One-Eye said, “Drink up. The fiery passion that Juan Carlos feels for Marisol de la Paz has awakened old memories of my own romantic past—a past which has, sadly, disappeared into the fog of this old man’s youth, leaving only wretched loneliness in its wake. These days I sleep alone but I dream vividly of past loves!”
He lifted his cup and polished off the liquor, running the front of his wrist across his mouth. A single tear rolled down his dirty cheek. “Someone should write a song about me. A ballad. A very sad ballad about a lonely, one-eyed old man in the desert, haunted by all that he has left behind. Tormented by his dreams!”
Prophet slid the cup toward Colter. “Go ahead. It’ll put hair on your chest.”
Colter pulled his shirt out and slid a look beneath it. He arched a brow then lifted the cup.
He froze when other sounds rose from the desert.
Still more riders?
Prophet frowned again as he turned his head toward the batwings. No. The sounds he was now hearing weren’t hoof thuds. They were the crackle of gunfire.
They were followed by a woman’s scream.
Prophet jerked with a start. He looked at Colter, who stared back at him, eyes wide. “You think that . . . you think that’s . . . ?”
“Who the hell else would it be?”
“¡Mierda!” cursed One-Eye. “I thought I read bloody murder in that lobo’s eyes! The de la Pazes and the Amadors have always gotten along like wolves and pumas! I was afraid it would one day come to this—especially after Marisol went off to the city!”
Prophet shot an exasperated look at the old man. “Bloody murder?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He glanced at Colter then burst through the batwings and sprinted over to where Mean and Ugly stood twitching his ears in the direction from which the gunfire had sounded. Colter ran out behind him. Lou grabbed Mean’s reins and swung up into the leather.
He turned to Colter, who’d just then mounted his coyote dun. Gunfire continued to rattle in the east.
“Red, this has got bad news written all over it,” Prophet said. “Me, I’m used to buckin’ the Mexican tiger, even when I got no cur in the ring. You best hang back. Head on over to the ocean and lounge in the sand with the señoritas!”
“Ah hell, I’d get bored with the señoritas after a day or two. I’m with you, Lou. Even if it ain’t none of our business, let’s buck the Mexican tiger!”
Prophet laughed. “Yeah.” He swung Mean around, facing east, and booted the mount into a ground-eating gallop. “What the hell else we gonna do?”
He shot out of the cantina yard and into the bristling desert like a cannonball. Colter came up close behind, leaning forward over his horse’s buffeting mane. With Colter and Northwest galloping just off Lou and Mean and Ugly’s right hips, the riders stormed up and around the first butte beyond the cantina. They clattered on down the butte’s far side, across a hundred-yard stretch of relatively flat desert and then up a low jog of chalky bluffs.
As they started down the other side, Prophet reined Mean up abruptly and pointed toward the east.
“There!”
The carriage sat on the far side of a wide wash, which appeared to be the dry bed of a now-dead river. It was paved in mottled black-and-white sand. The wash bristled with cactus and greasewood as well as rocks of all shapes and sizes, some as large as wagons, likely hurled down the wash by ancient floods.
The carriage sat low, slightly tilted to one side. Its four-horse team was fidgeting uneasily and looking around in the direction from which the bullets were being hurled toward them.
Several men lay around the carriage, unmoving, while a couple more were crouched behind rocks or cactus near the carriage, returning fire toward the men hurling lead at them from behind their own covering rocks and cactus on the near side of the wash. The shooters were maybe a hundred yards beyond Prophet and Colter, who had paused momentarily on the side of the bluff.
One of the shooters firing toward the carriage must have hit his mark. A man near the carriage gave a shrill yell as he lunged to his feet, throwing his two pistols into the air, then tumbled back into the desert caliche.
It took only a few seconds for Prophet to get the lay of the land. The stage must have gotten a wheel stuck in soft sand on the wash’s far side. That gave Juan Carlos and his seven compañeros time to catch up to it and ambush the vaqueros guarding Marisol del le Paz and her aunt. There appeared to be only one more guard left alive, returning pistol fire from behind a rock not far from the carriage.
