The man on the stairs—his unbuttoned shirt hanging open to reveal his long-handle top, shell belt and holster hooked over his left shoulder—triggered his pistol once more. At the same time, Sartain’s LeMat leaped and roared in his outstretched hand.
He fired twice more and saw the shooter fall back against the rail, stretching his lips back from his teeth. The man then twisted around and ran awkwardly back up the stairs. Sartain emptied the pistol at him, but his slugs only hammered the railing and the wall on the other side of it, blowing out chunks of adobe.
The shooter disappeared up the stairs. Sartain could hear him running back toward him on the second story. The Cajun gained his feet. The bullet crease across the outside of his left thigh burned and barked at him. Blood bubbled out of the cut in his tweed trouser leg.
He cursed as he quickly emptied the spent shell casings from the top-break LeMat and replaced them with fresh ones from his shell belt. When all the chambers were filled, he closed the gun, spun the cylinder, and strode toward the stairs, half-dragging his left foot and sucking sharp breaths through his teeth.
To his right, the barman peeked over the top of the mahogany, his eyes wide.
“Sorry for the mess, amigo.”
The barman’s eyes widened.
Sartain spied movement to his left. He turned to see the Irishman using a chair to regain his feet. The man’s shirt was bloody, and blood dribbled from between his lips. His eyes were opaque, the light dying in them, as he heaved himself off the chair.
Sartain swung the LeMat toward the snarling man. The gun barked hoarsely. The bullet plunked into the middle of the Irishman’s forehead. Blood and goo sprayed out the back of his head. The Irishman nodded his brainless head as though in vigorous agreement with something Sartain had just said and sagged back off the table to the floor, boots quivering.
Sartain continued to the stairs. He used the rail as he climbed, keeping his left hand clamped over his bloody left thigh. At the top, he edged a look down a dingy hall lit by two guttering candle lanterns, one bracketed to each wall. He stretched his gun hand out in front of him, along the right wall.
Something moved on the hall’s left side in a half-open doorway. The Cajun shunted the Colt toward the girl who’d just poked half her head, a bare tan shoulder, and one round brown fear-bright eye into the hall. That eye snapped wider when it found the LeMat. The girl jerked her head back inside the room with a muffled gasp.
At the same time, a man leaped out of the room directly across the hall from the girl’s. Sartain pulled his own head back into the stairwell as the killer’s pistol spoke twice. In the hall’s close confines, the reports sounded liked twin howitzer blasts. Sartain jerked his pistol into the hall and fired once as the man leaped across the hazy, smoky corridor in a brown blur of fast motion, and disappeared inside the girl’s room.
The girl screamed shrilly. There were foot thuds and sounds of frantic jostling.
Sartain cursed and ran down the hall, hobbling only slightly on his bad leg, and used his good foot to kick the door open. As the door slammed off the inside wall and lurched back toward Sartain, the Cajun stopped it with his right boot as he aimed the LeMat straight out from his shoulder, tightening the tension in his trigger finger.
He held his fire. His heart thudded.
“I’ll kill her!” the killer taunted him, grinning.
He was a tall, slender Mexican with short, curly brown hair and a thick mustache drooping down both corners of his mouth. Another small patch of hair sprouted beneath his lower lip.
He held his cocked pistol to the girl’s left temple. She was also Mexican. She wore only a sheer cream wrap. The killer had his free arm tightly around her shoulders, holding her fast against his gun barrel.
“I’ll kill her!” he repeated desperately.
In the heavy silence beneath the rain’s patter against the window flanking the killer, another pattering sounded. Sartain glanced down to see blood dripping down the outside of the right leg of the killer’s deerskin pants onto his brown boot adorned with gaudy white stitching over the pointed toe.
Drip, drip, drip. They came as regularly as the ticking of a clock. Each drop beaded on the boot’s worn leather and rolled off to the floor, staining the rug behind the girl’s delicate bare right foot that shifted position as she struggled against the killer’s savage grip.
The killer showed his teeth beneath his mustache. “I will kill her!” He pressed the barrel of his cocked revolver tighter to the girl’s head.
