.45-Caliber Cross Fire Read online

  From ahead, a horse snorted. There were the soft clomps of hooves on wet gravel. Finally, the cream stallion came around a bend about forty yards away, and Fire Eyes rode toward them, swaying easily on her blanket saddle, a bow and quiver of arrows poking up from behind her head, a Winchester carbine hanging from a rope lanyard down her other shoulder. She wore a short bearskin jacket over her vest, open to reveal her belly button just beneath the lower edge of the vest.

  Fire Eyes stopped the cream and stared toward them, characteristically cool and reproving. “They camped there,” the Yaqui queen said, casting her glance toward the ridge flanking Spurr’s right shoulder. “Then crossed the arroyo early this morning—while you two lay half dead in your blankets.”

  Cuno and Spurr shared a wry glance.

  Fire Eyes batted her moccasins against the cream’s sides and moved forward at a spanking trot, her stygian hair bouncing straight up and down. “They have joined the others.” She disappeared for a moment as she entered the dense willows lining the arroyo then reappeared as she dropped into the arroyo, splashed through the knee-deep flood water, causing it to splash up against her bare legs, then bounded up the other side.

  She stopped in front of Cuno and Spurr, shifting her dark eyes between them. Beads of water, like molten copper against her tan skin, dribbled off her legs. “We can cut them off before they arrive at Cuesta’s headquarters. They must follow a wagon trail through a canyon two, maybe three days away. We will move faster, get ahead of them, and throw rocks down on top of them.” She wrinkled her nose a little, and Cuno felt a vague pang of desire deep in his young man’s loins. “Big rocks… and crush them!”

  She reined the cream around them. “Come! I will need help!” As she turned the cream off the trail to Spurr’s right, heading south along a secondary arroyo that meandered along the base of the sandstone ridge, Spurr slid his Winchester into its sheath. “Come on, kid. The girl needs our help.”

  “This I have to see.”

  As they rode along behind Fire Eyes, who seemed to be holding her own horse back so she wouldn’t lose the two gringo white eyes, Spurr said, “Kid, I bet that girl’s hell in the sack.”

  “You better hope you never find that out, old man.”

  Spurr shook his head, laughing, and booted Cochise into a lope across a broad, open flat stretching out between widening ridges.

  Gradually, the day cleared, and the humidity gave the desert a heavy, peppery smell. The men rode hard behind the Yaqui queen, who often disappeared for an hour or so at a time, so that Cuno and Spurr had to track her to keep from losing her. Occasionally, she’d appear on a distant hillock, beckoning, then rein the gallant cream down the other side of the hill and be gone again, like a dream upon waking.

  “Damn,” Cuno said, late in the afternoon when they were back to following the tracks of her unshod horse, in a bowl surrounded by vast sierras, “I thought I had one of the best horses on the frontier. That cream of hers must have a heart as big as a rain barrel.”

  “Old Cochise has plenty of bottom himself,” Spurr said, patting the roan’s sleek neck. “But them Yaqui horses are made of sterner stuff—I’ll give them that. And so is she. I haven’t seen where she’s yet stopped to eat. She only stops at water tanks, and she must know every one out here.”

  She reappeared an hour later, trotting toward them from the west, when the sun was touching the western ridges. She was a silhouette against the large, buttery orb, until she drew rein a few yards away. She’d tied her bear coat to the cream’s back, with a skin sack of sparse camp possibles. “We camp in a canyon straight ahead. There’s a one-armed saguaro. Just beyond it. A spring in there.”

  She reined her horse around to head southwest. “Now, hold on,” Spurr said. “Where in the hell you goin’ there, missy? You too good to ride with us?”

  She turned the cream back toward them, the yellow-eyed beast rising up on its hind legs, its silky mane fluttering in the warm breeze and saffron light. “Many banditos here. I am checking out a camp they use. If they are here, they will know we are here, and they must be dealt with.”

  She reined the cream around once more and batted her heels against its flanks. “Yeah, well, how are you gonna deal with ’em all by your ownself?” Spurr said only loud enough for Cuno to hear as he scratched the back of his head, watching her gallop off.

  Cuno narrowed an eye at his old partner. “I do believe you’re in love with the girl, Spurr.”

