Red Moon (20 page)

“I see,” said the livery barn owner. “That explains what I saw in their faces.”

Sam looked at him as they walked along.

“What did you see in their faces?” he asked.

“I saw only death,” the man said grimly, staring straight ahead.

“Look long enough, you can see death in anybody's face,” said the Ranger.

“This is true,” said the Mexican. “But I didn't have to look very long to see it in theirs.” He looked sidelong at the Ranger. “Be careful that their deaths do not become your death too.”

“I'm going to try my best,” the Ranger said.

•   •   •

When he'd wiped the wet, mud-streaked barb down with an empty cloth feed sack, he pitched a worn and well-attended California-style saddle atop its back and cinched it. The speckled barb stamped a hoof in anticipation and shook out its wet black mane.

“Don't start right off rushing me,” the Ranger said, giving a quick rub on the horse's muzzle.

Stepping into the saddle, his Winchester in hand, he buttoned his swallow-tailed coat and pulled a brown rain slicker over it, buttoning the slicker all the way closed and flipping up the collar beneath his hat brim. He pulled on a pair of leather trail gloves the Mexican liveryman gave him and tapped the barb forward toward the open barn door.

Rain from the roof splattered across his shoulders as the barb walked out of the barn into the blowing rain. Sam leaned in the saddle and followed the three deep sets of hoofprints with his eyes, seeing them fade away in the mud and rain less than five feet away. But that was all right for now, he thought, already knowing the direction the two would start off in.

The pair of detectives would go back along the same trail out of Picate that they'd ridden in on. At the main trail they would turn right toward Twisted Hills—toward the Blood Mountains,
Montañas de Sangre
,
as the Mexican had called them.

Putting the barb to a light gallop in the rain, splashing through the mud, he noted that the animal made no more than a short reflex response to both the flicking slice of lightning and the rumble of thunder following it.

“Good boy,” he said down to the barb. He pulled his hat tighter onto his forehead and rode on, not stopping or slowing the barb until he reined it up at the T in the trail and looked off to his right, where he knew the Twisted Hills lay obscured in the silver-threaded rain.

Turning the horse in that direction, he touched his bootheels to its sides. But as the horse started to advance, he reined it up sharply.

“Wait a minute,” he said aloud to himself, holding the barb in check.

It is Orez's lair. Everybody who knows of him knows not to go there,
he heard the Mexican say to him only a few minutes ago.

What were you thinking?
he admonished himself. Maybe the wooden fid had knocked him off his usual game. He reined the barb around quickly on the trail and looked off in the opposite direction. There was something about the wagon being where they'd found it that wasn't right, he thought—Tillis and Jenny Lynn had seen it too, he was certain.

Beneath him the barb pawed at the mud and blew out a breath.

“All right,” Sam said, straightening the animal back on the trail to Trade City where they had found the empty wagon. “I hope you like running in the rain.”

In the pouring rain, Tillis and Jenny Lynn had struggled with the large rock until it had finally come free from the mud with a loud sucking sound and lay half over onto its side. Some of the stitches on Tillis' forehead had popped open. Pink-red blood ran down his face in the rain. His hair was plastered to his bare head. But he still managed to let out a chuckle of delight when he saw the bank bags piled under the rock where Orez and his two men had buried them.

“And here we find it, lying in wait for us!” he said. “Just like we knew it would be!” Laughing, he shuffled his feet a little on the wet muddy ground.

“Shhh, take it easy,” Jenny Lynn said in a lowered voice, trying to quiet him down. She looked around warily through the rain. Lightning flickered in the black sky.

“Take it easy, hell!” said Tillis, still laughing. “It's ours, and there is nothing or nobody going to take it away from us, Jenny. Do you hear me? Nothing or nobody!” he shouted on the hillside above the trail where the Trade City posse had found the body of Freeman Manning with his guns tied in his hands.

Jenny Lynn shook her head and picked up the shovel Tillis had brought along from the Picate livery barn. She began digging a wider space under the overturned rock to better reach the bags of money stuffed beneath it.

Tillis watched her dig for a few minutes, standing with his collar held snug around his neck, the bone-handled Colt stuck down in his waistband behind his coat.

Seeing her stop digging and start tugging at one of the bags to get it freed up beneath the rock, Tillis sighed and shook his head in exasperation.

“Here, get up out of there,” he said, reaching a hand down to help her up. “Let a man do it.”

Jenny gave him a spiteful look but didn't reply. She sank the shovel blade into the dirt, took his hand and stepped up away from the rock. The rock swayed back and forth a little as she pushed against it on her way to her feet.

Tillis gave a short smirk and stepped down where she'd been standing.

“We'd be here all day and night, as slow as you were going,” he said, stooping down, taking a hold on one of the bags and pulling hard on its string-tied top. “Jesus,” he said. “The rock's got it pinned under it.”