She groaned. Tears glazed her chocolate eyes. She gritted her teeth as the killer clamped his hand around her shoulders even more tightly.
“Don’t kill her,” Sartain said. His heart was drumming in his ears.
“Kindly ease the hammer down, amigo. Toss the pistol on the bed, or I will splatter this pretty little puta’s brains all over you!”
The girl’s head was tipped back against the killer’s chin. Her breasts rose and fell sharply as she breathed. Her flat belly expanded and contracted and her small, delicate bare feet shifted slightly on the rug, looking delicate and fragile against the killer’s leather boots.
Sartain looked at her face. She stared back at him, brown eyes reflecting the umber glow of two lit lanterns. She couldn’t have been twenty. Her skin was fine and smooth, like polished ironwood. Her hair, pulled back in a loose chignon, was the rich brown of roasted coffee beans.
She hardened her jaws and said, “Keel him, Senor! Send him to El Diablo!”
The killer narrowed an eye at Sartain and stretched his lips a little farther back from his teeth.
“Hold on,” the Cajun said, depressing his LeMat’s hammer and raising the barrel. He tossed the pistol onto the bed, where it bounced and lay still.
“Let her go,” Sartain urged the man.
The killer continued to hold the girl taut against him, pressing the revolver against her temple. “Si,” he said. “It would be a shame to kill one so young and pretty. I could get another round out of her tonight, maybe, no?”
He removed his cocked pistol from the girl’s temple and thrust it toward Sartain, narrowing his right eye as he aimed at the Cajun’s head. “Say good-bye to life, amigo!”
“No!” the girl shrieked, twisting around and throwing herself against the gunman’s right arm.
The pistol exploded. Instinctively, Sartain ducked as the bullet plunked into the wall several feet to his right.
“Puta bitch!” the man snarled, using his left arm to fling the girl away from him.
She screamed as she flew against a dresser.
Sartain took one running step toward the bed and lunged off his heels. The Mexican gunman fired two more rounds, both slugs hammering the wall and knocking the cross of Saint Guadalupe off the wall over a chest of drawers.
Sartain landed belly-down on the bed. Bouncing, he grabbed the LeMat and rolled to his right as another of the killer’s slugs chewed into the bed after nipping the Cajun’s left elbow. Sartain rolled onto his belly and extended the LeMat toward the shooter, who had turned and was hurling himself through the window.
Sartain fired twice quickly, but he glimpsed only the man’s boots being drawn through the window after the rest of him had disappeared. Both of the Cajun’s slugs flew wild into the dark, rainy night from which came the thud of the Mexican’s body landing on something outside.
Sartain fought his way off the bouncing bed and ran to the window. Slanting down and away from him was a brush roof glistening in the steady rain, turning blue with sporadic lightning flashes. Sartain aimed the pistol out the window and slid it this way and that, looking for his target.
“Where the hell did you go, you son of a bitch?”
A shadow bolted out from under the awning—the silhouette of a horseback rider. Lightning flashed, limning the rangy Mexican riding Buffalo’s sorrel. The man was hunkered low in the saddle. He was beating the horse’s right hip with his holstered pistol and cartridge belt.
Sartain stea
died his aim, fired. The rider glanced over his shoulder toward the roadhouse.
Lightning flashed again. Sartain triggered the LeMat and was about to engage the shotgun shell but held fire. Horse and rider had galloped into the chaparral beyond the yard, out of sight and out of range.
Behind them, there was only the muddy, puddle-dimpled yard glistening with each flash of lightning, lurching with each thunderclap.
Sartain lowered his smoking pistol, the odor of cordite peppering his nose. Quickly, the chill, damp breeze erased it. The Cajun wrapped his left hand around the bottom of the window’s frame and dug his fingertips into the half-rotten wood. He gritted his teeth as he stared off in the direction in which one of Buffalo’s bushwhackers had run off in the night.
“Senor.”
Sartain jerked around. The girl gasped, startled, and stepped back.
“You are bleeding,” she said.
“Any more of ’em?”
She shook her head. “There is one more dead across the hall. The one you shot through the ceiling.”
