The creamy-white flowers on the ends of the cactuses’ arms were in bloom, the petals open even this late at night, giving off a scent like overripe melons. Jack saw long-nosed bats flittering around in the air between the cactuses.
And he saw two horses, no saddles or reins, just standing there in the town. No people.
Jack rode his horse down into the bowl. The hoofs didn’t make a sound in the dust, so he rode most of the way, then he dismounted, tethered the horse to a saguaro and walked, keeping his eyes on the derelict houses, watching for movement, his six-gun ready in his hand.
He could hear a clunk-clunk-clunk, like rocks or mud bricks or something being piled up. The sound was coming from inside one of the semi-ruined adobes. When he was about twenty feet away from the adobe he heard a man growl, ‘Rest in peace,’ and a second later the man came out of the doorway and sat against the wall.
Jack got a little closer so he could be sure of his aim and said, ‘Don’t move.’ Then he said, ‘Look at me.’
The man raised his head.
It was a long time since the man had been a kid. It wasn’t Cootes, it was the older one, Sims.
‘Lie flat in the dirt, face down,’ said Jack.
The man grinned. ‘I’m dead tired,’ he said. ‘If you’re going to shoot me, you can do it when I’m sitting down as easy as you can if I’m lying in the dirt.’
Jack almost wished he was the kind of man who could just shoot a man and be done with it, without worrying if it was the right or wrong thing to do. It would settle things quicker and easier. And he figured he had the right. But he just couldn’t kill a man that way. And somehow the seated man knew it.
‘Go on,’ said Sims. ‘Kill me.’ He rested his hands flat on the ground either side of him.
Jack said, ‘Where’s my ma’s gold ring?’
‘So that’s what this is about,’ said Jed Sims, still grinning. ‘This ain’t about no Mexicans at all . . . I got the ring around my neck, on a string. You know, we was only after the food. If your ma and pa hadn’t put up a fight, they’d be alive now. They were stupid, trying to fight all five of us. It’s their own fault they’re dead.’
Jack’s finger tightened on the trigger, but he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t kill a man while he was sitting against a wall like that. It was almost impossible for the man to draw a gun in that position.
Sims laughed. ‘I’ll be damned. You can’t shoot me, can ya?’
Jack said, ‘If you try anything, I will.’
‘If I don’t move, then what? What are you going to do, stand there with that gun pointed at me till kingdom come? A Peacemaker is a heavy chunk of metal. Pretty soon your arm’s going to get mighty tired.’
A voice at the back of Jack’s head told him to shoot the sonofabitch, get it over with, but still he couldn’t.
‘Won’t have to wait that long,’ said Jack. ‘There’s a posse out looking for you. Sooner or later they’ll come back, and I’ll hear their horses. They might have heard the same gunshots I heard, already be coming this way. They’ll take you back to Nogales and hang you for killing that Mexican you shot.’
Jack would have preferred Sims got hanged for killing his ma, and being part of the gang that killed his pa, but he’d settle for the man getting hanged for killing the Mexican.
‘I ain’t sure they hang people for murder in these parts,’ said Sims. ‘Maybe they execute ’em by firing squad?’
‘That’ll do,’ said Jack.
‘Or maybe they just throw people in jail?’ pondered Sims.
‘I guess that will have to do too,’ said Jack. ‘Long as there ain’t no chance you’ll get out again.’
Sims shook his head, still looking at Jack. ‘I ain’t sure I ever met anybody like you before. You’re angry enough about your ma to trail me all the way down to Mexico, but now you’ve caught up with me, you can’t just shoot me dead like any normal man would.’
Jack said, ‘I’m a lawman. Maybe that’s a difference.’
Jack could hear horses. Maybe a mile or so off. He guessed the posse had turned around, some of them anyway, and were heading back. He fired his gun high, so that the bullet slammed into the wall above Sims’s head, showering the man with flecks of baked mud. ‘That’s just so they know where we are.’
Sims said, ‘You’re a lawman, huh? Up in Arizona?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, you ain’t in Arizona now. You don’t have to abide by any laws here. . . . So I guess you’re one of them lawmen who really believes in right and wrong and suchlike.’
