Ten Grand (12 page)

“That ain’t no kind of a deal,” he said. “Soon as you know, that, Hoyos ain’t a healthy place for us no more. I got holes in my head to see out of, hear with and breathe through. I don’t want any more.”

Matador’s eyes glinted dangerously. “Captain Alfaro
was keeping you alive to maybe make you suffer a little, señor?” he asked softly.

“And I thought he just liked me,” Edge answered.

“I know more ways to make men suffer than he ever heard of.”

“Torture ain’t reliable,” Edge said easily. “Some men break early. Others take longer. Some men just die of plain fright. Better you let us take you where the money is.”

Matador eyed Luis. “I think he break easy.”

Edge shook his head. “No good, He knows the place. I know exactly where in that place.”

The kitchen door swung open and the woman padded out, carrying a plate piled high with tortillas. She slapped the plate down hard on the table before Matador, her eyes spitting hate at the top of his head.

“You live ‘til we get to the place and you show me where,” the bandit said with finality,  snatching up a tortilla and biting into it, his expression showing that the food met with his approval. “Then I decide what to do with you. Hey, cow.”

The woman had begun, to go back to the kitchen, turned with resignation to await another order from Matador. The bandit swung the blunderbuss, leveled it and squeezed the trigger. The vicious load peppered the woman’s large breasts and she screamed, her hands going to the injured parts, blood oozing from between the clutching fingers. Then Matador drew one of his Colts and took careful aim as the woman’s horror-filled eyes stared at him. The bullet drilled a neat hole in the center of her forehead and she fell backwards, the skirts of her, dress riding high up her naked thighs the flesh quivering with the death convulsion.

“It is a kind man who would put an injured cow out of her agony,” Matador said evenly, holstering his smoking revolver and picking up another tortilla.

“Why?” Luis gasped, unable to rip his eyes away from the thick exposed flesh of the dead woman’s legs.

“She would have been no good for you, amigo,” The bandit said. “Those legs, they would have broke your back at the height of your passion. But it was not for that reason. This place, it is quiet. The cow may have heard our voices. As the Americano said, a secret is not a secret when others know of it.” He took a long drink with the new bottle, smacked his lips. “Now I eat, then I sleep. After that we go and get the money.”  

Edge rose to his feet, content with the situation as it stood. He jabbed a stiff finger into the ribs of Luis, dragging his fascinated gaze from the body of the dead woman.

“Come on, amigo,” he said wryly. “Let’s go find us some live ones.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

EDGE had too many other things on his mind to concern himself with the multitude of pleasures which the town of Hoyos had to offer a man.  Primarily he wanted what he had come into Mexico for the return of the money the bandits had stolen from him, and revenge against El Matador.  But it did not take him long to decide that both these objectives would have to wait. For not all the bandits had accepted their leader’s invitation to relax.  Obviously following a standing order, two men lounged outside the cantina, their attitudes of ease made fraudulent by the watchful glints of their eyes. They were the fat Miguel and the pock-marked Torres and as Edge and Luis moved out of the doorway, Torres broke away from the other and started down the side of the cantina, obviously intent upon taking up sentry duty at the rear of the building.

“We going to find some girls?” Luis asked, eyes alight with excited anticipation as he headed towards the street entrance, from which came the sound of laughter and shouting, an occasional feminine scream which could have been of pain or delight.

Edge shook his head. “I hope you find one that’s got everything,” he said.

“Señor?” The wizened face was puckered with bewilderment.

“They ain’t invented a pill for it yet.”

Luis grinned his understanding. “A man’s got to take chances, señor.”

Then he was gone, hurrying towards the sounds of gaiety.  Edge nodded to Miguel and got no response, began to pick his way between the dead bodies of the soldiers, towards the center of the plaza where their weapons had been heaped in an untidy pile. But he still had six feet to go when a rifle cracked and dust spurted up just ahead of him. He turned slowly to look back over his shoulder, saw Miguel with his repeater still raised to shoulder level, eye behind the backsight.

“Just looking,” Edge said.

“You are not a cat, señor,” the fat man said evenly.  “But curiosity, it can make you just as dead.”

