out back for you, but we can’t move you just yet. Some of us are going to stage a diversion to distract the slavers and keep them busy while we move you out,” Sam said.
Diversion? That was an understatement, but Sam saw no need to expand on his remark. He went on. “Quiet down, sit tight, and one of us’ll be along in a minute or two to tell you what’s next,” he said.
“Keep your courage up, gals. Don’t lose your nerve, and you’ll be on your way home real soon now,” Ringo said.
Sam nodded to Ringo, who followed him into the hall.
“Johnny Ringo!” one of the girls sighed, a tremulous thrill in her voice.
Sam cut Ringo a sharp side glance.
“Females of all ages and persuasions just naturally cotton to the Ringo charm,” Ringo said, shrugging. “Can’t help it if I’m famous, Sam.”
“Modest, too.”
“You’re just sore none of them recognized you.”
“Good thing they didn’t yesterday, or the whole plan might have blown up in our faces. Anonymity has its virtues, John.”
Matt Bodine stuck his head through the doorway of the under-stage area, into the hall, looking around. He saw Sam and Ringo, and motioned to them.
“We’re loaded up and ready to go,” Matt said, “but we need a couple of hands to work the lift.”
Sam nodded, going to Pepe Herrera. “We need Miguel and Vincente at the capstan. You and La Vieja will have to hold the girls back until we get the ball rolling.”
“How will I know when to start moving them out?” Herrera asked.
“Wait till we come back down. We can cover their flight then. That’s the safest way, if ‘safe’ is a word that applies to a tight spot like this. When the shooting starts, get them going.”
“It shall be as you say, amigo. Good luck.”
“To you, too.”
“And—good hunting!”
Matt and Ringo had already disappeared into the under-stage area. Sam and stagehands Vincente and Miguel went through the doorway.
Remy, Matt, and Jeff Howell stood on the lift platform, with Polk, Juan Garza, and crew chief Hector at the capstan. Ringo, rifle in hand, stood on the spiral staircase at the left wall of the space, about halfway to the top.
The capstan, a wooden cylinder four feet tall and three feet in diameter, stood mounted on a sturdy square-shaped platform bolted to the floor. The platform was open at the sides, making visible the rims of tooth-geared wooden wheels and rods like giant clockwork innards stacked vertically beneath.
Blood Bond 16: A Hundred Ways to Die Page 26