“No, you just figured you’d stove in my skull and drop me in the river to drown,” Braddock said. “Then you could tell Palmer I went off on my own somewhere after we left Hernandez’s together, and you didn’t know what happened to me after that. If anybody found my corpse, they’d just think some thief jumped and robbed me before dumping me in the river.”
“It could’a happened that way.”
“Then I’d never have a chance to take over your spot, would I?”
Wilcox laughed, but it sounded hollow. “You think I’m scared of you, George? You’re just a two-bit hardcase. You got lucky against Larkin and his boys!”
“You saw me shoot it out with those two,” Braddock said. “That look like luck to you?”
Wilcox snarled an obscenity and jerked his gun up, obviously not caring any more about drawing attention with a shot.
Braddock dived to the side as Colt flame bloomed in the night. He felt the bullet rush past his ear. He tried to slap at the Colt on his hip, but his right arm still hung limp and unresponsive. Under different circumstances he might have worried that Wilcox had broken his arm.
Now he just worried about staying alive.
Wilcox was already tracking the gun to the side for another shot. Braddock dove at his knees and took his legs out from under him. Wilcox fell on top of him. Braddock rolled desperately to throw Wilcox off of him and grabbed for Wilcox’s gun with his left hand.
Braddock missed the revolver but got hold of Wilcox’s wrist. He slammed it down hard on the bridge planks. Wilcox cried out in pain. Braddock drove his gun hand down again, and this time the weapon slipped out of Wilcox’s fingers and skidded away.
Braddock scrambled after it. He was a decent shot with his left hand, and it was faster and easier to scoop up Wilcox’s gun than it would have been to reach across his body and draw his own Colt.
His fingertips had just brushed the gun butt when Wilcox tackled him from behind. Braddock went down. The heel of his hand struck the gun and caused it to skid even farther away.
Wilcox smashed a fist into Braddock’s right kidney. Braddock gritted his teeth against the pain, writhed over, and brought his left elbow up into Wilcox’s face. That knocked Wilcox over onto his back. Braddock went after him and dug a knee into his groin. Wilcox gasped curses and curled up around the agony.
Braddock climbed wearily to his feet. His right arm began to tingle as feeling inched back into it. Maybe it wasn’t hurt too bad after all, he thought.
He looked around, spotted the dark shape of the gun lying on the bridge a few yards away, and stumbled over to it. He bent down to pick it up with his left hand, turned and steadied himself to cover Wilcox.
The question now was what he should do with the gunman and train robber. After this attempt on his life, he couldn’t ever trust Wilcox again.
But he couldn’t just waltz into the El Paso police station, turn Wilcox over to the lawmen, and tell them how Wilcox had had a hand in holding up that train, killing those soldiers, and stealing all those army rifles. The whole story was too complicated, and he was wanted, too, after all. The police would hold him while they tried to sort everything out, and word might get to the Rangers that he was locked up.
The simplest thing would be to do to Wilcox what Wilcox had figured on doing to him. Bust his head open and dump him in the river, then go back to Palmer and plead ignorance as to Wilcox’s fate. Palmer might suspect he’d had something to do with the disappearance, but nobody would be able to prove anything.
It was too bad he didn’t have a place he could stash Wilcox for a while...
Braddock considered all those options as he took a couple of steps toward Wilcox, and he was still trying to figure out what to do when Wilcox suddenly stopped groaning and rolled over toward him. Wilcox’s arm came up and flame spouted from the muzzle of the derringer he’d had hidden somewhere in his clothes.
The derringer made a loud pop, like somebody had clapped two boards together. Braddock felt the bullet rip into him. He dropped Wilcox’s gun, reeled back against the bridge railing, and toppled over it.
The fall lasted only a couple of heartbeats before Braddock struck the surface of the Rio Grande and went under, but it seemed longer than that.
Chapter 18
It would have been easy to surrender to the embrace of the warm, gently flowing water. Braddock could just let himself float away downriver...