“Why do you think I was digging?” Jenny said coldly.

“Blast it!” said Tillis. He put a hand on either side of the rock and shoved hard back and forth to get its weight moving and tip it the rest of the way over. As he rocked it back and forth, he grunted, saying, “What the hell is it going to take to get this thing to—” His words stopped as the big rock tipped slowly over toward him. “Oh no!” he shouted as he shoved the rock with all his strength.

Jenny let out a short scream and tried to reach over and help him shove the rock. But it was too late.

“Holy God!” she shouted as she saw the rock turn over against all of Tillis' efforts and flop on top of him, smashing the helpless man down into the mud and the bags of money beneath it. The weight of the rock jarred the soft earth and settled atop Tillis with a deep thud, pinning him from his waist down.

“Get it off me! Get it off me!” Tillis shouted, near panicked, the weight crushing him below his waist.

“What can I do? Tell me!” Jenny shouted, tearful, near panic herself.

Behind her, a man stepped into sight, walked over near the rock and looked down at Tillis.

“If I was you,” he said calmly to Jenny Lynn, “I'd use a rope and horse.” He smiled. “Hope I'm not butting in.”

Jenny Lynn gasped, turning to face Hardin.

The gunman smiled and touched his wet hat brim, a long Colt hanging in his hand, his thumb over the hammer. He wagged the gun barrel, gesturing to where more rocks of similar size lay strewn on the ground a few yards away.

“That's what we used, Orez and me,” he said. “To get the rock from there over to here? We roped that big boy, tied our horses to it, yanked it up right out of the ground.” He turned his smile down to Tillis. “Once it was unstuck, it rolled for us like a big ol' croquet ball.”

“Who—who are you?” Tillis asked in a halting voice. He tugged on his gun handle, trying to free it up. Hardin looked at what he was doing but didn't seem concerned.

“I'm Evan Hardin,” he said. “Part of that money you're trying to steal belongs to me. The rest belongs to my pal Wilson Orez. I expect you've heard of him?”

“We're not stealing it,” Jenny said. “Part of it rightfully belongs to us. We set up some big-paying jobs for Orez.”

“I see,” said Hardin, water dripping from his hat brim. “So you were going to only take some of it? Leave the rest of it, make sure we all got what was coming to us?” He chuckled. But then his chuckle stopped abruptly, his friendly smile vanished, as he swung a pointed finger at Tillis.

“If you get that gun pulled, you'd better shoot yourself instead of me. Because without me, you're going to die right there, half in, half out of your grave. Nightfall, when the critters come for you, guess how good you'll taste to them, all fresh and screaming while they chew out your eyes and dig their way inside your skull through the empty sockets.” He licked his lips as if imitating a wolf or a coyote.

Jenny Lynn stood staring, mesmerized by his vivid words.

Tillis lay crushed down into the money bags, his Colt mashed beneath his coat just at the edge of rock lying atop him. He'd managed to get his hand inside his coat and around the gun handle, but he hadn't been able to pull it free. His hand fell in submission.

“Please!” he begged, nearly hysterical. “Get me out of here, mister! For the love of—”

“Hush, now,” said Hardin, cutting Tillis off as if he were an unruly child. “Blaspheming never helps, especially not at a time like this.”

“Please help me get him out of there!” Jenny said, finally coming around. “Do you still have the rope?”

“Come to think of it, yes, I do still have it,” said Hardin. “It's on my horse, just around that big boulder there.” He lowered the Colt into his holster. “Why don't I just get it for you?” He pointed in the direction of the path around the big boulder.

“Plea-please,” she said.

Hardin started to turn and walk toward where he'd left his horse. But he stopped in second thought.

“Oh, before I go get that rope, we need to talk about what's in this for me,” he said, rubbing his thumb and fingers together in the universal sign for greed.

“Anything!
Anything!
” shouted Tillis. “Hurry, please. I can't feel my legs! You can have my share, all of it,
please!
”

“Hear that?” Hardin asked Jenny Lynn, a bemused expression on his face. “Can't feel his legs. Wants to give me
his
share.” He stepped in closer to Jenny Lynn. “Does that mean you're willing to give me your share too?”

Jenny Lynn stalled and didn't answer.

“Well, does it?” Hardin said.

“I don't know,” said Jenny Lynn. “I mean, I hadn't thought about it.” Her eyes darted back and forth between Hardin and Tillis like a trapped animal. “I—I need my share of that money. Isn't his share enough? He's the one stuck with a rock on his belly.”

Hardin laughed and shook his head as he raised the Colt from its holster again. Jenny Lynn's eyes widened.

“I swear, you people kill me,” he said. “You're both bargaining with money that doesn't even belong to you.” He cocked the Colt and raised it.