  “Ain’t you?”

  “Sure.”

  Cuno touched spurrs to Renegade’s flanks, trotting ahead across the fading desert.

  They found the one-armed saguaro a half hour later. The canyon opened just beyond it, between two shelving mesas and near the adobe remains of an old mine shack, with tailings and rotten wood Long Toms strewn across the slope behind it. When they’d gone in and found the spring and set up camp, Cuno filled his canteen at the spring. Spurr was bringing in an armload of firewood, which he dropped beside the charred rocks forming a ring obviously used by many past travelers.

  Spurr groaned, cuffed his hat back off his forehead, and sank down on a rock, adjusting the Starr on his hip. Behind the sun and windburn, his face was pale, cheeks hollow. Cuno walked over and handed him the canteen.

  “No, thanks.” Spurr waved off the flask and crouched over the saddlebags at his feet. He withdrew a bottle he’d bought from the padre. “This’ll do.”

  Cuno set some catclaw twigs in the fire ring, and with his pocketknife he filed some shavings off a paloverde branch around the catclaw. “You look whipped.”

  “I feel whipped. That squaw sets a smart pace.”

  “This is her country, Spurr. Not ours.”

  Spurr popped the cork on the bottle and squinted at Cuno. “Wanna chew that up for me?”

  “I think you’d best head back to the border.”

  “You do, do you?”

  Cuno struck a lucifer to life on his thumbnail and touched the flame to the tinder, watching the flame catch the shavings and catclaw, and grow slowly, a slender ribbon of white smoke rising with the smell of the burning wood. When the fire looked like it was going to go, he leaned back on his heels. “What’re you after, anyway, Spurr? What’re you really after down here, this far out of your jurisdiction?”

  Spurr took another pull from the bottle, throwing his head back and washing the liquid around in his mouth before swallowing as though he’d just ingested a rare elixir. “I told you what I’m after. I’m after that girl. Was gonna rescue her, now I’m gonna tan her hide and take her back to Arizona to stand trial for bein’ an accessory to the murder of her old man.” His eyes were bright and rheumy from the drink as he pointed around the bottle at Cuno. “And as many of them cold-blooded killers as I can throw a loop around.”

  Cuno regarded him skeptically. The flames were crackling as they engulfed the catclaw and paloverde shavings. Cuno set some larger shavings on the burning pile and added a few sticks. “Well, then you’re just as crazy as I first suspected. Even with Fire Eyes guidin’ us and probably getting in a few good licks of her own, we don’t have a chance.”

  “If you’re so damn sure of that, why’d you come?”

  “I don’t know. I reckon for some fool reason I thought you’d see the error of your ways after a day or two out here, and you’d do what any sane man would do and head back to the border. And I’d have the satisfaction of seeing it.”

  “And what would you do?”

  Cuno hiked a shoulder and looked around at the rocky canyon walls and the blue sky greening toward dusk, the lengthening shadows of the shrubs tumbling over the rocks and clumps of buckbrush. Loneliness was a cold breath in his lungs.

  He drew himself up against the dizzying rush of emptiness. “Well, I wouldn’t be heading to the border, I’ll tell you that. I won’t be heading that way for a good, long time, if ever. I have no intention of being led in chains back to that rat farm you call a federal pen.”

  “If you play your c
ards right, I might put in a good word with a judge. I know Sheriff Mason would, too.”

  “Thanks.” Cuno dropped a few more, larger branches on the fire, then rose and grabbed his Winchester. “I’ll take my chances down here.”

  “Lonely damn place for a man alone—no family, no girl, nothin’.”

  “North of the border ain’t much better.” Cuno levered a cartridge into his rifle’s breech, then set the hammer to half cock. He began striding up the canyon. “I’m gonna go shoot us something for supper.” He took another step, swung back around. “And as far as why you’re really here, old man, I know as well as you do.”

  “You do, do you?”

  Cuno shook his head. “I ain’t goin’ that far.”

  He turned away again, and as he walked up the twisting canyon, whose walls closed and then widened around him, he tried to keep his mind off his dilemma. There was no point in thinking about anything that had happened, or was going to happen. He figured he’d thrown in with the half-mad lawman because he had nothing better to do.