The Rio Grande was only about eight feet deep here. Braddock’s left hand touched the sandy bottom. He righted himself and kicked with his legs. He heard a couple of muffled booms and knew Wilcox was shooting at him...or at least shooting where Wilcox thought he was.
Braddock was already twenty feet downstream. He kept going that way, swimming underwater and trying to disturb the surface as little as possible. While he was falling from the bridge, he had sucked in as deep a breath as he could, so he didn’t want to come up where Wilcox could still see him.
His right arm had started working well enough again he could stroke clumsily with it. That kept him from swimming in circles, anyway. The pain in his side where the bullet from Wilcox’s derringer had struck him wasn’t too bad. He managed to put it aside and not pay any attention to it.
He never had figured out what to do with Wilcox after the gunman tried to kill him, but that dilemma had vanished in the pop of the derringer. The boot was back on the other foot. Wilcox would have to go back to Shad Palmer and claim ignorance of the new man’s whereabouts. Palmer might be annoyed by “George’s” disappearance, but Larkin was dead and that was the main thing he had wanted out of this night.
Even as he was falling into the Rio Grande, Braddock had realized it might be to his advantage to stay dead for a while.
That required not actually dying by drowning, of course.
He didn’t hear any more shots. Wilcox might have left the bridge and started running along one of the river banks, looking for him. Braddock had to risk that, because his lungs burned from lack of air.
He stopped kicking and let his legs drop, not a problem because his boots pulled them down. He stroked with his arms and lifted himself enough that his mouth and nose came out of the water. Trying not to be too noisy about it, he gulped down a breath.
He couldn’t float very well, not fully dressed and with his boots on, but he managed to tread water and let the river’s sluggish current carry him slowly downstream. Braddock looked from side to side, searching the banks for movement. He didn’t see any, but that didn’t mean he was in the clear yet.
His side began to ache. He put that out of his mind, let himself sink beneath the water, and began swimming again. He stayed under as long as he could, then came up for air again.
No bullets came screaming out of the night.
Wilcox had to believe he was dead. More than likely, he had left some blood on the bridge, and if Wilcox saw that, he would know his shot had struck Braddock. The way Braddock had gone right into the river and not come up again sure made it look like he was dead.
Braddock wanted Wilcox to keep on thinking that. To help insure the assumption, he stayed in the river and let it carry him downstream until he was just too weak and exhausted to manage anymore. Sensing that he might pass out and drown for real, he struggled to the southern bank and crawled out onto the sand.
The scattered lights of El Paso and Juarez lay to his right, at least a mile away. Where he had left the river was nothing but sand and scrub brush, maybe a rattlesnake or two hunting in the darkness. Braddock hoped he wouldn’t run into any of them. He pulled himself farther from the water.
Muffled hoofbeats sounded in the distance. Braddock listened and could tell they were coming closer. Muttering curses under his breath, he came up on hands and knees and moved as fast as he could toward a cluster of mesquite trees barely larger than bushes. The shadows were thick among them, though, and that was all Braddock cared about at the moment.
He thought about those rattlesnakes again as he crawled among the mesq
uites. He didn’t hear any warning buzzes, though, just the faint clicking as night breezes blew mesquite beans against each other. In the thickest shadows, he bellied down in the sand to wait.
The approaching rider might be Dex Wilcox, looking for him, but logically Braddock knew it was probably someone else, someone who had nothing to do with him. He waited, barely breathing. His gun still rested in its holster, but he wouldn’t trust it to fire properly after having been immersed in the river for so long.
The soft, thudding hoofbeats moved past him, thirty or forty yards from the mesquite thicket where he sprawled. In the light from the moon and stars, he saw the rider’s silhouette topped with a broad-brimmed, steeple-crowned sombrero, nothing like the Stetson Wilcox wore. Braddock heaved a sigh of relief as the man rode on.
