Bullet Creek (22 page)

“I'm sorry about your father,” he said, taking the towel she handed to him.

She watched him dry his face, then turned and, crossing her arms, took several steps to the back of the room. “I guess you're here to convince us that Vannorsdell didn't do it.”

“You get the cigar.”

Lupita turned back to him, her face taut with anger. “Save your words. Of course he did it. Who else would have killed Don Francisco?”

Navarro thought about what Sanchez had told him about possibly knowing who killed the don and wondered why the segundo hadn't shared the information with Lupita. He must have had his reasons. If one of the three siblings had dropped the hammer on the don, Navarro's trip here was for nought. No point in dancing around it, however.

“Someone with the most to gain from his death, right here at Rancho de Cava.”

“Who on the rancho would have anything to gain from the don's death? He paid the bills, you fool. He was the only one with any cattle sense. Without him, we'll be ruined in months.”

“Real and Alejandro are payin' all those banditos out there with something.”

“Bandits,” Lupita said distastefully. “That is all my brothers are. We are no longer a ranch but a hideout for criminals. And my father is turning in his grave.”

Navarro stood before the washstand, rolling down his sleeves and buttoning the cuffs, the expression on his face betraying his confusion. If he'd only had one more minute with Sanchez . . .

“What's the matter, Navarro?” she asked. “Don't you like being caught between two diamondbacks?”

“No more than you will.” He tossed the towel on the bed beside her. “I reckon I'll see if Real'll smoke the peace pipe. If not”—he leveled a hard look at her—“there's gonna be a pitched battle between our spreads.”

“I have already put in my two cents with Real,” she said. “If he won't listen to his older sister, why would he listen to you?”

“To forestall a war?”

“Hah!” she laughed. “It gives him a reason to get up in the morning.”

“Maybe he's too cocky for his own damn good and just needs convincing he won't be getting up at all soon. He might have a cavvy of gun hounds on his role, but the Bar-V doesn't hire rabbits, either.”

Her dark eyes glittered with admiration. “And they have you on their side.”

“That's right.”

“Maybe you and I should consider another option,” Lupita said with a sudden quirk of her upper lip, her left eye still glittering.

Tom had been about to go out, but he stopped and turned back to her. Distant thunder rumbled. “Such as?”

She shrugged a shoulder, looked at her hands toying with the edges of the black cape falling over her ample bosom. “I have friends in Mexico City. You might like it there.”

He fashioned a smile. “Don't tempt me.”

He turned and left the room.

By the time Navarro found his way to the don's office, Real was already a little tipsy. The rheumy-eyed de Cava sat behind his father's broad leather-topped desk, a cut-glass brandy goblet and two matched Remingtons before him. He had both guns apart and was cleaning the parts with an oiled rag, whistling while he worked.

When Navarro came into the room, Real stood, pointed to a chair on the other side of the desk, then plopped back down in his own chair with too much force. The chair broke, and he nearly went down. He caught himself at the last second, gaining his feet and hurling the chair across the room with a drunken bellow.

“You'd think with all the money he had,” he raged, crimson-faced, “he could have bought a new chair!”

Footsteps sounded in the hall. Chewing his cheek to avoid grinning at the firebrand's drunken display, Navarro turned. The grave woman in the simple black dress appeared, a look of alarmed inquiry on her pinched face.

“Go away, Henriqua!” Real pulled a high-backed chair away from a map table, maneuvered it behind the desk. “If I need you, I'll shoot twice into the ceiling.” He grinned at Navarro, who'd reached forward to steady the brandy glass, which had teetered when Real had rammed the chair into the desk.

De Cava sat in his chair, shoved an empty glass toward Navarro, and glanced at the decanter. Tom splashed a couple fingers of brandy into the glass, slid the decanter back toward Real, then picked up his glass and sank back in his chair. The curtains over the two arched windows buffeted, and the smell of desert rain filled the room on a chill draft. Thunder rumbled like a giant's hungry stomach.

Navarro studied the new hacendado, who studied him in return. Real's round face was flush from drink.

