Bullet Creek (13 page)

While Louise tended the stage crew and passengers—including two well-dressed couples, a young lady with a newborn baby, a cowboy, and two miners—Tom went out and switched the teams. That was normally Mordecai Hawkins's job, but since the hostler was off with Billie in Tucson, it would have been up to Louise if Tom wasn't here. The woman never ceased to amaze him.

As he backed the two fresh horses into the hitch and buckled the straps, he couldn't help wondering if he really deserved a woman like Louise Talon—an old saddle tramp and former gunslick like himself, who still had men wanting to punch holes in his hide.

He finished the switch just in time to refill coffee cups inside the station house and help Louise serve dried apricot pie with fresh-whipped cream. He even relieved the young mother of her eight-week-old baby boy, giving the young woman time to eat her pie in peace while Tom jostled the blanket-wrapped child on the front stoop.

The driver, a salty old Frenchman named Benoit, stood nearby, eating his pie and discussing the trail trouble he'd been encountering between here and Lordsburg—one holdup nearly every three weeks. Though the owlhoots wore bandannas over their faces, the jehu knew they were de Cava riders by the brands their horses wore.

When the young mother took her baby back from Tom and crawled back onto the stage with the other passengers, Benoit released the brake and popped his blacksnake over the fresh team. The stage lurched and rattled eastward through the chaparral. The shotgun messenger, biting a hunk from his tobacco plug, waved his shotgun high above his head. The rocks and cactus consumed the carriage, the dust sifting, the sounds of the thudding hooves gradually fading.

Navarro peered northeast, shading his eyes with his hands. Seeing no sign of Sanchez, Tom went back inside and helped Louise clear the table and wash the dishes. They'd had time to get to know each other on the ride back from Mexico last year, but now, talking while they worked, they began filling in the gaps between the stories.

When they'd finished putting the dishes away and gone back out to the main room, Tom made good on his urge to hold Louise and give her the passionate kiss he'd been dreaming about for a long time. He held her tighter than he'd ever held her, and she held him just as tightly, hands entwined behind his neck. Her mouth opened for him, their tongues pressing against each other.

Her lips had the texture of fine silk, the faint, sweet taste of orange-blossom honey. Clinging to him, she dug her fingers into his neck and moaned softly, her breasts swelling against his chest. He ran his hands down her sides to her waist and the womanly flare of her hips.

When someone cleared his throat, Louise gasped and stepped back. Navarro turned sharply toward the door, one hand slapping his pistol grips. Standing in the doorway, silhouetted against the bright station yard, was the diminutive, bandy-legged figure of Guadalupe Sanchez in a low-crowned, silver-trimmed sombreo and fringed shotgun chaps, a .44 Russian revolver mounted high on his right hip.

“Many pardons for the interruption, Senor Navarro,” the segundo said in his dignified baritone, politely removing his hat and bowing to Louise. “Many pardons, senora.”

He stepped back onto the stoop, turned, and moved off to his right. Presently, wicker creaked as the old segundo sat in one of the chairs positioned along the cabin's front wall.

Tom turned a wry look to Louise, shrugged, then strode out onto the stoop. Sanchez sat with his dusty hat in his lap, both boots on the floor, staring off across the station yard. Seeing Navarro, he rose and smiled warmly, holding out his hand, which Tom shook.

“Guadalupe, you look well.”

“As do you, Tom,” the segundo said, a baleful note in his voice. “In spite of our—how do you say?—dilemma.”

“
Sí
,” Tom said, sitting in the chair to Guadalupe's right with a weary sigh, making the wicker creak. “I guess you probably know Vannorsdell had nothing to do with the don's murder.”

His face the color of an old trail-worn saddle that hadn't been oiled enough, Sanchez stared across the station yard, at a small dust devil that rose on a sudden breeze, danced off toward the west end of the corral and a small hay pile with a pitchfork protruding from it, and collapsed. “Any other man I would suspect, under similar circumstances, but not Don Vannorsdell. I have known him long, almost as long as I have known Don de Cava.”

“I'm sorry about your loss.”