He was safe, but only for the moment. Not only that, but he still didn’t know how badly wounded he was or how much blood he had lost. He had been forcing his battered body to go on, but that couldn’t continue much longer.
He sat up and reached down to his right side where the bullet had struck him. The river had soaked his shirt, of course, so he couldn’t tell from feeling it how much blood had leaked from the hole he found. A grimace pulled his lips away from his teeth as he probed the wound and the area around it.
A few inches back from the bullet hole, he found a hard lump under his skin. That was it, he thought. The bullet hadn’t penetrated very far, skimming along his side until it came to a stop. He was surprised it hadn’t come on out. The derringer must have been a small caliber weapon not packing much punch.
Braddock reached into his pocket and found the clasp knife he carried. As he opened it, he thought about how awkward this impromptu surgery was going to be. He didn’t want to haul that slug around inside him, though. That was a good way to get blood poisoning. He gritted his teeth and started digging at the bullet in his side, trying to get the tip of the blade underneath it.
Suddenly, a vision of his father appeared before him.
“It’s just a damn splinter,” Pa said, brandishing a giant Bowie knife. “Now hold still and lemme take it outta there. Can’t leave it in. It’ll rot your whole hand off. Don’t want that, do ya?”
George swallowed hard and said, “No, sir.” But he saw the way his father’s hands trembled and knew Pa had been drinking, and he couldn’t stop a tear from trickling down his cheek.
“You know how many bullets I’ve taken outta men? Hell, I’ve carved bullets outta my own hide! What’re you gonna do, one of these days when you’re a Ranger and you’re out in the middle o’ nowhere by yourself and some damn greaser shoots you? You gonna just lay down and die, or are you gonna take that bullet out and live?” Pa let out a contemptuous snort. “Hell, what am I talkin’ about? They’ll never take a scared little piss-ant like you in the Rangers. Now hold still—”
George screamed as the tip of the Bowie lanced into his palm, gouging for the splinter...
The bullet popped out of his side and thudded to the sand. Braddock followed it an instant later, collapsing as he passed out.
Chapter 19
The mesquite branches threw a latticework of shadows over his face when he woke up, but the sun still shone brightly enough through them to make him wince and turn his head away from the stabbing glare.
The movement made his stomach roil and his head throb for a moment, but the feeling passed. He sat up slowly, stiff, sore muscles complaining as he did so. His injured side caught and twinged sharply. He sucked in his breath.
The mesquite beans rattled to his left. He looked in that direction and saw a small brown face peering at him through the branches. A boy, eight or ten years old, jumped back when he saw Braddock looking at him.
“Don’t be afraid,” Braddock told him in Spanish. “I won’t hurt you.”
“You are not dead,” the boy said.
“No. Halfway there, maybe, but no further.”
The boy started to back off.
“Wait,” Braddock said. “Don’t run away. Do you live near here?”
“My father’s farm is that way.” The boy pointed southeast along the Rio Grande.
“Your father...does he drink tequila or mescal or pulque?”
A look of understanding appeared on the boy’s face. “I thought you were hurt,” he said. “Now I see you have had too much to drink.”
He looked and sounded a mite too world-weary for his years, Braddock thought.
“I am hurt.” Braddock turned a little and pulled up his shirt so the boy could see both the bullet hole and the wound where Braddock had cut out the slug. “I need the tequila for medicine, not for drinking.”
The youngster frowned and said, “My apologies, señor—”
“That’s all right,” Braddock assured him. “Do you have a horse?”
“A burro.”
“Can you get him and bring him back here?”
The boy nodded and started to turn away, then paused and said, “My name is Alphonso.”
“I’m George.”
“Wait there.”
“Thank you,” Braddock said. In truth, he couldn’t do anything except wait. He was too weak to get up and wander off by himself.
