Bullet Creek (4 page)

De Cava glanced at him. The old man sighed, the haggard lines in his face deeping. His expression at once sad, frustrated, and chagrined, he shuttled his gaze to Sanchez. “No se que hacer. You may go, Guadalupe. Tell Henriqua we will eat in one hour, Don Vannorsdell and I.”

The segundo's boots still sounded on the tiles when young Isabelle appeared with a tray of drinks and two cigars, the stogies' ends already clipped. The girl set two cut-glass goblets before each man, removed the decanter's glass stopper, and poured Spanish brandy into each glass. Setting the decanter on the table between the two men, she lit their cigars.

All the while, the old don grinned up a the girl with open admiration. She seemed unaware of the attention, her eyes never meeting his.

“If my own daughter only treated me so!” he intoned as the girl walked away, black tresses of coal black hair bouncing beneath the mantilla, her breezy aroma lingering even amid the pungent scent of the rum-soaked cigars.

“Where is Lupita these days?” Vannorsdell said, exhaling a long plume of smoke and leaning back in his chair. “I haven't seen her in months.”

Instantly, Vannorsdell was sorry he'd mentioned the name of the don's only daughter. De Cava grimaced as he puffed his cigar, then cast a brief glance up and over his right shoulder, indicating a second-story window.

“Not far,” the don grumbled through a thick web of smoke. “Believe me, Lupita is never very far. . . .”

“Tell me, kid, what made you leave home so young?” Navarro asked Lee Luther as they followed the Windom Creek trail toward Coyotero Ridge.

Doves flitted about the chaparral. It was moving on toward five in the afternoon, and Tom's and the kid's shadows grew long beside them.

“My pa was old—older than you, even—and when the sawbones in Tombstone told him he had to quit drinkin' and smokin', he came home and hung himself in the barn.”

Lee Luther reined his horse around a sharp rock in the trail. “Ma, she went back to Pittsburgh, but I didn't want nothin' to do with a city: people walkin' around in suits all day, goin' to work in fancy offices. . . .”

“What happened to your family's spread?”

“Ma sold it to my uncle. Couldn't stand the old bastard. I wandered up to the Bar-V after three other spreads turned me away. Thanks again for givin' me a job, Mr. Navarro—without no reference letter or nothin'.”

“Anyone who stays on Sunset as long as you did earns a bunk at the Bar-V.” Sunset was the one Bar-V horse that had been roped wild, snubbed, branded, and saddled, but never broken.

They rode along a wash for a time, the rocky terrain rising gently toward the ridge.

“Mr. Navarro, you mind if I ask you a question?”

“I reckon.”

“How'd you get the name ‘Taos Tommy,' like some o' the other boys calls you?”

Navarro hit the kid with an angry look, the foreman's sharp blue eyes flashing and his silver-gray brows bunching. “They don't call me that to my face!”

A rifle cracked. Navarro drew back on the buckskin's reins and peered straight ahead, against the sun reflecting off the rocks. His right hand slapped leather. “What the hell was that?”

“Gunshot,” Lee Luther said.

Navarro glanced at him, the nub of his sun-scalded right cheek rising up into his right eye socket. “I know it was a gunshot.”

“You asked me, sir.”

“Junior, don't make me regret lettin' you ride Sunset.” Navarro booted the claybank into a gallop. “Come on!”

Another shot rang out as Navarro neared the top of a low knoll. He turned the claybank sideways and raised his hand. Lee Luther reined his own buckskin to a skidding halt.

“What is it?” the kid said.

Navarro shushed him with a look and dismounted. Tossing his reins to Lee Luther, Navarro doffed his hat and walked to the top of the knoll, crouching beside a tall saguaro off the trail's left shoulder.

In a rocky hollow on the other side of the knoll, an old Texas seed-bed wagon, its box covered with a ratty tarp, was stopped in the middle of the trail, facing away from Navarro. Two mules fidgeted in the traces, one lowering its head and angrily braying.

Two men sat in the box, staring stiffly down at a man holding a rifle on them. One of the men in the wagon clutched his right arm. The man with the rifle turned his head back and forth between the two men in the wagon and another man standing off the trail, partially concealed by small boulders, saguaros, and barrel cactus. This hombre was yelling furiously and kicking at something or someone on the ground before him.