Tom saw no reason to beat around the bush. “So what are we gonna do here, Real? Can I go home and assure Vannorsdell there won't be any more attacks on the Bar-V and no more long loops tossed over his beef?”

Real didn't say anything. Lounging so low in his chair that his head barely shone above the desktop, and steepling his fingers on his chest, he just stared across the desk at Tom with that funny, drunken grin. “You know Taos—” He stopped. “Do you mind if I call you Taos?”

“Yes.”

“You know, Taos, I believe we are cut from the same cloth, no?”

“No.”

“I think we are. I think we are both men of high blood. Blood that boils in our veins so that common, everyday things bore the hell out of us.”

Tom waited.

“I think I get that from my mother's side. Her people were conquistadors!” Real's lips and mustache swept back from his teeth, saliva beading along his gums. “My father 's ancestors were store clerks, and then landowners, cattle breeders, that sort of thing. Very boring. They could endure day after day of the same. Me, I like adventure!”

“Where's this taking us? It's thundering, and I'd like to get started back to the Bar-V before I need a boat.”

Real downed half his glass in a single swallow, then turned and shoved his head up close to the desk. “I am going to set aside the fact that you work for that gringo and offer you a place here with me . . . at Rancho de Cava.”

Tom just looked at him.

“Once a gunman, Taos Tommy, always a gunman.”

“Not for me.”

“Sí,
for you. Here, riding for me, you can make enough money to retire in two, three years. More money than you would make in twenty years of punching cattle for that gringo bastard.”

Navarro cocked an eye. “Doing what exactly?”

“A little of this, a little of that,” Real said, lifting a noncommital shoulder and throwing back the last of his brandy.

“Chew it up a little finer and maybe I'll consider it.” Tom had no intention of considering any alliance with Real de Cava, but his curiosity was piqued.

Real stared off to one side of the desk, smacking his lips as he thought it over. Sitting behind the broad desk in the cavernous office with its heavy furniture and cultured trimmings, including framed wall maps and imported gas lamps, he looked like a little boy playing grown-up.

Finally, he ran his hand across his mouth, set his glass on the desk, and refilled it from the decanter. When he'd topped off Tom's glass, he sat back in his chair. “You have heard of the Mexican smuggling trains, no?”

Few in southern Arizona and New Mexico hadn't heard of the smuggling trains that regularly came up from Sonora with thousands of dollars' worth of gold or silver. The smugglers would purchase American goods, then slip back across the border without paying the required duty and sell the goods for an enormous profit.

It was an illegal trade, but the Army was too busy wrangling Apaches to stop it, and there were too many well-armed smugglers for the U.S. marshals to handle. Those lawmen that tried simply disappeared or turned up as bleached bones in a canyon or boulder field high in the Dragoons or Huachucas.

Navarro chuckled without humor. “You're running a train?”

“No, no, no, senor. I am raiding the trains.” Real let that sink in for a time. When Navarro just scowled at him with incredulity, de Cava said, “I need men who are good with their guns.”

“You gotta be shittin' me,” Navarro scoffed, and laughed again. “You're raiding smuggling trains?”

“Si.”

“Why?”

“For the money, Tom.” Real pounded his fists on the arms of his chair. “And because it makes my blood surge in my veins.”

“I don't hire my guns,” Navarro said.

“From our last raid, we took four thousand dollars in silver. We lost three riders in doing so, but four thousand dollars just the same. I am honest with you. There is risk. But what endeavors do not involve risk, eh, Taos?”

“Stop calling me Taos,” Tom said, throwing back the last of his brandy and setting the empty glass on the desk. “Thanks for the drink.”

“Taos, you can't go—it's raining.”

Real gestured at the two windows behind Navarro. Beyond the veranda, rain came down in a heavy white sheet, the wind blowing it through the window and onto the office floor. As if on cue, lightning flashed, followed several seconds later by a thunder crash Navarro could feel through his boots.

“I can make it,” Navarro said.

