Crack in the Sky (64 page)

The sergeant met him in the middle of the room. Conchita screeched in horror as they grappled, arms and legs a blur. For a fleeting moment Bass was gratified that his opponent had burst into the room without a weapon … gratified, that is, until the Mexican cocked back a huge, hard-boned fist and drove it against the American’s temple.

With the light of a thousand shooting stars the darkened crib lit up as Scratch rocked back on his bare feet, then shifted his weight back farther still to keep from pitching over, when the sole of one bare foot landed on the wide band of thick leather. He stood there, blinking his eyes to clear them of stars as Conchita burst up from the floor, shrieking, her arms outstretched before her as she lunged for the sergeant’s arm curling in the wavering candlelight, in that hand a long double-edged dagger appearing right out of the air.

Ramirez swore at her while she struggled to pull the arm down far enough to seize the knife. Sobbing, she implored him as Bass blinked again, trying vainly to clear the rain-soaked cobwebs from his mind: hearing men banging the wall outside, the grunts and curses in a foreign tongue, McAfferty’s cries almost as foreign to his ears.

“‘… will I lay apart the Philistines like sheaves of wheat!’”

Then, as Scratch sank to his knees, his temple throbbing still but the shooting lights grown dim, he felt the belt beneath one hand. And beneath the other, the rock-hard rawhide sheath.

At the moment Titus seized the scabbard in one hand, gripped the knife’s handle in the other—he watched the sergeant clench his beefy left hand into a fist, drag it back as a man would cock the huge goosenecked hammer on a smoothbore, then fling it at the woman’s face.

The wide row of hard knuckles struck Conchita squarely across one eye and the bridge of her big nose. Titus watched her head snap back from her shoulders like a withered shaft of the corn he sheared with a huge scythe back on that Kentucky farm so many years ago. As the woman collapsed against the wall, smacking her head into the crude mud bricks, Ramirez slowly quartered around on Bass, grunting from somewhere within his barrel of a chest.

The soldier’s long blade shimmered in the candlelight as he held the weapon out in front of him and began to snarl in Mexican.

Just behind the lieutenant’s shoulder a knot of shadows
congealed against the crude plank door; then a body collided with the door itself, smacking the planks against the mud wall as the man melted to the floor and in stepped a white-headed warrior. His long hair flowing about his shoulders like corn silk in that muted candlelight, McAfferty immediately whirled about, putting his back on the room as he inched inward—a tomahawk in one hand, his long skinning knife clutched in the other. Foot by foot he retreated, holding more Mexicans at bay there in the darkened doorway.

Both Bass and the lieutenant realized McAfferty had his back to them at the same moment.

Like a strip of night torn from a midnight sky itself, Ramirez whirled and brought up his dagger, yanking it into the air as he started to lunge for McAfferty.

And like sunlight glancing off the rushing surface of mountain creek water, Scratch exploded from the floor. Slinging his left arm around the soldier’s bull-thick neck, he plunged his skinning knife into the side of the barrel of a chest there below the arm raised to strike McAfferty.

With a piglike whimper of surprise, Ramirez jerked, muscles tensing as Bass felt his thin blade slide along a rib for an instant, then suddenly plunge in clear to the hilt.

He had it buried until it would sink no farther.

The soldier tried jerking away, tried flinging Bass to the side, but the American clung there like a bloated tick to the hump of the herd bull.

Stumbling to the side a step, the Mexican nonetheless swung his knife downward at McAfferty. Missed. Then yanked his huge knife back into the air to try it again.

Bass’s arm pistoned only enough to free his knife from the enemy’s chest before he jabbed its razor point between another pair of ribs, feeling the warmth ooze over the back of his hand as he twisted the skinning blade this time, working it side to side through the muscle, slashing it on into the man’s bellows.

Again from the corner of his eye Scratch watched that huge right arm swing up and down toward McAfferty—realizing too late that the lieutenant’s target was not the
white-head. The Mexican was arching his knife back at the naked tormentor plastered on his back. Too late—

“Arrrghghgh!”

The pain grew hot as the huge flat blade plunged into the meat of his right thigh, close to the hip.

So much pain that Bass almost went faint, sensing his damp, sweaty grip loosening around the Mexican’s neck. Feeling his hand releasing the warm, slick handle of his skinning knife.

