Bullet Creek (16 page)

“You sure you should go back to Rancho de Cava?” Navarro asked Sanchez.

They had draped the dead attackers belly-down across their saddles. It was late afternoon, and the dusty stage yard was all shadows and ocher light. The horses, tied tail to tail, snorted and stomped disapprovingly at the heavy copper smell of blood.

“I must go back and find out who killed el patron,” the old segundo said, standing beside his pinto, reins in his gloved right fist. “If not for him, I would be an old bandit living alone in the mountains.”

“I imagine these fellas have a few friends back at the rancho who might not like what happened to 'em,” Hawkins speculated, glancing at the dead men humped beneath their own saddle blankets. Flies hovered over the bodies in thick clouds.

“I have a few friends left myself.” Sanchez turned out a stirrup and stepped into his saddle with unusual grace for a man of his years. “Not many but a few.” The segundo thought of Lupita, who only last night had asked him to stay on at Rancho de Cava. He reached down from his horse, shook Hawkins' hand, then Navarro's.

“I'll bring Alejandro home Monday afternoon,” said Navarro.

“Sí,
but it is a risk.”

Navarro bunched his cheeks in a wry expression. “Yeah, and I reckon you and me haven't had much luck avoiding trouble so far.”

“If I am—as you say—still kicking,” Sanchez said, “I will cover your ass.”

“Gracias, old friend.” Navarro pinched his hat brim and stepped back beside Hawkins as Sanchez gigged his pinto forward, leading the grisly procession out of the station yard and eastward into the chaparral, where quail and cactus wrens flitted and chirped amid the greasewood.

Casting glances after Sanchez, Navarro and Hawkins walked across the yard and mounted the cabin's porch, where Louise and Billie stood, soiled and weary. “Why didn't you bury the men out here?” Louise said, staring into the desert where Sanchez's salmon-tinted dust sifted over the pale green chaparral. “Why is he taking them back?”

“Guadalupe's got his own way of doin' things,” Tom said.

Louise shuttled her gaze from the trail to Navarro and Hawkins, both men bloody from the scrap. “Let's get you boys inside so I can tend to those wounds.”

 

Nearly an hour later, when the sun had set behind the western crags, Sanchez reined his pinto to a halt on the lip of a shallow gully. He freed the horses and led them, two by two, into the gully and let them drink at a small spring bubbling up from mossy stones. The run-out was little more than a muddy cup sheathed in Mormon tea, but the day's heat lingered, and the horses needed any water they could get.

He was leading the last two horses into the gully when he spotted a peculiar print in a sand drift still scalloped from the spring rains. He stared at the print, then led the horses to the spring, dropped their reins, and walked over to the track, pulling his trousers up at the thighs and hunkering down for a look.

It was the same print he'd seen in the pecan orchard, near where the don had been shot.

Frowning, Sanchez stood and moved across the gully, finding several more prints with the same built-up shoe, some half obscured by cattle and wild horse tracks, before losing them altogether in a rocky flat on the other side of the gully.

He stared across the flat for several minutes, pondering the terrain, realizing that even if he had more light, the tracks would be impossible to pick up again in the rocks. Pensively chewing his mustache, he returned to the spring, gathered up the reins of the two horses he'd left there, and led them up the bank to the others.

When he had all the horses tied tail to tail, he mounted the pinto and led off again toward the de Cava headquarters, nestled in the darkening hills to the northeast. When the headquarters appeared, only a hundred yards ahead, he removed his big Russian from its holster and filled the chamber he usually kept empty beneath the hammer.

He chuckled. What would an extra bullet do if Real's thirty or so riders turned on him? Still, if they sent him to the saints, it would be comforting to send six to the devil.

He rode into the yard, threading around the outbuildings, scattering the goats that had not yet been penned up for the night. The long, L-shaped bunkhouse lay before him, its shutters thrown back from the lamp-lit windows, its heavy doors standing wide. Several vaqueros milled around the veranda, some holding coffee cups, others whiskey bottles. Two were tossing bowie knives at the side of a hay wagon parked nearby, the thuds loud in the still desert night.

