.45-Caliber Cross Fire Page 15

  “Poor son of a bitch?” Flora exclaimed. “I told you what he did to me. Tried to keep me enslaved in that house of his, like I was his damn chambermaid. And I could tell you other things he did, too, Bennett, if I didn’t think it would turn your stomach against me.”

  Bennett chuckled as he stared out at the tree-lined creek the waterfall trickled into via its natural stone aquaduct, the leaves shimmering in the pink evening light. A great stone bridge stood over the canyon to his right, built by the conquistadores over two hundred years ago and still used by the peasants in the area.

  Faintly, Beers could hear the mules of his caravan braying for supper a hundred yards up the canyon on his left. The party had stopped for the night a few hours after Flora and Sapp had met up with Beers’s five remaining wagons at a fork in an old Indian road.

  Bennett didn’t believe a word the girl said about her old man’s improprieties. He’d soldiered closely to Abel Hammerlich for nearly a year, and while he’d hated the man’s sternness and painstaking attention to detail, he’d been no different from any other fort commander. Most of all, the colonel had been no pervert.

  “What’s so funny?”

  Beers gave her a sidelong look. “A girl as pretty as you should learn as soon as she’s out of swaddling clothes to fend off any man, including her father. If she had to.”

  Flora bunched her lips. Veins bulged in her forehead, just above her nose. She whipped her hand back, then brought it forward. It smacked Beers’s face so loudly it echoed. “You don’t believe me!”

  Beers laughed, drew a big arm around her shoulders, and kissed her. She struggled against him, finally broke away.

  “Bastard!”

  “Oh, come on, Flora!” Beers said with a laugh. “You been waggin’ your ass so long, I think you’re startin’ to believe your own bullshit.” His face sobered instantly, his steel-blue eyes turning hard as stones in their deep sockets mantled by thin, black brows. “And if you ever hit me again, I’ll kill you.”

  Flora stared at him, gulping. Finally she ran her hands up and down her pale, damp thighs, fidgeting, then broke into a laugh. “Ah, come on, Bennett. You an’ me gotta lighten up. I do believe we’ve both started to take ourselves too seriously!” She squeezed his arm, then pressed her cheek against it, curling her bare legs and snuggling against him as she changed the subject. “The men piss-burned about losin’ those two other wagons, are they?”

  “They’ll get over it.”

  “We mighta gone back for ’em. Lord knows we got enough weapons to stand against any amount of men the army might have sent down here.”

  Beers shook his head and blew a smoke plume out over the canyon. “Not worth the delay or the risk. We’re due at Cuesta’s train day after tomorrow. Besides, we can make up the money we lost with them wagons by robbin’ a few banks in the gold country west of here on our way down to Mexico City.”

  Beers turned to Flora and studied her creamy, naked body beside him. She was shivering, as the air was turning cool. “Darlin’, I do believe you’re chilly.”

  She snuggled tighter, giving an alluring little groan, against him and pressed her soft lips to his neck, about the same place he’d held that Arkansas toothpick to hers.

  “Need me to warm you up some?”

  Flora lifted her face toward his, her eyes bright, and nodded slowly. Beers reached around behind her shoulders to grab a fistful of her wet hair and pulled it back, lifting her chin. He kissed her. She snaked her arms around his neck and returned the kiss, moving her body enticingly against his.

  “I’m glad you and Dave is both still my friends,” he said quietly, smiling into her face.

  “I’m glad, too, Bennett. You’re my only friend,” she said, “from here on out. Oh, we’re gonna have a lovely life in Mexico City!”

  Beers picked her up in his arms and carried her down to the brush lining the creek, where she’d left her clothes and blankets. She pressed her head to his chest and closed her eyes, enjoying his big, warm arms wrapped around her, holding her close, but thinking what a thrill she would have soon, when she used his own knife on him.

  Later, as they were both dressing in the greenish, fast-fading light of dusk, a pistol crack echoed from the direction of the camp upstream along the creek. Beers, buttoning the fly of is whipcord trousers, jerked his head in that direction and narrowed his eyes.

  “Somebody taking target practice?” Flora said. Pitching her voice with dark irony, she added, “Or they fightin’ again?”