“Asa!” Titus cried out desperately as he watched the muscular Mexican yank the knife out of his leg and cock it into the air for a second plunge.

At his call McAfferty whirled in a crouch no more than three feet from the sergeant and immediately raked his left arm to the side before him. The dull oil-blued metal of the tomahawk blade slashed through the Mexican’s flesh, which gaped like a bloody mouth opening with bright-red berry juice the way Mexican women stain their own lips with the seductive red of the
alegría
, that honed blade cleaving the entire width of the man’s belly in that one smooth motion as the Mexican’s arm drove downward, completing his reflex.

Ramirez’s knife planted itself into Bass’s leg a second time before the big, hard-knuckled right hand tensed into a bird’s claw, releasing the weapon’s handle. He left it quivering in the meat of the American’s thigh.

“‘The bows of the mighty men are broken, and they that stumbled are girded with strength!’”

Feeling his supper smack itself against his tonsils with the icy pain, Bass slid backward, no longer able to hang on to the lieutenant’s neck. Scratch’s moist, sticky right hand opened and closed, empty now as he struck the cold earthen floor. His knife still hung in the Mexican’s chest as McAfferty whirled away, growling, cursing, spewing biblical invocations at his enemies who crowded against the doorway, working against themselves to get at the white-headed American.

“‘Whoso sheddeth a man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God made He man!’”

Asa lunged toward the shadows in the door as Bass
sensed Ramirez begin to totter to the side, both his arms clutching his belly, where blood splattered his forearms, the first squirt of purplish-white gut puerting from the wound that had nearly cleaved the huge man in half.

Mumbling moistly around the blood that burbled from his lips, the Mexican lurched to the side, suddenly stiffening as he collapsed to his knees, his eyes opening wide, his chin sagging. Ramirez pitched forward onto his face across Conchita’s legs.

She began moaning in that slow, dull-witted, dazed, and wounded way of an animal … realizing a dead man pinned her legs to the floor, his warm blood gushing over her bare flesh, pooling on the ground around them, soaking into the pounded clay. But her guttural moans became unearthly shrieks of horror the moment she attempted to free her legs from their prison beneath Ramirez’s bloody, eviscerated body.

“Mr. Bass!” McAfferty cried as he backed another step into the room, one moccasin landing in the black puddle as the sergeant’s blood pooled near the center of the tiny crib. “
’Lust not after her beauty in thine heart; neither let her take thee with her eyelids!’
Cover your nakedness before the eyes of this whore and come help me!”

How it hurt with a cold fire now to slowly drag that hot metal from his flesh, the whole of his leg from toe to hip throbbing with pain … just as two Mexicans leaped through the narrow doorway and McAfferty stepped back, a foot slipping in the dark puddle of the dead lieutenant’s blood.

In a smooth sweep Bass brought Ramirez’s knife up as he rocked onto his one good leg, jabbing forward the moment one of the soldiers cocked his arm over his head, knife in hand. Scratch caught the Mexican squarely in the left side of his chest, low. Dragging the big double-edged stiletto to the side, he felt the blade separate the muscle between two ribs, slash on through the tough muscle of the lung as the soldier recoiled in a jerk, attempting to pull away so violently, he struck the mud wall behind him. Dead, as he struck the floor already littered with another man’s blood.

Hearing the crack of metal against bone, Scratch whirled—finding McAfferty yanking the tomahawk out of the side of another soldier’s skull, letting the gurgling Mexican sink slowly to his knees before Asa flung the dead man back against the crude table where the pig-lard lamp spilled to the floor, snuffing itself out with a stifling stench of rancid bacon.

In the light of that one small candle, McAfferty spun for the last of the shadows in the door, flinging the knife an instant before pulling his pistol. He fired at the shadows, the sudden light blinding them all in the closeness of that tiny room.

“It’s time to find your pistol, Mr. Bass!”

His hands gumming with drying blood, his knees cold on the earthen floor, then suddenly warm as he crabbed through the Mexicans’ blood, Scratch searched the darkness for where his pistol had fallen in those frantic, fevered moments as the whore grappled with his belt, coat, and clothing. Beneath the flap to his capote he felt the short, hard barrel. Flinging back the thick blanket wool, Bass seized it with his left hand, dropping the knife from his right to fill it with the pistol butt as he palmed back the hammer with his left hand.

