“Tell me,” Slash said, “how many Pinkertons y’all have here in Tin Cup? I take it the barman’s one?”
“He is, of course, and everyone riding the stage tomorrow will be a Pinkerton agent,” said Number Two, fingering his collar again as though it were resting uncomfortably against his neck.
“Including the jehu and shotgun messenger,” said Number One.
“In addition,” added Number Two, “even the hostlers from the local relay station are our agents, in case the gang preying on the Cloud Tickler’s gold shipments decides to strike before we’ve even left town.”
“You see, this has been a very involved, carefully planned operation,” said Number One. “We agents have been here for the past three months, making preparations as well as fitting into the community, to avoid suspicion.”
“So you’ve been pretendin’ to be a sky pilot,” Pecos said.
“Indeed.” Number Two chuckled self-effacingly, clutching his coat lapels. “I come by it naturally. My father was a Baptist preacher.”
“I see, I see.” Slash cut his gaze to Number One. “And you’re his wife.”
“Yes.” She gave a brittle, uppity smile. “I come by such station quite naturally, as well, as I was raised in a good, God-fearing family who read the Good Book daily and had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the dishonest dregs of our society.”
She gave both Slash and Pecos a brashly judgmental up and down, curling her upper lip and then lifting her nose so high in the air Slash thought she was in danger of breaking her neck.
“Hey, now,” Pecos objected. “Just you listen here, little Miss Hoity-Toi—”
“There, there, now, gentlemen . . . and lady,” Number Two said, holding up his hands again, with placating eyes and giving his condescending partner an admonishing glance. “Suppose we get down to brass tacks so we can all get a good night’s sleep. We’re going to need it, as we’ll all have a very full day tomorrow.”
He opened his Bible and held it out in the palm of his hand. “Here, now, we have a map . . .”
CHAPTER 14
Slash and Pecos were beat, but in spite of their need for a good night’s rest, neither cutthroat-turned-freighter slept for more than a half hour at a time. Even during those rare half hours, their sleep was stitched by uneasy dreams and vague anxieties. Their hearts beat abnormally fast, they sweated, and their muscles twitched. It was as though they’d contracted an ague.
Neither would have admitted it under threat of being drawn, quartered, and spitted over a low fire, but the gold was preying on their brains. Neither dreamt of outright absconding with the goods, so to speak, but you can’t have robbed banks, trains, and stagecoaches for thirty years and then be in charge—just you and your former partner in crime—of delivering nearly a hundred thousand dollars in gold without that gold lodging in your brain like a bone in your throat.
“How’d you sleep?” Slash asked his partner the next morning at dawn as he sat up and stretched, feeling tight in every joint.
“Great,” Pecos sighed, raking a big hand down his pale, lined face. “You?”
“Wonderful,” Slash grumbled. He smacked his lips and reached for his makin’s. “Ready to hit the trail?”
“Reckon.”
As Slash rolled a quirley, he said, “How ’bout if we forgo breakfast and get us a few belts of some cheap busthead before we head out? You know—a libation for the road?”
“That sounds fine as frog hair split four ways, partner.” Pecos tossed his covers back and rose with an agonized groan. “Just what the doctor ordered, in fact!”
After they’d consumed a little over a half a bottle between themselves, and one raw egg apiece cracked into the Taos lightning, they rumbled out of town behind their four hitched mules, their two saddle horses tied to steel rings in the freight wagon’s tailgate. Adding to their misery, the clouds that had been threatening since they’d left the Palace finally made good on their warning. Rain hammered nearly straight down out of a sky the color of greasy rags.
Pecos stopped the wagon long enough for him and Slash to hustle into their yellow rain slickers. The freight trail they followed north out of Tin Cup became a veritable river, and the mules had trouble keeping their feet on the slick upgrades. The rain made it difficult for the men to follow the map that the Pinkertons had shown them last night, and that they’d been required to memorize, both operatives playing true to the suspicious and paranoid Pinkerton form.
