Bullet Creek (11 page)

Vannorsdell blinked up at his tall foreman.

“If you noticed, Sanchez wasn't among the riders we swapped lead with,” Navarro said. “That old vaquero's too sharp to pull a chuckleheaded stunt like that.”

“You stay away from de Cava range, Tom. I don't need to lose my foreman on top of all this other grief.”

“I'll meet him on neutral ground.”

“Even if you two do smoke the peace pipe together, it wouldn't matter. Real and Alejandro don't listen to him anymore. They got their bristles up, and they're painted for war.”

“I'll send him back with word that Alejandro's alive. That'll mean something to Real and Lupita. I'll set it up to turn Alejandro over to Lupita later. If she sees we saved her brother's life, she might listen to what I have to say. I've had some run-ins with Lupita myself, but I don't think she has it in her to kill her father.”

“You've had run-ins with Lupita?”

Navarro flushed slightly and took a drag off his cigarette.

Vannorsdell studied him. “What kind of run-ins, Tom?”

Navarro turned and began walking down the hill toward his claybank silhouetted against a falling bloodred sun, cigarette smoke billowing around the foreman's head.

Wistfully puffing his cigar, Vannorsdell watched him mount up and ride off down the hill. “Damn, that had to been like makin' love with a rattlesnake.”

 

Navarro stopped at the big house, its windows lit against the night. Finding the young Mexican unconscious in an upstairs guest room, with Pilar knitting in a chair beside the bed, and a guard posted in the hall, Tom returned his horse to the stables.

He ate with his men in the bunkhouse, issuing the next day's work orders and assigning picket riders. When he'd silenced the punchers' grumblings about riding out to the de Cava place and finishing the fight the de Cava men had started, he walked back around the stables and across the arroyo to his cabin.

He mounted the ramada, placed a hand on the door latch, and stopped. Facing the door, he heaved a long sigh. “One of these days you're gonna get yourself shot, lurkin' around my place.”

“I'm not lurking.”

“Oh? What would you call it?”

He turned left. Karla was a long, slender shadow reclining in his hammock, boots crossed, arms crossed behind her head. “Taking a break.”

“From what?”

“Watching Alejandro. Three Feathers thinks he should be watched in case his temperature climbs. Pilar took over for a while.” She swung her legs over the side of the hammock, planted her boots on the ramada's floor. “My grandfather can be a hard man, but he never would have killed Don de Cava. What's going to happen, Tom?”

Navarro turned to stare out over the ramada's three steps, into the night-cloaked arroyo. “I'm gonna set up a private powwow with Guadalupe Sanchez. Maybe he can talk some sense into Lupita and Real.”

“If he can't?”

Navarro lifted a shoulder. “We'll dream up something else.” Tom looked at her, sitting with her elbows on her knees and giving her troubled gaze to the arroyo. He moved to her, squatted down on his haunches, and squeezed her left wrist. “They didn't hurt you, did they?”

“Just scared the heck out of me. They took my gun and pulled me out of my saddle before I knew it. Guess I gave them a hand up there, didn't I?”

“It wasn't your fault.”

“Got any whiskey?”

“No.” He stood, opened the cabin door, and stepped into the musty darkness, redolent of candle wax, mesquite smoke, and gun oil, and fumbled with a table lamp.

Behind him, boots thumped on the ramada. He turned to see Karla moving into the open doorway, her disheveled hair swirling about her shoulders, her face drawn but alluring.

Navarro grabbed his wooden water bucket and disappeared through the back door. When he returned, she was sitting at his rough pine table, a brown whiskey bottle and a dented tin cup before her.

She sat sideways in a hide bottom chair, her slender, well-turned legs crossed, one elbow on the table, resting her head against her fist. Her chestnut hair spilled down her arm to the bottle. A moth ticked against the lamp, its shadows playing over the table's cracked pine boards.

Navarro poured water into the enamel basin on the table. He set the bucket on the floor, dropped a sliver of lye soap into the basin, and began unbuttoning his shirt cuffs.

Staring at the floor, Karla said quietly, “Did you propose to Mrs. Talon?”