Navarro squinted at the slumped figure. A spray of hair flew up from behind a rock—long, dull blond hair.

“Goddamn it,” Navarro grumbled, wheeling and heading back down the grade to where Lee Luther stood in the trail with the horses.

Tom shucked his Winchester from his saddle boot and glanced at Lee Luther. “Time to meet the neighbors, kid.”

“What?”

“Come on. Leave the horses and grab your carbine.” The horses would stay ground-hitched where their reins fell.

Navarro tramped off the left side of the trail, along the knoll's base. Lee Luther jogged up behind him, puffing nervously.

“What's over there?”

“Those two hombres from the Butterfield station are havin' a little fun with a family of three on the other side of this hill.”

“Oh, boy. What're we gonna do?”

“Whatever we can.” When they came to a gully snaking around the east side of the hill, Navarro stopped. The kid, close on his heels, nearly ran into him. “How good are you with that thing?” Tom asked, nodding at the kid's Spencer carbine.

Flushed with fear and excitement, the kid looked at the gun and hesitated. “Ummm . . .”

“Never mind. Just stay behind me and watch for my signals.”

Navarro dropped into the gully and followed it, walking and jogging, the kid huffing and puffing behind him, kicking rocks and grunting, nearly falling several times. At one point, Navarro stopped and indicated a snake coiled up under a catclaw shrub on the gully's east bank. Swinging wide around the tongue-flicking diamondback, Navarro set off again. The kid eyed the snake warily and traced the same path.

Laughter rose in the distance. Navarro stopped, got his bearings. He and the kid were east of the wagon. The laughter had risen just north.

Navarro cast a glance at Lee Luther. The kid had dropped to one knee for a breather. Indicating south with his eyes, Navarro climbed out of the gully and traced a winding path through the chaparral-shrouded rocks and boulders. The kid jogged along behind him, crouched over with the old Spencer in his gloved hands.

A gleeful whoop sounded. Navarro motioned for the kid to stop. He sidled up to a boulder slightly taller than himself and glanced around one side.

Twenty feet away, just beyond two entangled saguaros, one of the men shoved a tall blond woman dressed in dusty clothing against a rocky dike. The woman pushed him back, and he cuffed her hard with the butt of his six-shooter. The movement knocked his big sombrero down his back, where it hung from a horsehair cord. His head was as bald as a minie ball.

The woman grunted and fell back against the rock. Her knees buckled, but she didn't fall.

The man laughed again. “Now that we got a little privacy . . .” He holstered his .45, slipped a long-bladed skinning knife from a sheath behind his neck, and with one deft slicing motion, cut away the buttons of the woman's dark blue shirt. The tails still stuck in the woman's pants, the shirt opened, revealing a grimy gray undershirt.

“You son of a bitch!” she cried hoarsely. Raising her bruised face, she spit.

The man brought his right hand up to smack her, and she dropped to her knees, cowering and cursing. He kicked her onto her back and knelt down, straddling her wriggling, slim-hipped body and wrestling her flailing arms down to her sides.

The man had lowered his head to nuzzle the woman's neck, when he felt a tap on his shoulder. “Huh?” He whipped around. In a blur of motion, a rifle butt pistoned toward him, connecting soundly with his mouth, smashing his torn lips back against his teeth. Behind the man's fluttering lids, lightning popped and flashed. He fell back over the woman's head. Blood flowed from his gums and pulpy lips.

Between Navarro and the hardcase, the woman climbed to her hands and knees. Navarro reached down to help her to her feet. Meanwhile, Lee Luther scrambled out from behind another boulder and stopped a few feet away from the groaning, cursing hardcase. “I wouldn't do that if I was you!” the boy warned.

Navarro drew the woman to his side and looked down. The hardcase had clawed his .45 half out of his holster. He stared up at Lee Luther, blood washing over his lips and dribbling two streams down his chin. “You little son of a bitch!”

Navarro slammed his Winchester 's butt against the man's ear, knocking him over on his side with an exasperated grunt. “Raise your voice again, and I'll knock you owlheaded!” He didn't want the man's partner knowing their party had been spoiled.