Pecos finally turned the wagon off the main road and into a little side canyon that had become a roiling creek, then halted the big outfit near the giant, lightning-topped cedar that had been marked boldly on the map. Pecos hadn’t even set the brake before four men, also dressed in rain slickers, moved out from behind a snag of rocks at the edge of a pine forest. They were carrying a strongbox mounted atop two long four-by-fours. Each man carried an end of the four-by-fours.
As the steadily, whitely pouring rain sluiced off the brims of their high-crowned, black hats, they splashed through the mud and set the strongbox in the wagon. The four men, appearing indifferent to the pummeling the rain was giving them, crawled into the wagon’s bed. There was a good bit of pounding, chain jangling, and box jostling before the men, whom Slash assumed were mine detectives, leaped down out of the wagon. Slash saw the strongbox residing in the middle of the bed, attached to four chains, the end of each chain padlocked to the four steel rings that Slash and Pecos had outfitted the bed with, one in each corner, before leaving Fort Collins.
The box itself was a stout doozy. It appeared to be solid steel and was secured with two heavy steel padlocks that would likely take a couple of dynamite sticks apiece to blow to smithereens.
The detectives unrolled the cream tarpaulin over the bed, covering the strongbox, and strapped the fabric securely to the side panels and tailgate. Quickly and with as much grim purpose as when they’d appeared, all four men strode back into the rocks and trees from where they had come, and were gone.
Slash and Pecos gazed over their shoulders at the strongbox.
Slash looked at Pecos. Pecos looked at Slash.
Each man acquired a sheepish expression.
Pecos turned forward in his seat, released the brake, and shook the reins over the team, whose sodden backs glistened like cold metal. Slash saw a man standing in the relative shelter of a big tree to the right of the trail. Slash nudged his partner with his elbow and jerked his head in the man’s direction.
“Whoa!” Pecos hauled back on the reins.
The man stared up at them. He wore a three-piece suit under a gray slicker. He wore a tall, pearl-gray Boss of the Plains Stetson, beneath which his face was set like a badly mistreated and burned cameo carved in granite. He had gray eyebrows and a thick gray mustache. He was smoking a long, black cheroot, which he just now drew on before lowering and blowing the smoke out into the rain through his mouth and nostrils.
More smoke issued from his mouth and nose as he spoke, as though he had so much smoke inside his small, compact, ramrod-straight body that it would continue to come out on each breath he exhaled forevermore.
“I’m L. G. Tunstall, superintendent of the Cloud Tickler,” he said just loudly enough to be heard above the weather’s roar.
“Braddock and Baker,” Slash said.
“I know.” Tunstall took another deep drag on the cheroot. Slash saw a horse standing ground-reined on the other side of the tree—a fine, big, long-legged bay. “We’ve taken every precaution. Now it’s up to you two.”
“I don’t get it,” Slash said, glancing toward where the four detectives had disappeared. “Why didn’t you just send them?”
Tunstall shook his head. “Too conspicuous. Besides, they’re four of the total of six mine and ore guards I have on my roll. I need them at the mine. There’s always a threat of thievery up there—both in the mine, with the ore, and in the hot box.”
The “hot box” was the colloquial term for the locked, usually stone building that hou
sed the gold concentrate and the ingots that had been smelted into bars.
Tunstall continued. “The two fellas who own the mine, both Englishmen who live back East, won’t put any more money into the mine than they already have. They’re tighter’n the bark on a tree. Must have some Scotch in ’em. They either need to make a lot of money or no money at all. If they keep having trouble, they’re going to close the Cloud Tickler. That means I, at sixty-eight and counting, will no longer have a job. Those men you just saw won’t have jobs. Nor the other two detectives nor the twenty-six miners and five operators in my employ.”
He took another deep drag and, blowing out the smoke, said, “Them Eastern limeys have played all their cards, hiring the Pinkertons to come in and clean the rats out of the privy. That’s as far as they’ll go. If this operation fails, I end up in an Odd Fellows Home of Christian Charity, though there’s damn little charity in these parts excepting a bullet to the head. That’s why I’m going to take it very personally if you don’t get this gold back to Union Station in Denver. Understand?”
Slash nodded. “We got ya, Mister Tunstall.”
“We’ll get ’er there, Mister Tunstall.” Pecos pinched his hat brim to the man, who remained standing beneath the tree, expressionless.