Navarro froze and beetled his silver brows at her, his ears showing red. “Who told y—”

“My grandfather told me you were thinking of buying some mares and stud horses from him, and heading north with Mrs. Talon.” She dropped her arm to the table, swept her hair back from her left ear, and looked at him. Her eyes glistened in the lantern's buttery glow. “So did you?”

He dropped his gaze and rolled his left sleeve up his corded forearm. “In so many words.”

“What was her answer?”

“Said she'd think on it.”

Both sleeves rolled above his elbows, he lowered his head over the basin and splashed water on his face. He took the soap sliver, rubbed it briskly between his hands, and lathered his face. He felt her watching him but didn't look at her. He rinsed his face, then grabbed a towel off a hook, and dried.

When he lowered his hands from his face, her chair was empty. A warm, curving body closed on him from behind, her hands sliding around him and spreading across his chest as she canted her head between his shoulder blades.

She sighed luxuriously, rubbed her cheek against his shirt. “Hmmmm . . . mucho hombre . . .”

“Karla . . .”

“I know you love me, Tommy. You rode into Mexico to save me.”

He tossed the towel on the table and turned, took her shoulders, and gently pushed her away from him. Ignoring his own, frustrated arousal, he put some steel in his voice. “Karla, I do love you—like a daughter.”

“No.” She shook her head.

“Do you know how old I'll be when you're thirty?”

“I can't live without you, Tommy. Even when I was with Juan, I thought of you. You make me feel safe. You make me feel like a woman.”

She wrapped her arms around his neck, rose up on her toes, pushed her heaving bosom up against him, and closed her mouth over his, kissing him hungrily. He felt the firm mounds of her breasts swell against his chest. Passion rose in him. In a moment, he found himself holding her, no longer resisting, but placing his hands on her back, returning her kiss . . . enjoying the silky-wet feel of her tongue probing his mouth.

He pulled back from her, his cheeks flushed, his heart pounding. His brain swirled. “I love Louise Talon.”

Karla gazed up at him, her eyes soft and wanting. “You love me. I can stay with you, Tommy.”

Navarro grabbed her left arm, led her to the door, pushed her outside. “This nonsense can't go any further. You have to stay away from me before something happens we're both gonna regret.”

He shut the door in her tear-streaked face. Rubbing his hands through his close-cropped hair, he took two steps from the door and stopped. He listened, hearing her quiet sobs, silently willing her to leave.

After a time, footsteps sounded on the ramada. Then her boots crunched gravel, the sounds fading until they disappeared, replaced by the night hum of cicadas, lowing cattle, and yammering coyotes.

Navarro slopped whiskey into her cup and threw it back. He poured another jigger, took the cup to his cot, and sat heavily down.

He cursed and threw back the whiskey, then kicked off his boots and lay down with a sigh. He didn't wake until milky dawn light washed through the cracks in his shuttered windows. Rising, he stomped into his boots, washed, wrapped his pistol belt around his waist, and headed over to the bunkhouse to repeat orders and to check on the men who'd been wounded during the dust-up.

That done, he went up to the main house, where he breakfasted with Paul Vannorsdell, consulting the rancher on his plans to meet Guadalupe Sanchez at the Butterfield station to discuss the brewing war between their spreads.

“The Butterfield station?” the rancher said, one eye twinkling knowingly over the rim of his coffee mug.

Navarro shrugged a shoulder and looked off the porch, toward the stables, where the men were tacking up their horses. “Neutral ground.”

Vannorsdell sipped his coffee, gray brows bunching with thought. Then he set the cup on the table beside him. His and Navarro's empty breakfast dishes were there, as well.

“You gonna pull out on me, Tom?” the rancher asked, looking off toward the corrals, the slats and snubbing posts turning salmon with the rising sun. Top-knotted quail twittered in the chaparral.

“I think so.”

“When?”

“When this little misunderstanding has been resolved. If it's still good, I'll take you up on that offer to sell me some studs and dams.”

“Where you goin'?”

“Since I can't go back to Colorado, I think I'll try Wyoming. I've been in this desert long enough. I hear there's still some good land up there.”