Edge spat. “And I ain’t got but just the one life,” he said reflectively, spun and angled away from the heap of guns, going towards the building in which he and Luis had been held the night before. It was, in fact, a church, but it had been many years since it was used for religious purposes. It still had an altar with a crucifix fixed to the wall above and there were still two rows of pews with a central aisle dividing them. But the scarring of the wall above the altar told of shooting practice with the ornament as the target and a scattering of straw and filthy blankets on the pews and the floor between them indicated that the place served as a dormitory in times when Hoyos was overcrowded.

Edge took this all in with disinterest as he moved quickly down the aisle, went through a door to the right of the altar, found himself in what had been the priest’s robing room. A door on the other side was locked, but the wooden hinges had rotted and fell away within moments as Edge prized at them with the dead soldier’s knife. Outside he stood in a narrow space between the rear of the church and the wall of the town. The sun was well clear of the horizon now, but the area in which Edge stood—no wider than four feet—was in deep shadow. The wall was ten feet high at this point, sheer and smooth, offering no footholds.  There was only one way up and Edge took it.  He gritted his teeth, pressed his back against the rear of the church, swung one foot up against the town wall and began to push himself aloft.

As Edge was making his bid for escape, Luis Aviles was savoring a forthcoming delight, the like of which he had not experienced for more than forty years. He was leaning against a dresser in a room on the second floor of a bordello, watching with avid eyes as a girl of no more than fourteen began to unbutton a blouse which promised in its drape an upper body developed beyond her years. At first the girl had been terrified as Luis demanded her favors, his drooling mouth spitting words of terrible vengeance from El Matador if she did not go to a room with him.

The woman who ran the house was as fearful as the girl, certain that Luis’ new-found freedom must indicate an agreement with the bandit chief. So she had dragged the girl up the stairs and into the room, warning her of an even more terrible ordeal should the anger of El Matador be turned against the house. But now the girl’s fear of Luis had turned to disgust for him, her plain young face twisted into a sneer. “You will not enjoy me, old man,” she hissed, fingers nimbly unfastening the buttons.

“If you are not good, I will ask El Matador to slice you up like a side of beef,” he returned, not seeing her expression, unable to take his eyes away from the firm swells of her breasts as each button came loose. 

But then, just before the girl was about to pull the blouse wide, exhibit to Luis what lay on each side of the deep cleavage he could already see, the door burst open under the crash of a large boot and a drunken bandit swayed in the frame. His name was Alfredo and he was tall and broad enough to almost fill the doorway.  His face was scarred and ugly behind the stubble of his beard and he had a twisted mouth and only one eye, the other gouged out in a knife fight. Luis gasped and thought he was the most fearsome man he had ever seen in his life.

“Ah, the
hombre
who came back from the dead,” he said gleefully, his lips curling back in an awful grin. “First El Matador saved you from the soldiers and then something saved you from El Matador.” 

Alfredo lumbered into the room as Luis flattened himself against the wall, as if seeking to become part of it, and the girl cringed on the bed, pulling her blouse around her. The bandit reached the bed in two strides, grasped the blouse and ripped it from the girl’s body, laughed as the breasts came free, young, smooth and firm. 

“This is what you want to see,
hombre?”
he demanded of Luis. “The beautiful secrets of her body.  Now you have your wish.  I give her to you. But you must tell me your secret.” He shook his head, his single eye fuzzy with too much tequila. “A powerful secret to make El Matador spare your life.”

“I do not know …”

“El Matador is interested in one thing only,” Alfredo bore on. “Money. You have told him where there is money. Lots of it, eh?”

“No,  I …” Luis broke off again as the big bandit approached him, caught hold of his poncho in a bunched fist, lifted him and threw him bodily across the room, so that his body thudded on to that of the girl.

“El Matador, he always keep the money for himself. I, Alfredo, am tired of this. Tell me your powerful secret,
hombre,
or you die.”

As he finished speaking, Alfredo drew a revolver from its holster on each hip and leveled both weapons.  Luis breathing fast with fear, sweat releasing new odors from his filthy body, scrambled to the far side of the girl and cringed behind her. The bandit laughed and fired both guns, the bullets whining over the top of the shaking bodies to thud into the wall as the girl screamed and Luis whimpered.