  A man’s muffled shout sounded, and then more gunfire crackled from upstream. Beers’s pulse hammered in his ears—they couldn’t lose any more wagons!—and he reached for his gun belt where he’d tossed it into the brush just before lowering himself between Flora’s supple thighs and quickly wrapped it around his waist and buckled it. Seconds later, he and Flora were sprinting upstream, their rifles in their hands, leaping deadfalls and rocks.

  Pistols and rifles continued hammering for several minutes beneath angry shouts that echoed around the canyon. Then there was the tooth-gnashing rat-a-tat-tat of a Gatling gun opening up—one short burst followed by a long one and then another short one.

  “Shit, they have one of the guns!” Beers bit out as he and Flora continued to run upstream.

  Just before they came to the leftward bend in which their camp had been setup, Beers stopped, sucking air. “Flora, you head around to the left and get down behind them rocks. Stay there till I tell you it’s safe to come out. I’m gonna cross the stream, try to get behind that Gatling gun.”

  “Banditos, you think?” Flora said, her voice pitched with exasperation as she began running through the willows toward the canyon’s southern ridge.

  “I don’t know what the hell to think,” Beers said with a growl as he began splashing into the stream. “Hell, this is Mexico!”

  19

  THE SHOOTING HAD stopped by the time Beers had gained the base of the escarpment on which his men had set up a Gatling gun to watch over the camp from the north. Keeping the scarp between himself and the camp just on the other side of the stream, he looked up the knobby wall toward the top, from which a Spanish-accented voice was now shouting, “Throw down your pistols and rifles, amigos, and we let you live! We will even give you some tequila for your long ride back to the border! If you do not obey my command, however, my twenty men will kill you like dogs!”

  “Twenty men?” Dave Sapp shouted from the direction of the camp. “Bullshit—you don’t have twenty men out here!”

  The Gatling gun hiccupped. In the following silence, the man atop the scarp shouted, “Twenty men and one Gatling gun. You wish to live or die?”

  There was another silence. Slowly, Beers began climbing the backside of the scarp. It was a steep climb, but there was a natural corridor amongst the rocks and plenty of foot-and handholds.

  He was halfway to the top when Sapp shouted, “You want our wagons, come and get ’em!”

  Pistols and rifles began thundering from the other side of the stream. The Gatling gun began opening up once more, and Beers quickened his pace, gaining the top after a minute of hard climbing. He could see the back of the Mexican crouched over the Gatling gun—a bulky silhouette in the twilight—the gun spitting its empty cartridge casings over the stocky Mexican’s right shoulder.

  Behind the man, one of Beers’s men, Kiowa Ames, lay unmoving in a pool of his own blood. His neck was a black, nasty mess of gushing blood.

  Beyond the man shooting the gun, Beers saw the silhouettes of about five men crouched amongst the willows on the near side of the stream, rifles flashing as they fired across the stream toward the camp around which the wagons had been circled.

  “Twenty men, my ass,” Beers said, sneering, as he stepped over Ames and reached up to slide his Arkansas toothpick from the sheath behind his neck. Crouching behind the man shooting the Gatling gun to avoid the return fire of Beers’s own men, he moved up on the man until he could smell the sweat and leather stench of him, t
hen grabbed the man’s long braided pigtail and jerked it back.

  The man screamed as his head came up and back, and Beers put his head up right close to the Mexican’s, grinning into his shocked eyes. “Fandango’s over, amigo.” He slid the toothpick slowly across the man’s throat.

  The Mex grunted liquidly.

  Blood squirted straight out before him, splattering the smoking Gatling gun, and within seconds he began convulsing. The tension left his body, and Beers released his pigtail. The Mexican slumped to the ground near Aimes.

  Beers cleaned his toothpick on the man’s wool coat, frowning, studying the stocky Mexican more closely. He was dressed in deerhide and buckskin, with bandoliers crisscrossed on his chest. He had a broad face, cheekbones tapering to a jutting jaw, and a spider tattoo on his left cheek. His half-open, dead eyes were green.

  Rage was an insant blaze inside the outlaw leader.

  “Why, you… !”

  Beers slipped the toothpick back into its sheath, then crouched over the Gatling gun, edging the barrel down toward the gun flashes and crouching, silhouetted figures on the near side of the stream. He began furiously turning the crank.

  Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam!

  Screams rose from the willows. Through the weblike haze of the Gatling’s smoke, Beers saw the figures jerk or slump or leap or twist around, and fall. In less than fifteen seconds, he silenced all the guns on his side of the stream.

  Beers kept his head down as he stared off across the Gatling gun toward the wagons on the other side of the creek. No guns flashed over there.

  Finally, Sapp said out of the near darkness, “Boss?”

  Beers lifted his head. “They’re dead. Get over here, Dave!”

  He wheeled, stooped over the dead bandito, and lifted him over his shoulder. Grunting under the weight, he walked past the Gatling gun and heaved the body over the edge of the scarp. After two seconds there was a loud, crunching thud.

  He looked toward the camp, saw Sapp and two other men wading across the stream glittering pearl and violet. Flora was angling toward him from his left. Beers cursed, turned, and descended the escarpment the same way he’d climbed it.

  He was standing over the dead outlaw when Sapp, Bill Finnegan, and C. J. Corcoran were walking up, slouch-shouldered with chagrin.

  “Sorry, Boss,” Sapp said. “Somehow they got Tack to the south of us and Aimes to the north, and caught us by surprise. How they got through the pickets I sent out, I can’t fathom.”

  “Your pickets are most likely dead—just like Tack and Aimes. Any others?”

  “Just two wounded. They can both still skin a team, though. Good thing we had the wagons in a circle.”

  Beers kicked the rounded side of the dead man sprawled belly-up at the base of the scarp. “Recognize him?”

  Sapp crouched over the dead man, then knit his brows as he looked up at Beers. “Carlos Riata?”

  “That’s right. One of the most feared banditos in all of Sonora. Story has it he does killing and thieving jobs for the Federales, when they don’t want to be implicated themselves and start another revolution.”

  “Well, Jesus Christ. No wonder he slipped up on us quiet as a damn coyote.”

  “Fortunately, he didn’t sneak up on me,” Beers said.

  “Nor me,” said Flora, giving Sapp a hard look of reprimand.

  Beers kicked the dead Carlos Riata hard in the side and cursed. “And it’s no damn coincidence he targeted us.”

  Sapp winced, said darkly, “You think Cuesta sent him?”

  “Why not have your highest-paid bandito rob us rather than pay us off fair? You ever know an honest Mexican?”

  Beers cursed again, then brushed past Sapp and Flora and the others and took long, angry strides toward the stream. “That double-crossing son of a bitch just double-crossed the wrong goddamn gringo!”

  The next day, around noon, Renegade threw his left front shoe.

  As Cuno, Spurr, and Fire Eyes rounded a broad bend in the trail they’d been pushing hard on, trying to make their rendevous at the Fuerte River gorge well in advance of the gunrunners’ wagons, Cuno heard the clink of the shoe rolling off the side of the trail and piling up against a rock.

  Cuno pulled back on Renegade’s reins, scowling down at the cracked shoe, and cursed. Spurr and Fire Eyes checked their own horses down and blinked against the dust catching up to them. Cuno groaned, stepped out of the saddle, knelt down, and picked up the shoe in his hands, squeezing it as though to break it again in frustration.

  “That’s the trouble with shoes,” said Fire Eyes in her characteristic imperious tone, flashing her haughty eyes. “They come off.”

  “Girl’s got a point,” said Spurr.

  “You two go on. I’ll head back to the village we just passed. There’s probably a blacksmith there who can forge a new shoe.”

  “All right,” Spurr said with a nod, adjusting his hat and turning his head forward. “Break a leg, kid.”

  He booted Cochise on up the trail, and he and Fire Eyes soon had their horses loping once again, eating up the trail they followed across a parched flat where only small tufts of cactus and white rocks seemed to grow. Earlier that morning, they’d crossed the saddle of a small mountain range and were heading for another sierra growing taller ahead of them on the shimmering southern horizon.

  A half hour later, they passed along the edge of a giant, round crater, a good hundred yards in diameter and no doubt carved by a falling meteor—Spurr had seen other such sites in Arizona and New Mexico Territories—and entered an area of scalloped lava rock rising from both sides of the trail, like the totems of some alien civilization.