Alphonso didn’t come back for a long time, and Braddock had just about decided he wasn’t coming back when the youngster walked up to the thicket leading a short-legged burro. Braddock had been saving what little strength he had. He used it now to crawl over to the burro and reach up to grasp the animal’s harness.
Alphonso took hold of Braddock’s other arm to help him. With all three of them working at it—although in truth, the burro didn’t do anything but stand there—Braddock got to his feet.
“Have you told your mother or father about me?” he asked.
Alphonso shook his head. “My father and my brothers are working in the fields. My mother is home with my little sisters.”
For a moment, Braddock wondered why the boy wasn’t working in the fields, too, but then he saw the unnatural twist to Alphonso’s left leg. It didn’t seem to keep him from getting around, but he would have a difficult time putting in a full day’s work.
“What’s your mother going to do when you show up with me? She won’t shoot me, will she?”
Alphonso looked horrified at the idea. “No, señor! She is a good woman who prays every day to the Blessed Virgin. You are injured. She will care for you.”
“I can use it,” Braddock muttered. “Let’s go.”
He leaned on the burro and forced his legs to work. They walked slowly along the river with Alphonso leading the burro. Braddock hoped Dex Wilcox or one of his other enemies didn’t happen to come along. He wouldn’t be able to put up much of a fight, and Alphonso would be in the line of fire.
No one seemed to be around, though, and after a little while the adobe jacal where Alphonso and his family lived came in sight. Braddock saw some younger children playing outside but no sign of the boy’s mother.
“Are you a bad man?” Alphonso asked.
“What?”
“You have been shot.” As if that explained the question.
“A lot of people who aren’t bad get shot. It’s the bad people who shoot them.”
“So a bad man shot you?”
Braddock thought about Dex Wilcox and said, “A very bad man.”
“That’s all right, then. Mama will help you.”
Braddock hoped so, because even this short walk had him just about at the end of his rope again.
Because of that, he couldn’t do anything except stop and stand there when a woman stepped around a corner of the jacal holding a pitchfork and looking like she wanted to ram it right through his guts.
Chapter 20
Braddock wondered idly if she was part Yaqui. Her face was fierce enough for that to be the case.
Or maybe she just looked like that because she thought she was defending her home and family.
“Alphonso, what have you done?” she demanded.
“It’s all
right, Mama. This man was lying in the mesquites, hurt. I thought he was dead at first, but he isn’t. He’s been shot and needs some of Papa’s tequila as medicine.”
The woman looked at Braddock. “You have been shot?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. Bracing himself on the burro, he half-turned and pulled up his shirt again to reveal the wounds.
“Where are the men who shot you?”
“It was just one man, and he’s back in El Paso, I reckon. I’m pretty sure he thinks I’m dead.”
The woman frowned and said, “I will not have you bringing trouble into my house.”
“Well, then,” Braddock said, feeling himself growing weaker, “I’ll just sit out here, then...”
His head spun, and he would have fallen if Alphonso hadn’t caught hold of his arm. The woman looked indecisive for a second, then she leaned the pitchfork against the jacal’s adobe wall and hurried forward. She took Braddock’s other arm, and they helped him to a three-legged stool near the doorway.
“Sit here,” she told him after they had lowered him carefully onto the stool.
“Yes, ma’am. I don’t really feel like getting up and doing a jig.”
The thought of that made him laugh. The sound of the laughter made him realize he was lightheaded and not himself at all. The sun was hot as it beat down on him, or else a fever had hold of him. Maybe both.
The three little girls, all younger than Alphonso, gathered a few yards away and stared at Braddock. He was just loco enough at the moment he was tempted to say “Boo!” at them, but he knew if he did that, they would scream and run off and their mama might be mad at him. He didn’t want that.
She came back with a basin of water and a rag in one hand, a clay cup in the other.
“Can you hold this to drink?” she asked as she held out the cup.
Gun Devils of the Rio Grande (Outlaw Ranger Book 5) Page 6