by John Nichols
Quickly he took off his jacket, then his shirt. Immediately, his skin prickling, he put the jacket back on, then gingerly pressed the flannel shirt against his face, holding it there gently, eyes stinging slightly from the blood, and when he felt that enough blood had soaked into the fabric he tenderly wiped his face, after which he patted himself carefully all over his features, half expecting to come upon some huge gaping hole, but there were only scattered small pockmarks from the stone fragments.
Cautiously, lowering forward onto his stomach, he checked on the two horsemen again. One, the smaller man, was heading up the ridge on his horse, but way off to the side safely beyond pistol range. As his horse picked its way quietly up through the rocks and low brush, the bigger man remained down below, dismounted, kneeling behind a rock with his rifle aimed directly up at Kyril Montana.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out their plan. And without a rifle the agent was helpless. Advancing up the ridge out of pistol range the little man would eventually get a line on the back of Kyril Montana’s rock. The agent would inch around the side of his rock as the little man climbed, but he had no room for maneuvering. Sooner or later his ass would become a target for the man down below, who obviously had a fine telescopic sight and a gun that was sighted in true and had been very accurate at a far greater distance than the one from which he now had a bead drawn on the cop.
The valley had darkened, grown gray and momentarily still; almost icy cold.
Kyril Montana could do one of two things. Make a dash for his second shelter, empty his pistol at the mounted man, and then, in hopes that this might create at least momentary confusion, he could run for the timberline which began about eighty yards below those rocks. Only a miracle, he knew, would get him to those trees.
Or he could break for the top of the ridge about fifty yards above. It was a steep climb through tough little foot-high bushes and a million small jagged stones. It would be slow and hellish going, and that would give both gunmen plenty of time to empty their rifles at him.
Which meant his chances that way, too, were nil.
His pistol was loaded, but he checked to make sure, nervously thumbing the hammer back and in a few times. He didn’t know what to do; either way he was cooked. He whimpered, not believing that his mind was incapable of figuring a way out. To just sit there and wait for whatever might happen would be stupid. Those men meant to kill him, and if he didn’t soon hit on something they would rub him out with consummate ease.
The agent flattened himself against the rock, thumbed back the hammer of his revolver, and waited for the horseman to show. When the rider did not appear within a minute he set the gun down and spent a moment removing the cartridges from his gun belt and putting them in his right-hand coat pocket where they could be more easily reached. He had eighteen extra cartridges, six in the gun. Then he put the binoculars’ strap around his neck so that if he made a dash for it and somehow escaped he would be sure to have a pair of long-distance eyes; his survival might depend on it.
Almost by accident he glanced up the ridge, in time to see a third man not one hundred yards away, on foot and also carrying a rifle, rise into view. Even before he raised the glasses he knew it was a boy, a teen-ager, gangly, lanky, tall. Even with the binoculars, the agent could not see the boy’s face, which was also nearly hidden by the downturned brim of a straw hat. But it was a kid, all right, maybe eighteen, dressed in a droopy old army jacket, dungarees, and boots. He was carrying a lever-action rifle without a scope, and he was close enough for the agent to hit with the pistol, though it would take one hell of a lucky shot. The kid obviously had not seen Kyril Montana: he stopped, silhouetted against the sky, and waved downhill at the horseman riding up and at the other man farther below. Fascinated, watching him close up, the agent saw the boy’s lower features and posture change as the men below obviously gestured, pointing, and then the kid’s head turned and he was staring at the agent.
Kyril Montana lowered the glasses and blinked his eyes. He rubbed them quickly to get out the wind tears, raised his pistol, held his arm steady at the wrist with his other hand, aimed upwind a foot or so to the right of the silhouette and a little above his head, cocked the hammer with his thumb, and pulled the trigger. The explosion whacked him in the face like a fist, but up on the ridge nothing happened. The kid didn’t move, didn’t even lift his rifle, and there was no way to mark his shot, no splash of dirt, no splintering of rock, nothing. So he pulled back the hammer, took careful aim directly on the target, and fired again. This time the kid moved in a strange sideshuffle a couple of yards to his right, where he stopped and raised his rifle. There was nothing the agent could do except fire again, and so he pulled back the hammer, aimed quickly, and shot; cocked the gun right away and fired once more.