•   •   •

Following the main trail as far back as where he, Jenny Lynn and Tillis had found the overturned buckboard, the Ranger slowed the barb to an easy gallop and cut up a steepening trail running alongside a stream of runoff water. Beneath a familiar black sky, blowing rain and thunder and lightning looming low above him, he rode the desert barb along a higher, more treacherous route that would lead him to the place where they had found the dead outlaw atop the bloody rock.

Higher to his right lay the southern end of Twisted Hills, a line of rugged rock hills so named by the Apache long before the lathed boot of the white man had stamped its imprint on the desert lands. Above the Twisted Hills stood Blood Mountains, where Orez would have them believe he'd fled to. But the Ranger wasn't falling for it.
Huh-uh. . . .

Orez wouldn't have attempted to carry all that money by horseback with a posse breathing down his neck. Neither would he have ridden off and left it unguarded, taking a chance on its being gone when he returned for it. Orez was still here, the Ranger told himself, pushing the barb on through the driving rain.

By midmorning the fierceness of the storm had only lessened a little as the Ranger rode upward diagonally away from Twisted Hills, away from the longer, safer switchback trails and took a shorter, rougher route that would have staggered most horses. He noted that the hard-boned desert barb didn't seem to mind.

When he knew he had ridden well past the switchbacks below, he rode back down through the rain on a steep narrow path to the main trail—a trail that he knew would have cost Tillis and the woman twice as long to travel.

No sooner had the barb's hooves touched the main trail than he heard gunshots in the distance, six of them, slow, steady, the timing seeming deliberate. Turning the barb sharply toward the gunfire, he tapped his bootheels to its wet sides and put it forward in a run along the muddy trail. He could almost picture in his mind what had just happened at the boulder where he'd found Freeman Manning's body. The money would be there; he was sure of it.

•   •   •

Jenny Lynn stood wide-eyed in front of the rock where Foster Tillis lay helpless and spent. He'd had to give up on drawing his gun from under the weight of the heavy rock for the moment. He lay catching his breath, the rock crushing down on him. Jenny Lynn felt her nose burn from the smell of gunpowder drifting around her in the falling rain. On the ground in front of her, Hardin was writhing in the mud, his Colt only inches from his fingers as he gasped and struggled, dark blood spewing from his bullet-riddled lungs.

“I—I was coming back,” he managed to say, trying to push himself up, his palms sinking into the mud. “I swear . . . I was.”

“I don't believe you,” said Orez, stepping forward, drawing his big knife from its sheath. He reached down, gripped Hardin by his hair and raised his head at a sharp angle.

“No, no!” said Hardin.

But his words turned into a gurgling sound as the edge of cold steel sank deep and sliced hard, leaving a dark streak of blood spewing out from the beard stubble on his throat. Jenny Lynn half covered her face and winced at the quiet deadly sound of steel cutting through human flesh and tendon again and again until she shuddered as she heard the thump of Hardin's head splash in the mud.

“There, it's done,” Jenny heard Orez say. She opened her eyes and watched him stoop and wipe his knife clean on the muddy ground. A flash of lightning cast him in a stark gray-purple light.

She closed and opened her eyes again, this time looking at the young, strange Mexican woman who stood ten feet behind Orez, her face a mask of terror, the gun she'd used to shoot Evan Hardin still smoking, hanging in her trembling hand.

“You done well, Rosa,” Orez said to Rosa. He stepped over to the stunned, shaking young woman and took the gun from her hand. “That wasn't so bad, was it?” he said to her.

She trembled so hard she couldn't answer. Instead she shook her head as best she could and stood, her left arm across her midriff, gripping her right arm at the elbow. She managed to look at Jenny Lynn, whose eyes pleaded with her as Orez dropped the spent cartridges from the big Colt, reloaded it and put it back in Rosa's hand.

“Now her,” he said evenly, giving a short nod toward Jenny.

“Her too?” said Rosa, her face pale, ashen.

“Yes, her, too,” said Orez, stepping forward, staring at Jenny Lynn as he helped her point the Colt at the helpless woman. “Today is the day for everybody to die.” He cocked the Colt for Rosa.

Behind Jenny, pressed under the rock, Tillis was struggling again to raise his Colt, knowing it was the only chance he had to save himself, as slim as he knew that chance might be. But it was no use; the pistol wasn't coming out. He would die here, he told himself, helpless, with a loaded gun in his hand.

“Take your time, Rosa,” Orez coached her, stepping away from Rosa, closer to Jenny Lynn. “Take good aim and squeeze the trigger, the way I showed you.”

Please,
Jenny Lynn said silently, her lips forming the word, but unable to say it aloud. She saw the young woman standing behind the gun, ready to pull the trigger. But in a flash of hope, Rosa turned the gun away and aimed it at Orez's back. Jenny gasped aloud at the explosion as the hammer fell.

Orez winced and jerked in place, then straightened and turned around, walking stiffly back to Rosa Dulce, his hand on the bone handle of his big knife.