Bullet Creek (20 page)

When he came to the edge of the ridge, he dropped to a knee. Quirley in his teeth, he shaded his eyes with his left hand and peered southwest, where the de Cava men had been hazing the Bar-V cattle. The men had worked the herd a little farther southeast along the dry water course. Two were fully visible, sitting along the north bank of the course, probably smoking quirleys, taking a break from their labors. They seemed to be looking this way.

Navarro glanced over his right shoulder. The smoke billowed up from the brush and low tree-tops, tattering and tearing only after it had risen a good two hundred feet above the growth.

Tom turned back to the riders. He sucked on the quirley and waited. After a few minutes, a third rider joined the first two, and they sat their mounts abreast, staring this way.

“Come on,” Navarro said, exhaling cigarette smoke. “Better check it out.”

One of the men turned toward the water course. A faint whistle rose. When two more men had joined the three on the bank, the five began moving toward the ridge, reining their Arabians through the sand sage and brush carpeting the rocky playa.

Navarro took another drag off the quirley, stubbed it out in the sand, shoved soil over it with the heel of his hand, and rose. “Muchas gracias, amigos.”

Carrying his rifle down low on his right side, he walked back to the fire, where Alejandro sat wide-eyed and still, no longer fighting the gag. His gaze met Navarro's with unbridled animosity.

“I know,” Tom said, moving around to the other side of the fire and tossing another green branch onto the flames. “I'm the son of a low-down dirty sow. Been called worse by better hombres than you, Junior.”

Alejandro made several low grunting sounds, barely audible through the pinecone and the neckerchief. Navarro moved to the cracked granite wall and began climbing, pulling himself up one-handed by the cracks, holding his rifle in his left hand. It wasn't a hard climb, but on top, he sat back against the cliff, wedged into a little nook around which some brush spiked, huffing and puffing as he tried to catch his wind.

Cursing his tobacco habit, he rolled and smoked another cigarette. Watching the smoke from the fire rise before him and gradually thin, he waited.

Below the ridge upon which Navarro waited, Alejandro de Cava sat against the tree, breathing through his nose and trying to remain calm so he wouldn't gag on the pinecone. His heart thumped in his ears. Before him, the fire burned down until only a few thin smoke wisps rose, tattering on drafts.

Birds chittered in the brush.

After what seemed like hours, the crunch of a footstep sounded on his left. He turned toward the sound.

A vaquero whose name he couldn't remember appeared, walking slowly into the clearing, a cocked pistol in his left hand. When the man saw Alejandro, he stopped, stared at the kid for a moment, then rolled his eyes around the clearing, not moving his head.

Another man appeared on Alejandro's right, a shorter man named Toribio wearing a blue bandanna around his forehead. The bandanna shone brightly beneath the brim of his stovepipe hat. A long yellow grass stem protruded from between the man's teeth, bouncing as he moved, swinging his Sharps rifle from left to right and back again. He, too, stopped when he saw Alejandro.

The kid grunted through the gag, jerking his head and eyes up, trying to indicate the ledge above and left. Both men looked at him, frowning.

A third man appeared, then two more, all wielding rifles or pistols, moving into the clearing, crouching and jerking their heads this way and that. Alejandro canted his head back, and one of the men backed toward him, swinging his rifle around.

When the man turned and crouched beside the kid, slipping two fingers beneath the bandanna just left of the kid's mouth, Navarro's head appeared just over the lip of the ridge. Alejandro tensed.

The foreman snugged his cheek against his rifle butt and sighted down the barrel. He'd positioned the sun behind him, so all Alejandro could see was a silhouette against the gray cliff behind him.

Alejandro's heart skipped a beat.

“Freeze,” Navarro said.

The vaqueros wheeled toward him. Seeing Navarro cheeked up to his rifle, three of the five froze. Two raised their weapons. Navarro's rifle blasted one through the left temple, the other through the belly. The second man fired his Spencer into the ground as his knees buckled. With only a single quiet grunt, he fell forward and rolled onto his side, holding his bleeding belly with both gloved hands.

Navarro worked his loading lever, a two-syllable, metallic rasp in the clearing's silence. He raised the rifle again to his shoulder, swinging the barrel around as the three vaqueros stood gawking up at him, red-faced.

“We're gonna do this nice and orderly,” Navarro said. “You all throw the guns you're holding over here to the base of the ridge.”

The three stared up at him, eyes glinting savagely beneath their broad hat brims. He doubted they were fluent in English, but their eyes betrayed their understanding.

“Vamos!” he shouted.

One jerked with a start, then lowered his rifle and swung it underhanded to the cliff's base. It landed with a thud. The other two complied at the same time, their pistols clattering together in the brush near the rifle.

Navarro trained his rifle on the man with the stovepipe hat, standing beside Alejandro. “You, Mr. Lincoln, remove all your other weapons. When I come down there and frisk you, you better have gotten rid of them all, or your jaw is going to have one hell of an introduction to my rifle butt. Comprende?”

The man stared up at him, one eye narrowing. Navarro gazed down the rifle barrel and repeated the orders in pidgin Spanish. The man slid back his short leather jacket with his right hand, removed a pistol from a shoulder rig and tossed it with the others. When he'd removed another pistol from a cross-draw holster on his right hip, he crouched slowly, bending his knees. Staring up at Navarro, he slipped a long stiletto from the high top of his right boot and tossed it over with the guns. He straightened and, holding his hands straight down at his sides, turned them palms forward.

One at a time, the other two men went through the same maneuver, until there were nearly a dozen pistols and four or five knives in the grass at the base of the ridge. When Navarro ordered them to lie facedown with their hands on their heads, he climbed down from the cliff, his rifle trained on the clearing. He retrieved the coiled rope lying near Alejandro, who stared at him wide-eyed, gaunt cheeks mottled red with exasperation, and trussed up the trio like hogs for a roast, wrists bound to ankles.