The segundo nodded, his wrinkled eyes narrowing slightly. His gnarled red-brown hands were laced over the buckle of his cartridge belt, moving with the slow rise and fall of his flat belly.

“Any ideas who pulled the trigger?” Tom asked.

Before Sanchez could reply, Louise stepped onto the stoop, carrying a tin cookie tray. On the tray were a bowl of stew, a small plate with two slices of buttered bread, and a tin cup of coffee. The food and coffee steamed in the shadows under the porch roof.

“Mr. Sanchez, I thought you'd be hungry after your ride.”

Sanchez accepted the tray with gracious dignity. As Louise returned to the cabin, he sat back down in the chair and set the tray across his knees. He curled his callused fingers around the cup, brought the coffee to his lips, and shook his head. “I have no idea who killed the don. But . . .” He let his words hang there as he sipped the coffee, then set the cup back on the tray with a puzzled expression, absently brushing his left hand across his thick walrus mustache standing out against the dark hues of his face. “Whoever did it rode a horse with one shoe built up on the right side.”

“You tracked him?”

“Only along the hillside, from the point where the don was shot. The tracks disappeared in the arroyo east of the orchard.”

“You ever see that print before?”

Sanchez shoved the second spoonful of stew into his mouth, chewing hungrily, a slice of bread curled in his left hand. He shook his head. “But I wasn't looking for it.” He swallowed and dipped the buttered bread in the stew. “I am, however, looking for it now.”

“You'll stay on at Rancho de Cava?”

“For a while. Until the don's killer has had his—how do you say it?—reckoning.” Sanchez bit off a hunk of the stew-soaked bread.

Navarro opened his mouth to speak, but Sanchez raised his hand, cutting him off. “I know what you are thinking—that Real or Alejandro had a hand in their father's murder. Considering what they have become, your suspicion is understandable, my friend Tom.”

“Do you think it's possible?”

Sanchez shook his head. “You see, I have lived with the boys nearly every day of their lives, and while they have become a blight on Rancho de Cava and will no doubt run the operation into the ground—and while I would break a stout oak branch over their heads—they do not have it in them to kill their padre.”

“Not even for the ranch?”

Again, Sanchez shook his head. “It is not possible. It is a Spanish thing. It would be like pissing on a church altar before the admonishing eyes of a hundred saints. It cannot be done.”

“What about Lupita?”

“Ah, Lupita,” Sanchez said with a knowing half smile, swabbing his empty bowl with the second slice of bread. “She is another story. That one does not have a conscience. She could have pulled the trigger herself . . . or convinced one of the riders to do it.”

Leaning forward in his chair, elbows on his knees, Tom nodded. Lupita could get nearly any man to do nearly anything, he knew, having been in her clutches one long, bewitching night in Tucson about fifteen months ago.

“We have Alejandro,” he told the segundo now.

Sanchez looked at him sharply. “He is alive?”

“Took a bullet to the shoulder. He'll be down for some time, but it looks like he's going to make it. He shouldn't be moved for another week.”

“I was hoping the little bastard had gone to meet his Maker.” Sanchez sighed and shoved the last bite of stew-soaked bread into his mouth, then wiped his mustache with the back of his hand. “It is just as well. His death would only fuel the fire.”

“Want him back?” Navarro asked, fingers laced together and favoring Sanchez with a flat, wry expression.

The segundo shrugged. “Do I have a choice?”

He and Tom each rolled and smoked a cigarette. Louise brought out the big pot, refilled their coffee cups, and took Sanchez's tray back into the cabin.

Drawing deep on his cigarette, Tom said, “I'd like to bring the kid back myself.”

Sanchez exhaled smoke, glancing at Navarro, a faint glimmer of curiosity in his old brown eyes.

“I'll bring him back in one week, under a white flag.”

“It might be better if I ride over and pick him up, Tom.”

“I'd like to talk with Lupita. If I bring her brother back alive, I might be able to convince her the Bar-V's back isn't up and that Vannorsdell didn't kill de Cava. In the meantime, can you keep Real off his warhorse?”