Hearing the slow clomp of Sanchez's horses, a man on the veranda turned drunkenly. “Hey, what do we have here?”

The others turned, as well. The knife throwers stopped their game to turn and gawk as Sanchez reined up beside the wagon, the packhorses stretched out in a long line behind him, the lamp-light showing on the blankets.

The segundo tossed the lead rope at one of the knife throwers. Dull with drink, the man didn't grab for the rope until after it had bounced off his chest. “Better bury these drygulchers before they attract wildcats,” ordered Sanchez.

A couple of the vaqueros had peeled back the blankets to peer at the cadavers then regarded the segundo, their eyes narrowed with incredulity. “Sanchez, you shot these men?” asked a tall man named Theron. “All these men?”

A stocky form stepped through the bunkhouse's open door, playing cards fanned out in his right hand, a fat stogie in his teeth. Real's large-roweled spurs chinged on the veranda floor. He stood silhouetted in the doorway for several seconds, staring toward Sanchez and the horses lined out behind the segundo, hanging their heads after the long ride.

“What do we have here?” Real growled, removing the cigar from his teeth.

Other men from the veranda were looking over the bodies, clucking with amazement. One of the knife throwers turned to Real, his voice pitched with awe. “Sanchez killed them: Raoul, Pablo, Valdez, Tangoria, and de Marco!”

Real stiffened slightly when de Marco's name was recited, his nostrils flaring. He turned to Sanchez, his brows arched skeptically.

“I do not like being shadowed by your broncos,” said Sanchez. “In the morning, why don't you have your men do something worthwhile, like hazing those yearlings down from the Cordova Flats? It is time we all got back to work around here, don't you think?”

With that, Sanchez gigged the pinto forward. Real stared after him, frozen.

The hair of one of the dead men gripped in his fist, a wiry half-Comanche gunman named Cortozar turned to Real. “Do you really think . . . ?”

“Shut up,” Real said, sticking the cigar back in his mouth and thoughtfully puffing smoke. “Get rid of them.”

“Bury them?”

“Just get rid of them.”

Fifty yards away, Sanchez halted the pinto beside one of the rancho's several corrals, which was connected to a sprawling adobe stable. The segundo unsaddled the pinto, turned it into the corral, and was forking hay into the slatted crib when footsteps sounded behind him. He dropped the pitchfork and spun, clawing the .44 from its holster.

“Stop—it's Lupita!” came the female voice. The silhouetted figure moved toward him in the darkness, a black shawl draped around her head and shoulders. She stopped a few feet away, glanced down at the pistol in Sanchez's hand, and curled her lip. “You are faster than I would have thought. Maybe more willing, too.” She paused. “I was walking by the well when you rode in with the dead men.”

Depressing the hammer, Sanchez holstered the .44. “I didn't kill them all.” He looked around, making sure they were alone. “I had help from Tom Navarro.”

Lupita glanced around quickly, then stepped toward him to hear him more clearly, hissing, “What?”

“Tom and I met at the stage station to discuss the don's murder. Those five followed me.”

Lupita's whisper was shrill and accusing. “What were you doing with Navarro?”

“I told you, senora. We met to discuss—”

“Surely you wouldn't believe anything he has to say!”

“Navarro is an honorable man.”

“He works for a murderer.” Lupita narrowed her eyes. “What of Alejandro?”

“He is alive. When he is well enough to travel, Tom will bring him home.”

A curious mix of emotions crossed her face. Sanchez wondered which name had caused it: the Bar-V foreman's, her brother 's, or both.

Lupita's right eye twitched again with anger as she said, “Real will kill him. He works for a murderer.”

Sanchez shook his head. “Senora, do you really think Senor Vannorsdell would be stupid enough to kill the don a kilometer from the hacienda?”

“In a moment of rage, with my father stubbornly refusing to sell to him? Why not?”

“They were friends. They held this country against the Indians.”

“Don't be a fool, Guadalupe. You know what this land would be worth to Vannorsdell.”

Sanchez studied the woman for a time. She had been his primary suspect, but that was changing. Maybe she was much softer within than without. Seeing that her eyes were not as certain as her words, he fashioned a knowing, lopsided smile. “Who are you trying to convince, senora? Me or you?”