But when he got outside, he could tell he wouldn't make it. The rain came down in waves. The courtyard was a pond. The trail back to the Bar-V would be a river. After a monsoon rain of this severity, the trail wouldn't be passable until midmorning tomorrow, at the earliest.

“Shit.”

“Taos, you better have another drink,” Real said, sidling up to him and placing a hand on his shoulder. “Why not?”

Grudgingly, Navarro followed Real back to Don Franscico's office, where they had two more brandies before Real, growing bored and peevish over Navarro's refusal to join his train-raiding pistoleros, bid him an unceremonious good night and staggered toward the door.

“Taos,” he said, turning back toward Navarro and holding himself up with one hand on the doorjamb, “I hope you have a comfortable night here at Rancho de Cava.” He swayed from side to side and lifted an admonishing finger. “But next time we meet, we will not be friends. Buenos noches, senor.”

When Real had staggered off, no doubt to drink and play cards with his men, Navarro poured himself another brandy, then sat, sipping the drink and listening to the rain, cursing the early-summer storm's unfortunate timing.

He was nearly finished with the drink when Lupita came with a tray of sandwiches and invited him into the partially roofed courtyard outside the don's office. They ate by the wan light from a couple of Chinese lanterns and washed down the sandwiches with rich sangria. The rain lightened up but it was still sprinkling and Navarro heard the water gurgling lower down in the terraced court and outside the low adobe wall.

He had finished his sandwich and was working on his second glass of sangria when Lupita said, in a brooding, faraway voice, “It is lonely here.”

“Leave.” Navarro sipped the wine. He was drunker than he knew he should be in enemy territory. “You said you had friends in Mexico City.”

“It takes money to travel.”

“Just how broke are you, anyway?” Tom wondered if Real shared his smuggling train plunder with his sister. Maybe she didn't know about it.

“I don't want to talk about money tonight.” Lupita stretched like a cat and stood, her wicker chair creaking. She walked slowly over to him, a seductive set to her pretty mouth. Then she brusquely spread his knees and perched her rump on his right thigh.

Before he could get his hands up to ward her off, she kissed him and ran her hands through his hair. The warm, wet, passionate kiss would have stoked the fires in any man. The hot, womanly curves and the full bosom swelling against his chest would have, as well. Drunk, he needed a few minutes to remember he'd asked another woman to marry him, then to push Lupita away and heave himself to his feet.

“Why such a saint?” she snapped, glaring at him as she collapsed back into her own chair and crossed her legs with an angry flair. “I wasn't good enough for you in Tucson? You seemed to enjoy it.”

“I enjoyed it, all right. I reckon I'm not as young as I used to be. I'm drunk and tired and need a bed to sleep in.”

“You got a woman, Navarro? I won't kiss and tell.”

“Thanks for the grub.” Navarro swiped his hat off a wrought-iron table and headed for the room he'd washed in earlier.

Looking for the room in the sprawling, cavelike hacienda, he wondered if there was anyone in the house but him and Lupita, until, stumbling down a dark hall, he saw a dim light ahead and heard muffled female voices.

Finding the room, Tom pushed through the heavy door, managed to get the single lamp lit without breaking it, then closed the door and removed his pistol and cartridge belt. He stripped down to his underwear, pulled the dusty covers back, and crawled into bed.

What had he accomplished here?

Besides setting himself up for one hell of a hangover, not a damn thing. His only hope was that Real would get himself killed raiding the Mexican smuggling trains before he could effect anymore attacks on the Bar-V. That was something, anyway.

He leaned over to blow out the lamp on the bedside table and was asleep less than a minute after his head hit the pillow.

 

Real returned to his father's office for two more bottles of brandy. His men in the bunkhouse had run out of the local firewater but Real's cards were hot, and he was not yet ready to call it a night.

Dripping wet from the rain and cradling both bottles in his right arm, Real closed the office door behind him and moved drunkenly down the corridor, toward the outside door he'd left open and through which wan night light emanated, illuminating his muddy bootprints. He was turning to go out when a girl's muffled laugh rose from the corridor beyond.