Brought it up just as another shadow burst from the darkness of the hallway. Firing at the black hole the figure made in the dim, flutting candlelight. How his eyes stung with that bright-yellow jet of flame spewing from the muzzle as the shadow hurtled back against the door, its wooden planks slamming against the mud wall with a hollow sound.

“Gather your damned clothes!”

Scratch couldn’t agree more. He scooped up his leggings and moccasins, stuffing everything inside his war shirt before he jabbed his arms inside his coat sleeves as McAfferty swept out of the darkness and whacked his pistol against the side of a soldier’s head the instant the Mexican leaped into the room.

Scratch clambered to his bare feet, trying to balance on that one good leg, flinging the wide black belt around
his waist and buckling it as he stabbed the knife into its scabbard, shouting, “Let’s get!”

At the doorway a step ahead of Bass, Asa stopped, peered quickly at the three bodies of unconscious men who lay sprawled across the hall, then looked toward the dull, dancing light of the parlor, where women still shrieked and more than four vaqueros stood shoulder to shoulder, squinting into the darkness of the hallway. Their own knives at ready, each one waited half-dressed, their bare-breasted whores clinging frightened to their backs, peering between the shoulders of the men as they clamored and swore and screamed. Behind them flitted a huge, blurry form half-illuminated and backlit with more than two dozen candles.

As he followed McAfferty from the doorway, Scratch stopped a moment and gazed down that narrow hallway so low a man almost had to duck, peering at those vaqueros, at that gaggle of prostitutes, at that fat and frantic madam who had looked upon them both with such disdain—eager to take their American beaver money, eager perhaps to help the lieutenant and his soldiers take their American lives once she had her fat fingers secured around their beaver pesos.

How he wished he could plunge his knife into her heart.

But Asa grabbed a fistful of Bass’s capote and yanked him farther into the darkness, on down the narrow hallway and out a door so low, they both had to duck as they plunged into the shocking cold of that moonless night. Dogs barked nearby on the far side of this mud-walled den of whores. Voices streaked out of the starshine beyond in the streets with a growing echo. Coming closer. Angry voices accompanied by the clatter of hard-leather boot heels and the jangle of arms.

“Forget the horses!” he snarled at McAfferty.

“On foot?” Asa demanded in a harsh whisper. “All the way to Workman’s?”

“You figger us to make it out of town in our own saddles? When those horses are out in front on that street?”

For a moment in the dim, silvery light, McAfferty stared this way and that—his mind working feverishly. Then shook his head. “We’ll have to steal a couple of horses on our way out.”

“We better,” Bass swore as they started away, pressing themselves into the shadows along the adobe wall. “We gotta make it to Workman’s place afore the soldiers do … or our hash is fried.”

The bear of a shadow loomed out of the night as if it were a tattered shred of the black sky itself.

Bringing up his knife, Bass braced himself on his good leg, prepared to cut his way through more enemies—

“Bass!”

Confused, Scratch turned to glance at McAfferty a flicker of a moment, whispering, “Who is it knows my name?”

“Kinkead!”

“Damn,” he sighed in relief as the shadow inched closer, taking shape as the big American stepped into the starshine. “Matthew.”

“It really is you, Asa McAfferty,” the shadowy shape said as it came to a halt right before them.

“Pray—what finds you here, Mr. Kinkead?”

“You don’t have the time to listen to my story,” Kinkead explained, seizing them both by the shoulder and shoving them back toward the shadows at the side of that narrow street, the very same shadows where he had just emerged.

Scratch looked in one direction, then another. “Where?”

“Out of town, now!” Matthew ordered. “On four legs!”

“I’ll kill for that horse of yours!” Bass husked. “I won’t make it on my two—”

“He’s game,” McAfferty explained. “Took it in the leg.”

Kinkead turned on Bass. “You walk on your own?”

“How far?” Titus asked, his face pinched in pain.

“The corner,” Matthew said, pointing. “Here,” and
he swung an arm around Scratch’s shoulder, nearly hoisting him off the ground as he set off in a trot, Bass’s feet all but dangling on the crusty snow.

Leading them around a corner at the end of the long row of low-roofed adobe houses, Kinkead lunged for the reins of one of the three horses he had tied to a tall wooden post buried in the ground. “Take your pick of them two—but leg up quick, fellas.”