It was hard to tell with his skin so dark, but Sanchez seemed to flush slightly with chagrin. His lips parted, then closed. The segundo stared northwest across the station yard, beyond the corral and the barn, his eyes narrowing and the muscles in his face drawing taut.

He sat frozen, staring, both hands resting on his thighs, cigarette stub smoldering in his right hand. His head moved slightly. His eyes slid across the ground before the cabin, to the right of the two horses tethered to the hitching post.

Navarro followed Sanchez's gaze. A conical shadow separated from the shadow of the cabin's roof on the hard-packed, hay-flecked ground, about twenty feet out from the porch. Straight above, the roof squeaked.

“A thousand pardons, Tom,” Sanchez said, rising slowly from his chair, his right hand dropping the cigarette stub and moving to the stout Russian riding high on his right hip.

He drew the revolver and fired two shots into the porch roof.

The reports sounded like two quick thunder-claps as they echoed off the cabin and around the yard. Dust and wood slivers rained down.

Above, a man grunted and cursed in Spanish. The ceiling shook, dust sifting downward, as a body hit the shingles. The man rolled over the roof's lip, following his high-crowned sombrero dangling from the thong around his neck, and hitting the ground before the porch with a solid thud.

“I believe I was followed,” Sanchez finished.

A second after the man had rolled off the roof, a rifle cracked in the yard's northwest corner, the slug slamming into the cabin over Sanchez's left shoulder.

As Sanchez returned fire, Tom spied movement in the opposite corner of the wagon yard. A bearded man wearing a straw sombrero and two cut-down holsters ran up from the rear of the corral. As he dove behind the stock tank by the front gate, Tom drew his revolver and fired three shots, two bullets plunking up dust around the tank and another slamming into the split-log rail before it.

As more guns opened up around the cabin, Tom leapt off the porch, untying both sets of reins from the hitch rack, then slipping both rifles from their saddle boots as the horses, frightened by the gunfire, bolted eastward into the chaparral.

Leaping up the porch steps, Tom tossed Sanchez his old Spencer. The segundo caught the rifle one-handed. Holstering his big revolver, he cocked the rifle and pressed his back against the cabin as two bullets tore widgets from the porch floor in front of his boots. He extended the rifle and fired a shot toward the barn.

“Inside!” Navarro yelled from the cabin's open door.

He poked his gun out the doorway and fired three shots, covering the segundo as Sanchez bolted into the cabin. As Guadalupe ran to the west window, Navarro fired one more shot through the door, then pulled the door closed and barred it.

Navarro turned from the door, raked his gaze around the cabin. “Louise?”

As if in reply, a rifle shot sounded from the kitchen. Navarro ran through the kitchen door, stopping just inside the small room dominated by a black iron range. Louise stood before the open back door, a rifle raised to her shoulder.

Beyond her, a stocky Mexican had fallen to his knees, both hands cupped to his blood-soaked belly. In one hand he held a sawed-off shotgun. His face bunched with pain, lips stretched back from his gritted teeth, he began raising the barn blaster.

Louise cursed and, working the Winchester's lever, ejected a spent shell and jacked another into the breech. She aimed and fired.

Peering over her left shoulder, Navarro saw a round hole appear in the Mexican's left temple and blood spray out the back of his head. Both arms flying straight out from his sides, he flung the shotgun like a hot potato. He fell awkwardly, legs curled beneath him, and lay still.

Sensing Navarro behind her, Louise turned her head, her eyes meeting his incredulous stare. Louise kicked the door closed. “Friends of yours?”

“Not anymore,” Tom said, setting his rifle against the wall.

He leaned into a heavy table on which bread, vegetable peelings, and a paring knife were strewn. Louise set down her rifle, hurried around the table, and helped Tom slide the table snug against the door.

Tom picked up his Winchester. “Any other ways inside this place?”

Sanchez's rifle cracked in the main room, sounding like thunder echoing in a narrow canyon.

“No.”

Tom's gaze was hard and commanding, belying his anxiety. “Stay in here and keep down.”

He hustled back into the main room as Sanchez, sidling up to the west wall and extending his Spencer through the window, snapped off a shot. The segundo quickly ejected the spent shell and slammed a fresh one into the Spencer's chamber.