‘Guess I am,’ said Jack.
Sims could hear the posse’s horses getting louder. He reckoned they’d be here in another five minutes, maybe a little more, maybe a little less. Time was wasting. If Sims was going to kill this man, he would have to do it now.
He made his move. The same move Cootes had made: firing with his six-gun still in the holster.
His hand flew to his gun, and he pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Sims jerked the trigger too hard, and instead of travelling along the outside of his leg, the bullet buried itself in his thigh. He screamed and dropped the gun.
Jack said, ‘That would have been quite a trick, if it had worked. I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t. I’ll have to watch for that in future. That bullet would have blown my head clean off if your leg hadn’t been in the way.’
Sims wasn’t listening, he was too busy clutching at his wounded thigh and yelling.
Jack kicked away the six-gun and relieved Sims of the knife he had in a sheath fixed to his belt. He checked for other weapons, thinking maybe Sims had a throwing knife up his sleeve like Virgil Deakin had. But Sims didn’t have any other weapons.
Then he took back the gold ring Sims had taken from his ma.
They only had to wait another three minutes for the posse to arrive. Jack recognized the leader, the rifleman who’d asked him in Nogales if he wanted to join the posse.
The rifleman said in English, ‘You got to them first, eh? Good work, señor.’
‘Thank you kindly,’ said Jack, ‘What do you do with murderers around here, anyway? Hang ’em, shoot ’em, or lock ’em in jail?’
‘This one will hang,’ said the rifleman. He looked around. ‘Where is the other Americano?’
‘You’ll find him in there,’ said Jack, nodding to the adobe house. ‘His friend here killed him, then buried him under rocks or mud bricks or something.’
The rifleman shook his head. ‘There is no honour among thieves,’ he said.
‘Guess not,’ said Jack.
Jack rode back to Nogales with the posse, Sims trussed up and tied to his own horse.
When they got to town, Jack stabled his horse and went back to the rooming house. There he crashed onto the bed without even taking his boots off, and slept for the next twelve hours.
Payne and Mulligan were still a day’s ride from Meseta de Plata. They were in the foothills of the Sierra Madre Occidental, the mountain range that runs along the western coast of Mexico.
The foothills were thick with oak trees. But as the mountains got higher, the oaks were replaced by pines, then higher still there weren’t any trees at all, just bare rock and grass.
Payne had his own code of honour, of sorts. He fully intended to keep his word to Mulligan. He wouldn’t try to kill Mulligan and take his share of the money to add to his own. But he didn’t trust Mulligan not to do that same thing. He knew, however, that Mulligan wanted to go to Meseta de Plata as much as he did. Which meant that till they got within sight of ‘Silver Plateau’ Payne was safe, because Payne knew exactly where it was, Mulligan didn’t. But the moment Mulligan knew where the place was, he wouldn’t need Payne any more, so if Mulligan was going to make a move against Payne, he’d do it then. Mulligan wouldn’t be able to kill Payne once they were inside the thieves’ town. Punishments for killing another resident were severe.
So now, with only one day’s ride to go, Payne
was on his guard.
They started at dawn and rode up into the sierras. It was hard going.
‘You reckon we’ll get to Meseta de Plata before sundown?’ Mulligan asked.
‘I reckon,’ said Payne.
‘Guess we’ll see it before long,’ said Mulligan.
‘Guess so,’ said Payne.
But the sun was getting low in the sky, had almost dropped below the tops of the distant mountains before they saw the plateau.
They were on top of a ridge, a valley between the ridge and the plateau.
‘There it is,’ said Payne, nodding.
‘I don’t see nothing,’ said Mulligan. He couldn’t see any houses or people. Just the edge of the plateau.
‘It’s there,’ said Payne.
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Because my brother was there. Later, he took me this far – a long time ago, couple of years before he died.’
Mulligan looked at Payne. ‘You never told me you had a brother.’
‘I’m telling you now.’
‘I heard tell that once you go there, they don’t let you leave. That so?’