Colter glanced at Prophet. “What are you thinkin’, Lou?”
“I’m thinkin’ that ain’t a fair fight even by Mexican standards. Let’s go, Red!” Prophet shrugged the Richards twelve-gauge off his shoulder and swung it around in front of his chest, taking the savage popper in his right hand after switching the reins to his left. He gigged Mean and Ugly down the slope, yelling behind him, “You take the shooters on the right. I’ll take the ones on the left!”
“You got it!”
When Mean and Ugly had gained the broad wash, Prophet swung him slightly left, toward where he could see four shooters triggering pistols toward the one remaining vaquero guard. The coach’s ambushers hadn’t seen him yet, but when Mean had taken two more lunging strides, the ambusher nearest Prophet, to the right of the other three, must have heard the thundering of the dun’s hooves. The man swung around sharply, widening his eyes and then slamming his rifle to his shoulder.
Prophet triggered the Richards, blowing a pumpkin-sized hole in the man’s belly and hurling him back onto the clump of spiky cactuses he’d been crouched behind. He triggered his rifle skyward before throwing it far and wide.
The three to the dead man’s left jerked their surprised gazes toward the big bounty hunter galloping toward them, within twenty yards and closing fast. Before the man on the right of the three-man group could snap his own rifle to his shoulder, Prophet triggered the Richards’s second tube, sending his target flying backward into the chaparral, howling.
The other two attackers fired shots at Prophet, who’d by now overrun them, Mean’s hooves hammering into the dirt the man Prophet had just turned into a sieve, adding insult to injury.
Prophet swung Mean around sharply to face the other two bushwhackers. One triggered a Winchester carbine at him, the slug screeching past his right ear. Prophet had tossed the empty Richards behind him and whipped his Colt out of its holster. He extended the pistol straight out from Mean’s right withers and blew a .45 caliber round through the man’s right cheek.
Clicking back the hammer again quickly, he aimed at the last of the four bushwhackers and fired. That bullet merely blasted dust from the rock the man had just pulled his head behind.
Prophet slipped cleanly out of the saddle, threw himself to the ground, and rolled as the last of the four shooters lifted his head and rifle over his covering rock, and fired.
The bullet blew a spine off a buckhorn cholla as the big bounty hunter rolled behind the plant. The shooter fired again, this time blowing two prickly spines off the cactus.
Prophet rolled onto his chest and belly, extended his Colt straight out from his right shoulder, lined up his sights on the bridge of the shooter’s dark nose, beneath the brim of his black, steeple-crowned sombrero, and fired.
The .45 bucked, flames lapping from the barrel.
Prophet missed the man’s nose. Instead, the bullet blew out his target’s right eye before exiting his right ear in a spray of blood and bone matter.
“Cored you like an apple, you bushwhackin’ dog!” Prophet bellowed, heart pumping hot blood like lightning through his veins.
The now-one-eyed man sat up straight, lower jaw hanging, his lone eye widening in the shock of his demise. The light of life became the shadow of death in that lone eye just before the man fell straight back and out of sight behind the broad, pale chunk of ancient, sun-bleached driftwood from behind which he’d been firing.
Chapter 12
Pro
phet looked around. All the shooters near him were dead.
Hearing more gunfire, he whipped his gaze to the south. Colter Farrow was on one knee over there, maybe sixty yards away from Prophet, punching lead into one man and then into another, spread out much as Prophet’s own victims had been, slinging lead toward the carriage.
Two of Colter’s targets were crouched behind the same boulder. Victims, rather. Calmly, the redhead jacked another round into his Tyler Henry and fired, shooting one of the two. The other one returned fire with a long-barreled revolver but his partner had just flopped against him, and his shot flew wide.
He didn’t have time to get off another one. Calmly aiming down his Henry’s barrel, Colter chunked a. 44 round between the lapels of the man’s stitched leather chaqueta jacket. The man dropped to the ground on his back, howling.
Colter fired again and his third target slammed back against the broad stock of a barrel cactus and hung up there, impaled on its spines. He screamed, blood gushing from his chest, turning his head this way and that, struggling against the thorns, before ripping himself loose, dropping to his knees, then falling onto his side.