Angrily, she wheeled, her skirts swirling. She stomped a few yards away and stopped, facing the hacienda rising on the slope beyond her.

She wheeled back to him. “If not Vannorsdell, who?”

“One of our own, I am afraid.”

“Why?”

“If we knew that, we would have our killer.”

There was a pause. Lupita's expression was thoughtful as she held Sanchez's gaze. “One of Real's gun wolves?”

Sanchez was happy that she had opened her mind to possibilities beyond Vannorsdell, but the mystery remained. “Perhaps.”

Lupita drew a long breath through her nose, her shoulders jerking. “My father must be avenged!”

Lupita heaved another exasperated sigh, then turned and started toward the hacienda. Sanchez had turned back to the hay crib when her voice rose behind him again. “You better move into the hacienda. You have few friends in the bunkhouse.”

He turned back to her, opening his mouth to object. Lowering her eyes demurely, she cut him off.
“Por favor, el segundo.
You are the only one who can help me find my father's killer.”

Sanchez stared at her probingly, taken aback by the statement. As uncomfortable as bunking in the house would be, she was right. He couldn't avenge the don from his own grave. He inclined his head. “Of course.”

“You can have the room beside the don's.” With that, she turned, her low boots crunching gravel as she climbed the slope to the house.

When Sanchez finished forking hay, he stowed his tack in the stable, then walked over to the bunkhouse, holding his rifle down low in his right hand. The horses bearing the dead men had been led away, and only two men sat on the veranda, smoking and passing a crock judge back and forth between them. They stopped talking and drinking to stare curiously as Sanchez mounted the veranda and strode past them and into the bunkhouse.

Stopping just inside the door, the segundo surveyed the room. Only about half of Real's men appeared to be here, gambling or lounging about their bunks under a thick haze of tobacco smoke. The others were probably running horses up from Mexico or hitting banks in small Mexican towns. Real was playing five-card stud at one of the two round tables, chewing a stogie, his eyes bright from the sangria one of the farmers had brewed.

Spotting Sanchez, Real did a double-take, then removed his cigar and grinned. “
El Segundo,
won't you join us?” He extended his right hand, indicating an empty chair with a mocking flourish. He knew the segundo did not gamble.

“I am moving out,” Sanchez said, striding down the aisle between the bunks, the smoke so thick he could barely make out the faces of the men lounging on either side of him. Some read magazines or old newspapers. Others played solitaire, cleaned and oiled weapons, sharpened knives, or simply drank by themselves, brooding. José Horan's pet rat sat on his chest. He fed the rat bits of crackers, coaxing the rodent onto its back legs as it nibbled the cracker from between the pistolero's fingers.

A pudgy, round-faced hombre with a thin black mustache and a hideously scarred nose looked up from a bowl of beans as Sanchez passed his bunk.

“Did you really kill those men or was there divine intervention?” Several other men snickered.

Sanchez unlocked the door of his private room, stepped inside, set his rifle in a corner, and lit the lamp on his table. From the main room, someone yelled, “The next game is for el segundo's quarters!”

Sanchez trimmed the lamp's wick, then stooped to retrieve his saddlebags from beneath his cot. He stopped when something moved under the cot's single wool blanket, up near the pillow.

Watching the thing move around ever so quietly, Sanchez grabbed an edge of the blanket and threw it back. The thick stone-colored diamondback coiled up tight as a wheel hub, gave Sanchez its flat-eyed, evil glare, and rattled loudly. The forked tongue shot out of the arrow-shaped head, and the rattle, big around as the barrel of a .45, was a quivering blur.

Sanchez stepped back, palmed his revolver, and fired two shots, severing the head and spraying blood across the cot. The body spasmed, whipping. In the main room, guffaws shook the rafters.

Sanchez holstered his .44 and grabbed his saddlebags out from under the cot. When he'd stuffed his few possessions into both flaps, including his old Bible, he slung them over a shoulder, grabbed his rifle and his brown wool poncho and rain slicker off a hook by the door, and left the room, leaving the door wide behind him.