“The money,
hombre?”
Alfredo demanded. “Your secret, or take it to hell with you.”

“Tell him, stupid,” the girl cried, trying desperately to wriggle free of Luis’ grip. But Luis found enormous strength in his terror and held her fast, an inadequate shield against the wrath of the big bandit. “He will kill us both.”

“Do as she says,” Alfredo shouted and squeezed the triggers. Then again, and again. Six bullets skimmed across the bed, the rush of air seeming to get closer to the flesh at each report.

“Your secret!” Alfredo yelled in fury and loosed off the last two bullets from each gun, aiming lower, so that they all thudded into the bed in front of the girl’s straining body, sending up a shower of feathers.

Snorting, the bandit hurled away the empty guns and moved towards the bed, drawing his knife. In the shooting and yelling nobody in the room had heard the thud of running footsteps on the stairs.  Not until the thunderclap of the exploding blunderbuss filled the room, the oil lamp hung from the ceiling shattered and showered, did Alfredo halt his murderous movement. He turned his single eye towards the darkly glowering face of his leader and realization hit him like a blow in the stomach.  He dropped the knife with a clatter and fell to his knees, his hands clasped in supplication as his eye sent out a silent plea.

“I was joking, El Matador,” he croaked, all signs of his drunkenness gone. “Having some fun with him and the girl.”

Matador’s mouth set into a grim line, and his eyes glinted. “And now we shall have some fun with you,” he said.

Edge had reached the top of the wall, was sweating freely from the exertion of the climb, his back and arms moving slowly, as if they were lead weights. He heard the gunfire from the house on the far side of the plaza and ignored it, thought it was probably part of some wild game with which the bandits were letting off steam.  Here, in the hot shadows, it was quiet, only his own rasping breath disturbing the silence. At the end of his climb he rested, jammed ten feet above the ground with his back against the church and his feet planted firmly on to the wall. All he had to do now was drop his feet and push himself across the gap, hook his hands over the wall and haul himself up and over. But before he did this, he rested, closing his eyes against the bright sunlight, willing new strength into his arm muscles that would have to take the strain when he jumped.

“The gringo could hurt himself.”

Edge snapped open his eyes as a shadow fell across them and the soft words were spoken, found himself looking up at a bandit whose grinning face seemed a mile high as he stood upon the wall.

“I do this every morning,” Edge said with resignation.  “Exercise to keep me fit.”

“I think you are not so fit, señor,” the bandit replied and swung his rifle, upside down, so that the butt crashed with force into the side of Edge’s legs.

Edge’s feet came away from the wall and he plunged to the ground, landed with a thud on his back to lay gasping for breath.

“No, not so fit,” the bandit said with a laugh. “Maybe you should take such exercise in the afternoon as well.”

Edge cursed softly as the bandit continued his patrol of the top of the wall. But the man paid him no heed, found something down in the plaza which was a greater source of interest than a bruised and breathless Americana. What he could see was a group of bandits, led by the tiny El Matador, dragging the unfortunate Alfredo from the street into the wide plaza. The one-eyed man was screaming his innocence, the words barely understandable through his racking sobs, and falling upon unheeding ears.  His hands were tied together in front of him, the loose length of the rope held by other bandits.  When the group reached the edge of the plaza, El Matador went to lean against the wall of the Golden Sun Cantina and at a nod of his head the bandits broke into a fast run, shouting and cheering in drunken glee.  Forced to join them, his hands jerked out in front of him, Alfredo found it impossible to retain his balance, so that as the bandits went into a turn at the comer of the plaza, the prisoner stumbled and pitched forward, to be dragged full length over the rough, sun-hardened surface. The bandits completed two circuits of the plaza, their pace slowing and their ebullience faltering as sun and drink took toll on out-of-condition bodies. But the run had been long enough to tear through the clothes and flesh of the wretched Alfredo, who was hauled erect to exhibit a sickening sight of blood, dust and tattered clothing  from chest to knee. His face, too, was lacerated at forehead and jaw where his head had bounced on the hard ground.