‘Sure you can leave. But only if you have money invested there.’
‘Invested? Like in a bank?’
‘Yeah. Exactly like that. They have a bank in the middle of town, the safest bank in the world. When you arrive you put your money in the bank – they don’t give you a choice – and once a month somebody goes out to the nearest town, which is San Ignacio, and puts it in a regular bank, and the people there invest it.’
‘In what?’
Payne shrugged. ‘Whatever makes money. Railroads, shipping lines, I don’t know. Don’t matter any. . . . Sometimes there’s money to put into the bank, sometimes there ain’t, but just the same somebody rides out to the bank in San Ignacio every month, and they check on the investments. There’s a lot of money invested, and so there’s always a lot of interest. So they take out some of the interest and buy stuff with it, food and liquor and such, and then all of that gets transported here, where the outlaws can buy it, just like the folk in a regular town.’
‘Sounds like a whole load of people must know about this place,’ said Mulligan. ‘The people at the bank, and the men who bring the food and stuff here.’
Payne laughed. He wasn’t a man who laughed often, and the sound of his laugh, rasping and off-key, sent a chill down Mulligan’s backbone. ‘I guess just about everybody in this part of Mexico knows about Meseta de Plata,’ he said.
‘So why ain’t it raided by the federales?’
‘That’s all taken care of. The government’s officials and the generals are paid off, all the suppliers are making a load of money. . . . And don’t forget, the money these outlaws stole was all stole north of the border. They stole it in America – fat, green American dollars – and brought it down here to Mexico, where they invest it in the banks, and spend it. Why would anybody down here want to put a stop to that?’
Mulligan laughed too. Then he said, ‘So your brother – he had a lot of money invested in Meseta de Plata, huh? And that’s why he could come and go as he liked?’
‘Yup. If you’ve got money in the bank you can leave, come back, it don’t matter. But he showed me this place when he knew he was dying of the cancer. Told me to rob a load of banks, get a few thousand dollars together and come down here. Ten thousand dollars is the minimum investment. What you might call the Price of Entry.’
‘And we got more than twenty thousand each.’
‘That we have,’ said Payne. He’d heard the greed in Mulligan’s voice, the yearning to double his money. Payne could almost hear Mulligan’s thoughts: All I have to do is put a bullet in Payne’s head. . . .
Payne said, ‘Well?’
And Mulligan said, ‘Well what?’
They stared at each other a moment. Then Payne said, ‘We going to stay here all day? The sun’s going down? You want to get to the top of that plateau before dark, don’t you?’
‘Sure,’ said Mulligan.
Payne started riding his horse slowly down the incline, into the valley, and Mulligan followed.
Mulligan didn’t do anything till they got to the valley floor. Then he said, ‘I’m sorry, Amos. I truly am.’
Payne turned his horse around, saw that Mulligan was pointing his six-gun at him.
‘So you intend cheating me after all,’ said Payne. ‘I was wondering if you would.’
‘Afraid so,’ said Mulligan. ‘But you’d have done the same to me, sooner or later. I just did it first.’
Payne shook his head. ‘No, I would not. I would have honoured the bargain we made.’
‘Then you’re a fool,’ said Mulligan, clicking back the hammer of his six-gun.
‘Not so big a fool as you think,’ said Payne. ‘I shall give you fair warning. I reckoned you might try something like this, so last night, while you were sleeping, I wedged a .22 calibre derringer cartridge into the barrel of your gun, and packed some mud in there too. It will have set hard as concrete by now. If you fire that six-gun, it’ll explode and blow your hand clean off. What’s more, the hammer will shoot back into your face. I’m telling you so that you have a choice. You can leave your share of the money here and ride away, or you can take a chance I’m lying, and pull that trigger. In which case you’ll blow your hand off, and possibly your head, too. Then I’ll take your money anyway, and leave you here. Those are the only choices you got, because I know you ain’t got more than the one gun. It’s up to you.’
Mulligan wanted to open up the gun and peer down the barrel, find out if he could see daylight. But in the time it took him to do that, Payne would shoot him stone dead.