  That was as good a reason as any. He’d likely get himself killed, or let the old man get him killed, but he’d never been less afraid of death. He wasn’t ready to die, but he wasn’t afraid of it, either.

  He’d walked up a feeder canyon when he spied a jackrabbit sitting beneath a paloverde tree not far from a moldering deer carcass. Swerving to the right, he crouched behind a rock and watched the rabbit munching grass, its head half turned away from Cuno and downwind. He drew a bead, squeezed the trigger, and gritted his teeth against the rifle’s screeching report echoing off the canyon walls.

  The shot would be heard for miles around, but it was too late to mess with a snare.

  Cuno ejected the spent cartridge, walked over to the dead rabbit, and began cleaning it with his pocketknife. A small stone rattled down the canyon wall to his left. He whipped his head around to see a great mountain lion crouched atop the rocky ridge, staring at Cuno, its ears laid back.

  A hard rock fell in Cuno’s gut, and for an instant, fear froze him. The cat gave its tooth-gnashing shriek, brown eyes flashing demonic yellow, its tail curling up viciously. Cuno dropped the knife and the rabbit and grabbed his rifle, but by the time he’d gotten a cartridge levered, the cat was a gray-brown blur diving toward him from the rocky ridge, extending its long, thick body and giving another wail.

  Cuno raised the rifle defensively, as though to shield himself from the beast. The cat plowed into him, knocking his onto his back so hard, smacking his head on the gravelly ground so resoundingly, that for several seconds he felt ensconced in warm tar. There was a floating feeling.

  Was he dead?

  He blinked his eyes, and as they cleared, he saw the cat’s eyes flashing yellow at him. The lids were slowly drooping closed, and the pupils were narrowing to black pinpoints. The wet tongue, flecked with white foam, came to rest in a corner of its open mouth, the cat’s fangs looking steel blue in the last light.

  The smell emanating from the open mouth was like old urine and rotten meat.

  Wrinkling his nose, Cuno canted his head to the left. The fletched end of an arrow protruded from the cat’s thick, gray-brown neck. Cuno turned his head the other way and saw the razor-edged, strap-iron arrow point, coated in blood, protruding six inches from the cat’s shoulder. Blood oozed out around the ash-wood shaft and started to dribble slowly down through the cat’s fur.

  He could feel the heart fluttering in the beast’s chest, but the cat was a deadweight pinning him to the ground.

  He got his knees and arms under it and heaved it off his side, then slid his legs out and gave it a kick. A brown figure dropped straight down off the opposite ridge and landed on the canyon floor with a solid thud. Still holding her bow, Fire Eyes strode toward him and looked down with the expression of an overwrought schoolteacher.

  “Rifles make too much noise,” she said tonelessly.

  Cuno stared up at her, his heart still hammering, feeling genuinely chagrined.

  He sat up, looked at his half-skinned rabbit and then at the big cat. The rabbit appeared little larger than one of the painter’s broad paws.

  “Thanks for supper,” he said.

  Saying nothing, Fire Eyes pulled a bowie knife with an elkhorn handle from her belt sheath, dropped to her knees, and went to work butchering the wildcat.

  Fighting off the hot flush in his cheeks, Cuno retrieved his own knife and helped her.

  18

  BENNETT BEERS MOVED to the lip of the gorge through which a slender creek flowed amongst willows, cottonwoods, sycamores, and more green grass than he’d seen since he’d left Missouri so many years ago he’d lost count. He could hear a slender stream dropping out of a spring in the ridge wall, and he could hear Flora moaning and groaning as she washed herself.

  He couldn’t see her from this angle, but she’d told him before she’d left the camp that she was coming over here and she wanted him to make sure none of his “low-down” men followed her.

  He’d made sure.

  Beers grinned slyly, stretching his dark mustache, as he started down the game trail that twisted down the steep, sandstone embankment. He followed the trail around a thumb of rock arching out over the gorge, and then he gained the canyon’s bottom and stopped.

  Flora stood before him, beneath another ledge of rock about ten feet out from his. She was naked, and water dribbled down over her blond head and slender shoulders. It curved down her back and fanned out across her slender hips and buttocks that were as creamy and pink as fresh-whipped butter.