The man lay in the desert caliche, staring up at Navarro, his beard bloody and flecked with tooth chips, his pale, egg-shaped head glistening with sweat. His brown eyes watered from the pain.

“Besides, the boy's just tryin' to save your life,” Navarro said, keeping his voice low and extending his own Winchester out from his right hip, holding the woman's arm with his left.

The foreman cast a glance toward the wagon road, about thirty yards through the brush. Then he looked at the woman, who stood caressing her cheek. Keeping his voice low, Navarro said, “You all right, Hattie?”

“Been better, Tom. I'm obliged for the help.”

“This is Lee Luther. Lee, Hattie Winters. Her and her husband and brother have a mining claim near here.”

“Those chicken shits!” Hattie snarled, glaring back toward the road.

She was prettier from a distance—lean and hard-bodied, with small, high breasts pushing at the man's wool shirt she didn't bother to hold closed. The wind and sun had fried her hair and drawn the skin so taut across her face that her blue eyes bulged. Hattie and her husband, Homer, and her brother, Richard, had been farming rock near the Bar-V for the past three years.

“They just let those two bastards pull me right off that wagon without no fight at all. Homer took a graze. The way he's carryin' on, you'd swear he was gut-shot!”

Back at the wagon, Derrold Emory stood with his rifle trained on the sun-seared gents in the driver's box, one grimacing as he held his bloody arm. Emory glanced back where his partner, Hought Ellis, had dragged the woman. He shuffled his weight impatiently from one foot to the other.

“Come on, Hought—break a leg! It's my turn!”

He turned his head to tell the groaning man to shut up. Before he could get the words out, a rifle cracked from only a few feet away. Emory's low-crowned hat was torn from his head. His scalp burned where the bullet had parted his hair.

Startled, Emory staggered back, swinging his gun toward the source of the shot. “Wha—what the hell?” He stepped back to where he could keep an eye on the two men in the wagon while training his rifle on the area from which the shot had come.

From behind a boulder, blue smoke rose, fluttering on the breeze. Both mules brayed and jerked against the wagon brake. The off one turned slightly and kicked.

“Who did that, damn it?” the hardcase called, his voice thick with worry. “Hought, was that you? Very funny.”

A bird whistled in the desert to his left. The sun sank, and shadows grew.

“Did you see who did that?” he asked the men in the wagon.

“I didn't see nothin'—just a rifle,” said the man holding the reins.

As Emory stepped slowly forward, he said tightly, “You two make one move, and I'll swing around and kill you both—understand? I got eyes in the back of my head.”

The driver grunted acknowledgment over his partner 's groans. Emory held his rifle straight out from his hip as he approached the rock. “Hought? If you're playin' a goddamn joke . . .”

Emory swung around the rock and thumbed back the rifle's hammer. Something moved up from down low on his right, and before he could aim his rifle at it, a brass-plated rifle butt connected soundly with his mouth. His finger pressed his Winchester's trigger, but he'd raised the barrel as he flew backward off his heels, and the rifle discharged skyward.

Emory released the gun as he hit the ground on his back, feeling as though every tooth in his mouth had been smashed to bits. Blood poured from his mouth, which was full of broken teeth. He looked up to see gray-blue eyes in a granite-hard, sun-seared face staring down at him coldly.

The man was tall, late forties, early fifties, with steel gray hair under a high-crowned black hat with a snakeskin band. He wore a dusty range shirt and denims with ponyskin seat and inner thighs. High cheekbones. Firm, cold mouth. Uncompromising gaze.

Taos Tommy Navarro.

“What the . . . ?”

“Don't cuss,” Navarro snapped, reaching down, grabbing Emory's rifle and deftly removing the short-barreled .38 from Emory's holster.

It didn't seem fair. When Emory and Hought had seen Navarro at the Butterfield station, they'd decided to ambush him one day. But here he'd gotten the drop on them.

Navarro levered the shells from Emory's rifle, punched the pills from the .38's wheel, and tossed both weapons into the brush. He picked up his own rifle and, stepped back, glancing at Hought, whom Lee Luther was holding his Spencer on.