Leaving Alejandro and the pistoleros in the clearing, he tramped off to look for their horses. A half hour later, he had the five vaqueros, including the two dead men, tied belly down across their saddles, though the two dead were considerably more sedate than the living. Alejandro wasn't any too pleased, either, and voiced his complaints at the top of his lungs while spitting bits of the pinecone still lodged in his teeth.

Nibbling jerky, Navarro tied all the horses together in a long line behind his claybank. He took a long pull from his canteen, washing down the jerky, then turned to regard his caravan. The dead men were covered with their blankets.

Alejandro brought up the rear, sitting slouched in his saddle, his hair mussed and seed-flecked, his eyes heavy-lidded and dark. His tirade had wound down as the fatigue had set in. Tom was glad. He had to resist the notion to turn the younker belly down across his saddle and throw a blanket over his head.

Navarro mounted the claybank and jerked his caravan down off the ridge and into the playa, moving southeast toward the de Cava hacienda.

 

On a brushy plateau east of the playa, Real de Cava stared through his field glasses at the tall, silver-haired man in the high-crowned black hat leading the horses toward a notch in a jog of olive hills. De Cava followed the procession for nearly a minute, sliding the glasses slowly from right to left, using his gloved hands as visors, shielding the lenses from the sun glare.

Lowering the glasses, Real shook his head, chuckled, and ran a hand across his nose. “If I had a man like that on my role, I wouldn't need you, Cayateno, or half my other gun wolves.”

He looked at the blocky-framed Mexican hunkered on one knee beside him. Cayetano Fimbres raised the heavy Sharps buffalo gun to his right shoulder, the octagonal barrel glistening darkly in the midday sun. Real placed his right hand on the barrel, shoved it down.

“No, no.”

“Why not?” protested the regulator, frowning beneath the brim of his buckskin sombrero. “Four hundred yards is nothing for this weapon.”

“I'll hear what my friend Navarro has to say back at the ranch. Then, after I've given him a drink for returning the worthless Alejandro, I'll kill him myself.” Real glanced at the gunman's younger brother, Pepe, who stood on the other side of Cayetano, holding an old Burnside rifle in both hands, as if eager to use it. “Pepe and I will return to the hacienda. You, my good friend, continue to the Bar-V, as we discussed.”

“I wish to go with Cayetano,” Pepe protested. When Real's eyes glittered angrily, the boy swallowed and added, dropping his gaze to his rope sandals, “I mean . . . with your permission, jefe.”

“You cannot cat around like your brother. You will—”

Cayetano Fimbres had risen to his full six-feet-four, shadowing Real, who glanced up at him warily. Cayetano spoke in a burly monotone, not looking Real in the eye. “The boy comes with me. I am teaching him.” Now he slanted a grim glance at Real, the gunman's eyes black as a cave. “So he will not have to take orders from mice like you, Real de Cava . . . unless he is well-paid for the indignity.”

Cayetano turned, tapped the boy on the shoulder, and headed down the hill. The boy glanced at Real, a jeering twinkle in his eye, then followed his brother down the hill, trying not to skip.

Real's gaze bored into Cayetano's broad, buckskin-clad back.
Ungrateful bastard. I never should have given him his first hunting rifle. The peon thinks he's bigger than those he once chopped hay for.
Real spat and scratched his head. Once the Bar-V was taken care of, he'd have Cayetano done for, as well. He'd make it look like an accident. Wouldn't want to put the man's beguiling sister, La Reina, off.

Real followed the two down to where their horses were tied in an ironwood thicket, and watched them mount up and ride away.

“Report back to me as soon as it's done,” he shouted, trying to reassert his authority.

Neither Cayetano or Pepe so much as glanced back at him. His chest burning, Real mounted his Thoroughbred and whipped it toward the hacienda.

Riding east behind Cayetano, Pepe said, “I do not wish to insult my brother's abilities, but do you think you can really get into the Bar-V's yard without being seen?”

“Of course,” the older Fimbres said simply, not turning around, his thick black hair bouncing on the collar of his elaborately stitched buckskin tunic.

Pepe frowned, studying his brother's back and trying to suppress his apprehension. “Will we wait till nightfall, Cayetano?”

“At night, the rabbit hunkers in his borough. When the sun is high, his guard is down.”

From behind, Pepe saw the dark skin of Cayetano's right jaw rise with a smile.

An hour later, they'd left their horses in a gorge and scrambled like coyotes through rocky swales and over cactus-tufted hills until they crossed Bullet Creek and entered the Bar-V compound. Moving slowly, keeping their eyes and ears open, and having to change course twice when they found their route blocked by Bar-V hands working around the barns and stables, they finally hunkered down behind a crumbling rock wall that had one time enclosed a melon patch. Before them lay the east side of the barracks-like rock house. Voices rose on the patio.

His breath a low wheeze in his throat, Cayetano set his rifle on a rock and slid his cheek up to the smooth-worn walnut stock. Kneeling beside him, Pepe squeezed his own inferior rifle in his hands and tried to slow his breathing.

Ten minutes earlier, Karla Vannorsdell had entered the house with Lee Luther on her heels.

“Grandfather?” she called, walking through the foyer into the house's cool, deep shadows still smelling of the sope saguado Pilar had fixed for lunch. She strode through the high-ceilinged sitting room to the old man's office. Finding the room vacant, she headed for the house's other end, her calls echoing off the rock walls.

She was crossing the living room again when she realized Lee Luther was no longer behind her. She turned into the foyer. The boy stood just inside the main door, hat in his hands, shuffling his boots as though the floor were hot.