Sartain sighed.
“You are bleeding, senor.”
The Cajun looked down at his left leg. Blood was oozing out from behind the bandanna he’d tied around it.
“My partner got it a lot worse,” Sartain said, holstering the LeMat and wrapping his hand gently around the girl’s arm. “Are you all right, señorita?”
The girl nodded. “This is a crazy place, mi amigo. I am accustomed to such eruptions.” She narrowed her eyes and hardened her jaws. Her brown eyes flashed beautifully. “You should have shot him when you had the chance.”
“Oh, I’ll get another chance,” Sartain said, brushing his thumb across her chin and winking. “You can bet the seed bull on that!”
The girl nodded once, gazing up at the tall, blue-eyed Cajun appraisingly. “I bet you will at that, amigo. But first, let me tend your leg . . . and then your horse…and then I will make you as comfortable as I can on such a cold and deadly night, eh?”
Chapter Five
He woke just after dawn. While Esmeralda slept, curled on her side, snoring very softly, the Cajun gathered his clothes and dressed. He made sure his pistol and his Henry were loaded and then he went downstairs.
The barman, Chico, sat in the misty dawn shadows, head down on a table. Around him were several piles of scrip and gold pieces, all of the dead men’s pistols and their rifles stacked across the arms of a near chair.
On the table, too, was a half-empty whiskey bottle.
The barman was snoring loudly, evenly, pooching out his lips with each exhalation. He did not awaken as Sartain walked past him on the balls of his boots.
The Cajun went out to the barn, found a pick and a shovel, and used both to dig a grave in a relatively high spot between two washes a hundred yards behind the barn. The rain had loosened the sandy soil, making an easier job of it than it otherwise would have been.
When he’d deemed the grave deep enough, Sartain returned to the barn. He saddled Boss and then he back-and-bellied Buffalo head-down over the saddle. He led the horse and his dead friend out behind the barn to the fresh grave and gentled Buffalo, wrapped in a saddle blanket, down inside.
Grimly, the Cajun shoveled dirt back into the grave, rounded the top, and arranged large rocks over it and along the edges to hold the carrion-eaters at bay. He’d have fashioned a cross, but there was no time for that. Maybe he’d return at some other time to pay his respects and put the finishing touch on the mossyhorn’s grave.
For now, with the sun beginning to climb, he was burning daylight. He needed to get after the rangy Mexican while the man’s trail was still relatively fresh despite the rain. Carrying the pick-ax and the shovel over his shoulder, he led his horse around to the front of the barn. When he’d returned the digging implements to the little side shed in which he’d found them, he walked back outside and closed the doors. He heard soft footfalls on wood and turned to see Esmeralda descending the steps of the roadhouse’s front gallery.
She walked across the yard toward Sartain, holding a croaker sack by its rope-tied neck in one hand and a long, slim cigar in the other. The sun was up now, slanting its buttery light into the soggy roadhouse yard. It flashed blue in Esmeralda’s freshly brushed black hair.
She wore the same thin wrap she’d been wearing last night. It did little to conceal her. The cones of her brown breasts jostled as she walked in a pair of worn moccasins that were a lovely contrast to the fineness of the rest of her.
She stopped beside Boss, held up the sack to Sartain. “Food for the trail. Burritos made from beans and spiced chicken. And a bottle, as well. Chico’s best stuff.” She smiled. “He won’t mind.”
“Thanks.”
“Good luck to you, Miguel,” she said, using the Spanish translation of his first name, as she’d done last night in her room. “I hope you find your friend’s killer.”
“I intend to find out the what and why of it, too.” He hadn’t recognized any of the dead killers, had no idea why they set the trap for him or how they’d gotten the names of his friends Phoenix and Jeff.
He stepped up to the girl, smiled down at her. “Thanks for the grub and everything else.”
“My pleasure, amigo.”
Sartain took the girl in his arms and kissed her long and passionately. He had a feeling it was the last bit of real tenderness he’d be displaying for a long time and he wanted to enjoy it, as he’d enjoyed her the bittersweet night before.