Pecos hoorawed the team back on its way.
Just before they cleared the curve that would take them back to the main trail, Slash glanced behind to see the small, gray, stoic-appearing but anxious Tunstall standing there beneath the dripping tree, smoking and staring expressionlessly toward the wagon.
* * *
“We’ve stolen from men like that before, you know, Slash,” Pecos said an hour later, after the storm had cleared out and they were following the twisting freight road through a shallow valley beside the Taylor River, rushing and occasionally thundering against boulders on the trail’s right side. Craggy granite and pine-clad ridges jutted on both sides of the canyon. Side canyons opened, as well—creases in the ridge wall, dark and mysterious and also threatening.
Slash and Pecos knew from their own experience that curly wolves could be cooling their heels in there, waiting to strike as suddenly as a mountain lion leaping from a tree branch on an unsuspecting cottontail.
Towering pines and spruces and pale-stemmed aspens dripped from the recent rain, beneath a sky suddenly as blue and flawless as a high-country lake. The air smelled as sparkly fresh, like champagne infused with pine needles.
Pecos’s words had roused Slash from his own thoughts. He glanced at his partner in annoyance. “What’re you crowin’ about?”
“That man back there—Tunstall. We’ve robbed from men like him before. We’ve ruined men like him before. Old men who couldn’t afford it.” Pecos turned to Slash. “Don’t you ever think about that?”
Slash scowled at him skeptically, as though a big bird had just dropped a load of plop on his hat. “No.” Slash shook his head, his vexed scowl in place. “I don’t think about that. We were robbers. The way some men ride for the law or bounties or the way some men run mines. We were robbers. That’s what we did. That’s how we survived.”
“On the backs of others, I reckon,” Pecos said, turning his head forward. He rose with his elbows on his knees, crouched forward, holding the leather ribbons lightly in his gloved hands.
“On the backs of fools, mostly.”
“Oh, really? What if everybody did it our way? Stole from everybody else to survive?”
“That’s the way it is!” Slash said.
“Huh?”
“Everybody makes it on the backs of everybody else, you damn fool.” Slash swatted his hat across his partner’s stout right shoulder. “Don’t you know that by now?”
Pecos blinked. “Huh?”
“It’s dog eat dog. That’s how it is an’ how it’s always been. We were just more obvious about it, that’s all.”
Pecos studied him, frowning, stretching his lips halfway back from his teeth. “You really think that’s how it is?”
“Sure enough, I do.”
Pecos stared at him, and then he shook his head and shuttled his gaze back forward, along the sun-and-shade-dappled trail beyond the mules’ twitching ears. “Damn. That’s downright depressing to think that’s how everything works. Here I thought we was runnin’ against the grain of things.”
“We were really the most honest of all men, Pecos.”
“Do you really think so, Slash?”
“I sure as hell do. And you know what? I don’t see no damn reason for us to fall for ole Bledsoe’s ploy now, so late in life. He’s only bedevilin’ us, havin’ us haul all this treasure. He knows how it’s killin’ us. I say as soon as we’re out of these mountains, we swing down to the old Santa Fe Trail and drift straight south.”
Pecos snapped a surprised look at him. “You mean . . . to Mexico?”
“Hell, yes, to Mexico! We can cool our heels there for the winter, then hop a steamer for South America. Why, I heard the women down there were—”
He raised his hands to trace a figure in the air before him, but Pecos cut him off with, “Ah, hell, Slash—you’re just all down in the dumps because you think you lost Jay.”
“No, I ain’t. I’m bein’ practical. Why deny who we are? Why pass up an opportunity like this, Pecos?”
Pecos stared at him, studying him closely, as though he were trying to decipher a complicated line of prose. Sweat beads popped out on his forehead, just below the brim of his snuff-brown Stetson. His pale cheeks flushed above the line of his silver-blond beard. His chest began to rise and fall sharply. He was breathing hard.
A sweat bead ran into the corner of his left eye. He winced against the sting and brushed it away with his shirtsleeve. “Don’t do this to me, Slash.”
“What—make you rich?” Slash grinned.