Tom was wanted in Colorado Territory for killing two deputy U.S. marshals who'd had it coming.

“Well, I can't begrudge you that,” Vannorsdell said with a weary sigh. “She say yes?”

“Not yet. I think she will when I give her a little more to hang her hat on.”

“I think she will, too. I've met Louise Talon. She's a smart woman.” He paused, then shot Tom a glance. “My granddaughter been pestering you anymore?”

“Nope.” Navarro tossed back his coffee dregs and set the mug on his empty plate. “I best swap chair wood for saddle leather.” Standing, he adjusted the holster on his hip and headed for the stables, Vannorsdell bidding good luck to his back.

Fifteen minutes later, Navarro rode off the mesa upon which the Bar-V headquarters sprawled, and put his claybank into a lope through the southern sage, greasewood, and cactus-studded hills. The sun climbed over the eastern peaks, its torchlike heat making his back and collar sweat and causing him to tip his hat over his left temple, to shield his face.

He'd just climbed out of a salty-white playa when a rider trotted out from behind a cedar-studded knoll about fifty yards ahead and right. Karla's long chestnut hair bounced on her shoulders as she reined her Arab on an interception course with Navarro. She waved.

The foreman cursed.

Navarro kept his claybank moving along the faint horse trail as Karla approached from ahead, looking fresh in the morning light, wearing a red-and-yellow plaid shirt and, instead of jeans for a change, a slitted green riding skirt. Her pistol was snugged into a saddle holster just below the horn.

“Good morning,” she said, smiling, eyes bright, hair blowing, as if nothing had happened between them.

“Mornin'.”

“Come out to find me for a morning ride?”

“I'm heading to Tio Muranga's. You best mosey.”

“Muranga's?” Karla turned her horse and fell in beside his right stirrup. “That's on de Cava range, isn't it?”

Navarro nodded. “I'm gonna send Tio for Sanchez. We're gonna meet at the stage station to discuss the situation.”

“Oh, the stage station. Convenient.”

Navarro ignored her sarcasm. “This isn't work for a girl. Skedaddle.”

“Ske-daddle?” Karla said, wrinkling her nose skeptically. “I'm a little old for skedaddle, don't you think, Tommy?”

“No, and I don't think you're too old for a whipping, either, so run along before you get my back up.”

“Let me ride along to the station.”

Tom shot her a hard look. “No.”

Karla held up her left hand, palm out. “I'd like to see Billie again. She's the only girl I know out here.” When Navarro stared over his horse's ears, she said, “I promise not to do or say anything to embarrass you in front of Mrs. Talon.”

“Karla, I'm not gonna tell you again.”

She heaved an angry sigh. “You're a bastard, Tommy.”

“Don't forget it.” Navarro gigged the claybank into a gallop, his dust sifting over the girl sitting the cream Arab behind him, staring after him and trying not to cry.

Navarro forced the girl from his thoughts and put his mind to work on the de Cava problem. It was beginning to look more and more as though the old man's killer was another man riding for the de Cava brand. Which meant it could have been any of the thirty or so vaqueros and peons working the grant.

Which meant the Bar-V was in one hell of a pickle . . . unless Navarro could convince the three de Cava heirs they were sniffing up the wrong tree for their father 's shooter.

To that end, Tom followed a narrow, spring-supplemented tributary of Bullet Creek to the
estancia
of Tio Muranga—a cluster of cracked, sun-seared adobes standing amid irrigated wheat, oat, and hay patches. He found the old peon feeding slops to his pigs while his dozen or so children wielded hand sickles in the hay patch south of the house.

When Navarro had apprised Tio of the situation and his dire need to confer with Guadalupe Sanchez, the old peon nodded expansively, muttering his understanding. “Anything to avert a war. Heaven forbid, Senor Navarro!”

Holding his horse's reins in one hand, Tom placed his other on the wizened oldster's shoulder. “Tio, it's important that you speak to Senor Sanchez alone. No one must overhear.”

“
Sí
, of course. I may be old and half blind with too many children and a fat, do-nothing wife, but I am no fool in most other ways.”