“You kiss a puta on the lips?” she said, blinking, startled.
“Best lips I ever tasted.” He winked at her.
She smiled, sandwiched his long, tapering, unshaven cheeks in her hands. “You are a lover, Miguel Sartain.” She narrowed her eyes with grave befuddlement. “But you are a killer, too. Hombre de la Venganza. The Revenger.”
“You know?”
“Who has not heard? I certainly never expected him to be a man like you.”
“This life is full of surprises, senorita,” Sartain said, pecking her cheek and then toeing a stirrup. He cheeked Boss as he stepped into the saddle and settled his weight.
“I put some extra bandages in the bag,” Esmeralda said. “And a tin of poultice made from prickly pear blossoms and bacanora. My mother’s concoction.”
“Gracias.”
“Stop again sometime,” she urged with a smile.
“Wild horses couldn’t keep me away.”
Sartain pinched his hat brim to the girl and then tsked Boss into a lope, brushing his fingers across his holstered LeMat as he headed in the same direction the rangy Mexican had.
Chapter Six
Don Alonzo de Castillo woke to find himself lying in a wedge of lemony morning light pushing through one of the tall, arched windows of his sleeping quarters at Hacienda de la Francesca, in the foothills of the verdant Olvidado Mountains in northern Sonora, Old Mexico.
Don de Castillo blinked, lifted his regal, bearded head, groaned, and then eased his skull, with the tender brain residing inside like a violently beating heart, back down on his silk-covered pillow.
The don could hear the blacksmith, Rafael Loera, wielding his infernal hammer against his infernal anvil. The blacksmith shop at Hacienda de la Francesca was positioned back by the stables, a hundred yards from the sprawling main casa, of which Don de Castillo, haciendado of Hacienda de la Francesca, was patrón. But this morning Loera and his heavy steel hammer and his stout iron anvil sounded loud enough to be stationed at the foot of the don’s bed.
Clanggg! Clangggg! Clang-Clangggg!
“Oh, Mother Mary, please have mercy on this poor devil’s soul!” the don groaned, pressing his beringed fingers hard against his age-spotted temples, trying to quell the hammering heart in his head.
Nearby, a girl grunted.
The don turned his head to the left. A perfectly round, naked brown bottom faced him from only a foot and a half away. The don smiled, his salt-and-pepper bearded cheeks climbing up under his coffee-brown eyes.
Despite Loera’s ceaseless hammering, despite all the Spanish brandy and Cuban cigars the don had consumed the night before, he felt better just staring at this girl’s bottom.
The sweet bottom of the seventeen-year-old daughter of Don de Angelo, who owned the bank in Nogales, though of course there would have been no bank without Don de Castillo and Hacienda de la Francesca. That was why the girl, young enough to be the don’s granddaughter, was here. She’d been here for the past two months as the don’s “special guest.”
Of course, the arrangement, while sanctioned by the girl’s father, was sacrilege, and Don de Castillo had heard that the girl’s mother had made a special trip to visit a Catholic cardinal in Mexico City to somehow get her daughter’s sins expunged.
But what was the de Angelo family to do?
Don de Castillo and his twenty-odd gunhands pretty much had this corner of Mexico, and even a good bit of southern Arizona, in a stranglehold. He was the richest, most powerful man within several thousand square miles, and even the territorial governor of Arizona was at de Castillo’s beck and call. The governor of Sonora would have been as well if he didn’t turn and run every time he heard the don’s name spoken.
Yes, de Castillo was the wealthiest man in many a mile.
So why, behind the pounding in his head from too much brandy and mescal and the grating in his throat and lungs from too many cigars, did he feel so hollow?
Empty.
Sad beyond his ability even to describe it.
The don stared at the girl. But then she became another girl whose memory haunted him, and he felt that razor-tipped stiletto twist in his guts once more, as it had been doing regularly for the past two months.
The don groaned. His pain and sorrow acquired an edge nearly as sharp as that of the stiletto in his belly. Flaring his nostrils and hardening his jaws, he shoved his head forward and sank his teeth into the girl’s plump right buttock.
The Revenger Page 4