‘You’re lying,’ said Mulligan. ‘You’re a lying sonofabitch!’
‘The only sonofabitch here is you,’ said Payne. ‘I was going to stick to the bargain. One hour from now we could have been safe on top of that plateau, each with his own money, ready to spend the rest of our lives living like princes, snug in Meseta de Plata. But you had to be greedy. Living like a prince wasn’t good enough. You wanted to live like a king. . . . So now, I’m going to take your money as well as my own, and that’s your reward for trying to cheat me. . . . Well? You going to walk away, or are you going to pull that trigger?’
Mulligan aimed his six-gun at Payne’s chest. ‘I don’t believe you,’ he said.
‘I didn’t think you would,’ said Payne. ‘Shame. We always got along so well.’
Mulligan pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Payne had been telling the truth about ramming the derringer cartridge into the barrel of Mulligan’s six-gun, and pushing a load of mud in there after it. And like he thought, the mud had set hard, so that now it was solid as concrete.
When Mulligan pulled the trigger the bullet only travelled about two inches before hitting the derringer cartridge, which Payne had pushed in bullet-end first. And then several things happened at once, or pretty much at once. The barrel of the six-gun exploded, sending shards of metal into Mulligan’s hand. The gun jerked violently, ripping off Mulligan’s trigger finger and breaking his thumb. And the hammer was torn clean off and hit Mulligan in the face, knocking him off the saddle.
Payne looked down at Mulligan, writhing around in the dirt, his hand a bloody mess, a ragged hole in his right cheek. Mulligan’s mouth was wide open and full of blood, and he was making a kind of keening, gurgling noise.
‘I don’t know if you can understand what I’m saying to you,’ said Payne. ‘But if you can, I want you to know I’ll never forget our friendship. I shall try and erase this final act of betrayal from my mind. We all behave unwisely and contrary to our natures sometimes, and I prefer to believe this was one of those occasions. It’s possible that if I left you here, you might survive, but even if you do, you’ll never be quite the same again, and I’m not sure you’d want that.’
So Payne shot Mulligan twice, once in the heart and once in the head.
M
ulligan’s horse had panicked and run away. It took Payne twenty minutes to find it again. The horse shied away when Payne rode up, so Payne dismounted, took the derringer out of the holster fitted inside his beaver felt top hat, put the gun in his pocket, poured water from his canteen into the hat and offered it to Mulligan’s horse.
The horse smelled the water and came over to drink it, and as it drank Payne stroked its flank and blew into its nostrils. ‘Good boy,’ he said. ‘You ain’t got no cause to be scared of me.’
Then he gave some water to his own horse so it wouldn’t get aggrieved.
He got back on his horse and led Mulligan’s horse – with Mulligan’s share of the money in the saddle-bags – up the final incline.
It was dark by the time Payne reached Meseta de Plata.
Two days earlier, a man named Harper had attacked a man named Benson, punched him so hard that Benson had fallen backwards, hit his head against the edge of a table, and died. Which meant that, according to the rules of Meseta de Plata, Harper had to be executed. No excuses. It was no good Harper protesting that he’d only meant to knock out a couple of Benson’s teeth. Harper had killed Benson, so Harper had to be executed, and that was that. He was hanged and his corpse put inside a gibbet, a body-shaped metal cage.
When Payne entered the gates of Meseta de Plata he saw Harper’s body inside the gibbet in the middle of the town’s main square, and said to the man who’d opened the gate, ‘Who’s that?’
‘Fellow named Harper,’ said the gatekeeper. ‘He was quite a man with the ladies when he was younger, so I heard. Not that you’d know it now.’
‘Who do I have to report to?’ asked Payne.
‘The Queen of Meseta de Plata,’ said the gatekeeper.
Payne had been told by his brother that Meseta de Plata was run by a man, nobody knew his name, he was just called the King. But Payne wasn’t sure if he was supposed to know that, which is why he’d asked the question the way he had. Being told that he had to report to ‘the Queen’ took him by surprise.
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