  Flora raised her hands to work the water through her hair, pivoting slightly on her hips so that Beers glimpsed the tender half curves of her breasts.

  Beers stood admiring her for a time, wanting to hold on to this image of her for later, when he wouldn’t have her anymore, and then he reached up behind his head and snatched the five-inch Arkansas toothpick from the sheath behind his neck. He moved slowly forward so that his low-heeled cavalry boots would not make a sound on the wet rock. He stepped up behind Flora, then drew his left hand out around her to clamp it over her left breast and, holding her taut against him, slid the toothpick’s freshly sharpened blade about one inch from her smooth neck.

  “Oh!” Flora said throatily, jumping.

  “Hello, my sweet—enjoying your shower?” Beers whispered menacingly into her left ear, letting the five inches of stone-sharpened Damascus steel press against her neck just this side of actually scoring it. With his other hand, he squeezed her breast savagely.

  “Oh—ow—Bennett—what the hell?”

  “Just wanted to let you know that Sapp told me the kind of chicken-hearted connivery you two was up to last night on your little campin’ trip.”

  “What?”

  “Sure.” Beers gritted his teeth as he spit the words out against Flora’s jaw, holding her fast against him with his left hand. “He told me what you two decided on, and he confessed you gave him a tumble, to sorta seal the deal. Told me that, he did, just before I stuck him like a pig and he crawled around squealin’ while he bled out in front of the rest of the men. Ruined supper for a few of ’em. Made it sweet for them that never liked him in the first place, figured he might be a goddamn, pink-panty-wearin’ four-flushin’ bastard!”

  Flora did not struggle, but held her body tight, every muscle ridged, and angled her neck away from the knife Beers held against her neck. He felt her throat work as she swallowed—or maybe it was her pulse—shoving the blade out just a hair.

  In a strangled voice, panting, she said, “Bennett… for chrissakes… I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. If Sapp said anything like that, he’s gone plumb loco, and he shoulda been put out of his misery. Him and me shared no blanket last night, and if he told you we did, he’s a goddamn braggart and bald-faced liar. Why, I’d no sooner let that pig grunt around between my legs than I would a horny javelina!”

  Beers drew his hand from her breast, his knife away from her throat. She tu
rned and looked up at him, her face red with shock and terror, veins standing out in her forehead.

  “Just checkin’,” Beers said, reaching up to slide the knife back into its sheath.

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  Flora crossed her arms on her breasts, the thin waterfall tumbling onto the rocks behind her. “You mean—you were lyin’ about gutting Sapp?”

  “I wouldn’t gut Dave. He’s my right-hand man. If I found out you two been biblical, hell it’s you I’d gut like a pig. I’d wait till our mission was over, and then I’d shoot Dave through his lyin’ heart, but”—Beers winked—“I’d dig him a nice grave and say a few words over him. Can’t blame a man for wantin’ to give you a roll, Flora honey. In fact, I don’t know if I’d trust a man that didn’t… or a man that wouldn’t if he had the chance.”

  “You bastard,” she said in a monotone, flaring her nostrils at him. “You don’t trust me.”

  “Don’t take it personally,” Beers said, walking out away from the waterfall and sitting down on the lip of the ledge, where he could feel a soft, cool spray against his neck. “I don’t trust anybody.”

  Beers swung his feet over the ledge, dug into his silk shirt pocket for a long, black Mexican cheroot, and stuck it between his teeth. He fired a match on his shell belt, and as Flora sat down beside him, wrapping a blanket around her shoulders, he touched the flame to the cigar, puffing smoke.

  “You know you can trust me, though, don’t you really, Bennett?” She looked up at him meekly. “Tell me you were just foolin’, all right. You had me plum scared out of my wits!”

  “I trust you probably about as much as you trust me, Flora. I’m no fool. I know a man like me ain’t trustworthy. But I know you, Flora. I know how you were around the fort, drivin’ your poor pap mad with your cavortin’ with the noncoms. I don’t know if you were just hotter’n a stick of detonated dynamite or if you just wanted to drive him crazy. Maybe kill the poor son of a bitch.”