The second man Colter had shot lay writhing, digging his heels and elbows into the ground, lifting his back up off the sand and gravel. Colter pumped a fresh round into the Henry’s action, rose from his knee, walked over to the man, and aimed the rifle casually in his right hand at the man’s head.
“No!” the Mexican screamed.
Colter didn’t hesitate. All business, he squeezed the Henry’s trigger. The rifle bucked, roared, and stabbed smoke and flames at the man’s head, slamming it back against the ground, where it and the rest of the man lay jerking in sudden death.
“Oh yeah.”
Colter shook the rifle, cocking it one-handed, and glanced toward Prophet. The bounty hunter gave a weak smile. He’d be damned if the young redhead didn’t, indeed, remind him of a particular pretty blond who was just as coolly efficient at killing.
“That all of ’em?” Colter called.
Prophet looked at the dead men around him and the redhead. “We’re missing one.”
He turned toward the carriage and started to raise his Colt once more. He stayed the action, seeing that the man moving over there was one of the señorita’s guards. He’d obviously taken a bullet, maybe more, and was staggering around as though badly drunk. He held a hand to his belly, was clawing at the air ahead of him as though negotiating his way through a heavy curtain.
He stopped suddenly, wobbling on his hips. He gave a strangling cry then fell face-first in the sand and rocks, doing nothing to break his fall.
Prophet started walking toward the carriage, looking around for signs of life, his blood still racing in his veins but this time with worry about the señorita. “Bloody murder,” One-Eye had said. It wasn’t only the south-of-the-border folks who sometimes got love and murder mixed around in the same barrel, but they were especially adept at it, and ugly about it.
“You see the señorita?” Prophet called to Colter, who was roughly fifty yards to Prophet’s right, also striding toward the carriage.
“Nope.”
“What about Juan Carlos?”
Colter looked around some more. “Nope.”
Prophet walked up to the carriage. The left side’s two doors were open. Lou peered into the shadows within the contraption.
There was only one person inside. The señorita’s aunt, Señora Aurora Navarro, sat slumped in the carriage’s opposite rear corner, head canted back and a little to one side. The woman’s eyes were open but she wasn’t seeing anything. Angels, maybe, if she’d kept up with her rosary. The puckered hole in the dead center of her withered forehead dribbled blood down into the corner of her right eye and then on down her right cheek, along the base of her pointed nose. It glistened in a single beam of sunlight angling into the carriage over Prophet’s left shoulder.
Prophet studied the ground beneath the door. He spied the moccasin-like impression of a woman’s soft slipper. Stepping out away from the carriage and then walking up around it and the team, he spied more prints. They were overlaid with the deeper impressions of spurred boots with high heels.
The girl had run out away from the stage and a man had pursued her.
Prophet followed the sign around the front of the fidgeting team.
“You find something?” Colter asked, walking up behind Lou.
Prophet studied the rocky slope ahead and on the far side of the team. It was stippled with desert brush and cactus. He could see where rocks had recently been displaced and rolled down the slope and into the wash. “I think so.”
Quickly, Lou reloaded his Colt from cartridges in his shell belt, dropping the empty casings on the ground at his boots. Flicking the loading gate closed, he spun the wheel and ran forward.
He climbed the steep slope, dropping to his hands and knees and sort of half crawling and half running up the incline, causing a landslide of sand and rocks behind him.
At the top, he paused a moment to catch his breath.
Picking up the sign again, he ran forward but quartering to his right, following the two sets of prints through the scrub, tall cactuses like misshapen, tendril-bearing monsters rising around him.
He lost the woman’s and the man’s trail in gravel sliding down from yet another sandy slope.
Colter ran up beside Prophet, breathing hard.
“Damnit,” Lou said, raking his gaze desperately across the ground.
“There!” Colter pointed toward the indentation of a man’s boot heel and the dimple of a large spur rowel.
Prophet broke into another run, scissoring his arms and legs. He pushed through some prickly shrubs, wincing as the thorns grabbed and tore at his shirtsleeves, then dropped into another low area.