“No, no, no, no, no!” Pecos shook his head. They’d both been so deep in thought that even though the storm had rolled away over an hour ago, and the morning had heated up, neither former cutthroat had removed his rain slicker and rolled it around his soogan stowed beneath the seat, with their saddlebags and rifles. Now Pecos unbuttoned his oilskin hurriedly, shrugged out of it almost violently, and stuffed it down beneath him with the rest of their gear. “We can’t do it, Slash!”
“Sure, we can.” Slash was grinning so brightly, so uncharacteristically, that Pecos thought his jaws would crack. “Who’d stop us?”
“Bleed-Em-So!”
As he shrugged out of his own slicker now, as well, Slash laughed. “We know the back trails and dark coulees, my friend. We have friends all along the way to the border. Have you forgotten?”
“No, no, no, no, no! Stop talkin’, Slash! What about our word bein’ ‘bond’ and honor among thieves!”
Slash laughed. “Yeah, honor among thieves! Not among Pinkertons an’ thieves! Hell, did you ever know a thief whose word was ‘bond’?”
“Stop!”
“I ain’t gonna stop, Pecos! You can feel the heat of that gold back there just as hot as I can. Why, it’s burning a hole right through my spine and stitching my innards all together in one great big ball!”
“What about Myra? We just gave her a home . . . a job. We gonna just run out on her?”
“We’ve run out on folks before. That’s what cutthroats do!” Slash thought about it. “Besides—hell, we’ll send her some dust. Enough to make a fresh start. A good, proper, fresh start in Denver. Hell, we’ll send her enough so she can buy into her own saloon, just like Jay did!”
“You gotta stop talkin’ now, Slash. You’re talkin’ like you used to talk, all heated-up like, and it plum scares me!”
“You’re sweatin’ like you just crawled out of a creek, Pecos.”
“Hell!” Scowling straight ahead along the trail, Pecos scrubbed his sleeve across his forehead. His cheeks were rose red, and his eyes were as bright as the morning winter sun through a pane of hoarfrost. “Hell! Hell! Hell!” He sliced his arm down past his right ear, as though to smash an annoying
fly. “Stop it, Slash!”
Slash leaned over and spoke like a green-horned, yellow-fanged devil in his partner’s ear, his voice soft and wickedly resonant. “A half-day’s ride farther west and then we take the old Ute Trail south to the Sangre de Cristos. You remember the route, Pecos. At that crossroads by Owl Canyon was where we turned back that posse from Cheyenne. As soon as we started shootin’, they caught a bad case of homesickness. Remember that?”
Pecos shook his head and squeezed his eyes closed. “I don’t remember that, Slash! I plum forgot an’ I don’t wanna remember!”
“From the ’Cristos, we drop straight down to the Sacramentos, then over to the Black Range.”
“Stop it, Slash! I’m beggin’ ya now!”
“We spend a night or two in Silver City with Pete Alvarez. Remember him? He was always good for a night or two of carne asada and his own homemade tequila. Remember his daughter? What was her name?”
“Isabella.”
“That’s right!”
“Oh, stop it, Slash—damn your rancid old hide, anyway!”
“After a night of watchin’ Isabella dance in that skimpy little red dress of hers—remember the one, so small that either one of us could tuck it into one cheek and still chew a full meal around it?—we’ll scuttle over to the San Francisco Peaks, then over to the Pinaleños farther west. From there—”
“Oh, stop it, now, Slash! You’re killin’ me!”
“From the Pinaleños we shoot down to the Chiricahuas, or if Geronimo’s braves are runnin’ off their leashes again, we’ll slide over to the Dragoons, have a few drinks in Tombstone, say hi to ole Doc Holliday if the poor soul’s still on this side of the sod, then hightail it down through the Mules and straight south to the border an’ beyond!”
Slash frowned at his partner. “Hey, where you goin’?”
Pecos had stopped the team. Now he was scrambling down the side of the wagon, puffing his cheeks out.
“Pecos . . . ?”
Pecos wheeled, then scrambled off into the brush beside the trail. He dropped to his knees, and, judging by the violent heaving sounds emanating from the wild currant bushes, disgorged everything in his chest and belly, except maybe a lung.
A Good Day for a Massacre Page 11