  A large hawk was perched on one, about fifty yards off the trail to their right, fluffing its feathers and watching them stonily. When they’d ridden well beyond the bird, it screeched behind them, and Fire Eyes instantly drew back on her reins, frowning at the oddly shaped formations tilting around her, some no taller than her horse, some a hundred feet high and serving as a pedestal for others.

  Spurr glanced at the Yaqui queen and drew rein, frowning. “What is it?”

  She looked around nervously, dark eyes darting about in their sockets, lines of consternation cutting across her forehead. She stiffened as her gaze held on something off the trail to their left. She had just started to swing her rifle down off her shoulder when a voice said in Spanish, “Hold it right there, or we gun you both where you sit!”

  Spurr followed the man’s voice as well as Fire Eyes’s gaze to an H-shaped formation not far from the trail. The man was staring between the two upper bars of the H and aiming an old Civil War model Springfield Trapdoor rifle at Spurr and Fire Eyes. He wore no hat, and his black hair was cut in a straight line over the top of his forehead.

  He shouted orders in Spanish, and suddenly the rocks were raining men dressed in dusty, dove-gray uniforms and wearing wagon-wheel sombreros. They all held old rifles and had pistols on their hips in covered black holsters. Some wore two or three cartridge belts around their waists; some wore them crisscrossed on their chests. They were a ragged lot, dirty and sweaty, red-faced from the sun, but the uniforms they wore were of the rural Mexican police—Rurales.

  “Ah, shit,” Spurr said tightly, stretching his lips with a frustrated grin.

  As men scrambled around them from both sides of the trail, the man who’d spoken came down out of the rocks—a stocky gent a little under six feet, in his late thirties or early forties, clean-shaven, and looking all business. The others—there were ten Rurales in all, a few looking well under twenty and fidgeting around inside their too-large uniforms—stood within ten feet of Spurr and Fire Eyes, cocking and aiming their rifles from their shoulders.

  Spurr offered a stiff smile and raised his hands to his shoulders, palms out. He’d been afraid he’d run into a Rurale, so he had his story all written out in his head.

  “Hola, amigo,” he said now in his limited Spanish to the man striding toward him, looking angry. “No ne
ed for all this pomp and circumstance. I’m a lawman, like yourself.” He’d seen the lieutenant’s bars on the shoulders of the stocky gent’s gray tunic, one pocket of which was torn and hanging. “Name’s Spurr Morgan—Deputy United States Marshal Spurr Morgan out of Denver, Colorado Territory. I’m here on official business, and don’t worry, it’s all been given the stamp of your own government in Mexico City. You probably ain’t gotten word yet, but I’m sure a letter’s in the mail.”

  He chuckled, trying to put the serious-looking officer at ease. It didn’t work. The man stopped just off Cochise’s left wither, scrutinizing Spurr through one narrowed eye before narrowing the other at Fire Eyes. He canted his head to one side, frowning, then strode slowly around Spurr’s horse to stop in front of the cream stallion that was nodding its head nervously.

  The man said nothing for nearly a minute. Fire Eyes stared straight ahead, chin lifted proudly. She could have been sitting there by railroad tracks, waiting for an overdue train.

  Finally, the lieutenant stiffened and took one step back. “Fire Eyes!” His tone was not so much recognition as accusation. He raised his rifle to his hip and hung his lower jaw in shock. “Si, si—it is you, isn’t it? My god, what are you doing out here with this old gringo?”

  Fire Eyes only let her gaze flick to the man before hardening her jaws and staring straight off over the heads of the men aiming their rifles at her.

  Spurr felt as though he were sitting on a mound of fire ants.

  “Fire Eyes here,” he said, gesturing at the woman beside him, “is my official guide. I’m after a passel of bank robbers trailing here from Arizona, and she was kind enough to offer her services. Now, I’m sure you have a bone or two to pick with the little gal, but she’s promised to mend her ways, so I do hope you’ll see fit to gaze beyond them bones for now. This is an important mission I’m on, and like I said, I do have the blessings of both our countries.”

  He couldn’t let the Rurales know what he was really doing here, as he wasn’t sure how closely allied they were with the Federales led by General Cuesta.