Ahead, a man gave an angry, screaming wail.
Prophet stopped, looked around, trying to locate the source of the shout.
Again, the man shouted. The señorita shouted back at the man, just as angry.
“This way,” Prophet told Colter, who’d caught up to him again.
Prophet ran ahead, angling left. He ran for maybe a hundred more feet before he stopped again.
Straight ahead, the señorita stood atop a low shelf of jumbled rock. Desert willows flanked her, partly shading her.
Facing her at the base of the shelf was Juan Carlos. He had a silver-chased pistol in his right hand, aimed up the shelf at the woman. The señorita held a wicked-looking, black-handled, silver-bladed stiletto, threatening Juan Carlos with it.
Juan Carlos was bent slightly forward at the waist, shouting in Spanish. He spoke so quickly it was hard for Prophet to follow, but it seemed to his crude ears that the man was professing both his love and hatred for the woman, who, it also seemed from Prophet’s limited understanding of the señorita’s rapid Spanish, was taking a wicked satisfaction in mocking and taunting him.
The señorita was calling Juan Carlos an ugly, gutless dog whom she wouldn’t marry if . . . and here’s where her voice rose to such a crescendo that Prophet couldn’t understand another word.
“Carlos!” Prophet shouted.
The man and the woman suddenly stopped screaming and swung their heads toward where Prophet stood fifty feet away, Colter flanking him on his right side, both men sweating and breathing hard from the run.
“Put the gun down, Carlos!” Prophet ordered.
Juan Carlos kept his long-barreled, silver-chased Colt aimed at the señorita. He grinned at Prophet, spreading his lips wide.
“You come to watch this Mexicana bruja, this cheap puta, die bloody, amigo?”
“Kill him!” the woman shouted at Prophet, bending forward at the waist. “Kill him now!”
That didn’t faze Don Carlos a bit. Raising his voice and keeping his eyes glued to Prophet, he said, “She is a common hog-pen moaner, this woman. She is a mad dog in heat. A double-crossing puma with the perpetual springtime itch! That is what she is—no more and no less than the lowest
of rabid animals!”
“Kill him!” Marisol shrieked at Prophet, her eyes glinting furiously. “Kill him now—I order you to shoot this devil and stop this insanity!”
Juan Carlos smiled again. He swung his pistol toward Prophet, his smile in place but a flat darkness spreading across his eyes. In half a second, his Colt would be aimed at Prophet’s head. Again finding himself with no choice, Prophet squeezed his own Colt’s trigger.
Juan Carlos jerked.
He took one uncertain step backward, triggering his own Colt wide of Prophet and Colter. An expression of deep surprise shone in his eyes. His face turned one or two shades paler even than its natural cream, and he looked down at the blood bubbling up through the hole in his red silk shirt, just beneath the tail of the black silk bandanna knotted around his neck.
He placed a finger in the blood there then let that hand drop to his side. The Colt fell from his other hand to the ground.
Juan Carlos looked at Prophet, his brows furled as though with great concentration, his eyes still cast with exasperation. “This gringo killed Juan Carlos Anaya Amador,” he announced flatly, unable to believe his own words.
He gave a dry chuckle, as though at a cosmic joke he’d found himself the butt of. His eyes crossing and lower jaw falling slack, he stumbled backward, raking his spurs across the ground, and collapsed on his back, one leg angled beneath the other one. He gave a long, ragged sigh and lay still.
Silence had fallen. The only sounds were those of the desert birds piping in the bushes.
Slowly, Prophet lowered his smoking Peacemaker.
Marisol stared in dumb shock at Juan Carlos, her beautiful mouth forming a perfect O of exasperation.
“Juan Carlos?” she said. She drew a deep breath, her well-filled bodice rising and falling sharply. “Juan?” she repeated. “Juan Carlos?”
She dropped the stiletto, ran down the shelf, and dropped to a knee beside the dead man. “Juan?” she said, nudging the dead man’s shoulder. She looked at the blood bibbing his fancy shirt then turned her head slowly to Prophet. Her own features had paled considerably.
The Cost of Dying Page 9