Then the kid was shooting, rapidly, excitedly, popping his shots off fast, and the first two went high, one just clipping the top of the rock, another one whining off with a violent spurt of granite fragments almost three feet away from his shoulder, a fourth punching up a fan of dirt and stone splinters five feet in front of the agent, and the fifth zipping harmlessly by on his open side. During this flurry the agent crouched flat against the rock with his arms crossed, his own gun held sideways across his face, eyes clenched shut and everything tensed waiting to get hit, and when the firing stopped and he had not been hit he extended his pistol arm again, cocked the hammer with the thumb of his trembling other hand, and squeezed off another useless shot at that amazingly immobile silhouette up there, in a squat now, reloading; and then he swung his arm to the right because the small horseman had come into view and the agent wildly punched off his last shot.
Without even waiting to see if he’d hit the man, though certain he had not, the agent triggered open the chamber, bapped out the spent shells, and quietly, almost calmly, reloaded the gun. When he clicked the chamber back into place he looked up and saw the kid above him, reloaded, rising, and the rider off to the right dismounting off the wrong—the far and protected—side of his horse, and at that moment it started to hail.
It happened so suddenly that at first the agent cringed and doubled over thinking the hailstones were bullets from somebody behind or off at a slant below his exposed rear. But as soon as he saw hundreds of tiny white balls about the size of his little fingernail popping all over the ground he understood what was happening and scrambled to his feet, spun around, and began sprinting toward the trees. The hail was so furious and thick he could barely see a faint gray tree line down the hill. Within seconds the ground was white with the icy stones and the agent slipped once, pitching sideways; he struck hard, did a half-somersault and was on his feet again, galloping crazily down the slope, pelted by the hail, falling again and getting up, and falling once more and rolling several times and crawling insanely a few yards, scrambling and bashing his knees, and then bolting up again and plummeting the last few yards into the trees where the covering pine branches were so thick that suddenly it wasn’t hailing anymore.
Swinging behind a tree he shouted “Hah!” triumphantly and giggled crazily, sobbing, laughing, panting with his chest tight and stricken with pain.
Kyril Montana looked at his hands: they were raw and bleeding. His pants were split at the knees, his kneecaps scraped raw and bloody. The side of one hiking boot was torn open. But he was alive, still mobile, and in the trees, and from here on in it was a whole new ball game—
But he had dropped the gun.
He had lost it in his scramble across that open area; and his binoculars were gone too.
Kyril Montana stared at the amazing storm, a sheet of violent white between him and three men with guns and, even as he watched, the storm slackened, the white thinned so that he could see back up the slope, at first faintly, and then more clearly to where he had been.
And with that he turned around and plunged deeper into the trees, grabbing trunks to swing around and down, skidding in thick meshes of slick, rotting leaves, barreling clumsily through brushy tang
les, staggering pell-mell down through the forest and the canyons toward his car four miles below.
* * *
Eliu Archuleta was surprised, shocked, and almost knocked down by the sudden onslaught of hail. When he saw the agent whirl and make a break, he was firing and jamming down the lever and yanking it back up with his finger on the trigger so that the shot automatically got off, even as the agent suddenly disappeared into the violent white explosion. Swinging the rifle in the direction Kyril Montana was running, he fired three more times, clicking the pin into an empty chamber once, and then he started trotting down through the pelting hailstones toward the rock, shouting in Spanish, “How was that? How was that?” to his mother, who had been dismounting seconds before the blinding storm struck and Eliu had commenced his second barrage.
They met at the rock, both on foot, Ruby leading her horse. And while the woman stood a few feet uphill, shoulders hunched against the stinging pellets, her son anxiously inspected the rock, nervously touching the bullet scars, shaking his head and pretending to be ashamed over how many times he’d missed.
“I should of come closer,” Eliu said with a shrug, staring through the storm toward where he knew the woods were. “I missed that son of a bitch by too much every time.”
“You came close enough,” Ruby said. “In fact, for a second I thought you might have hit him.”
Eliu kneeled and, taking an old tobacco can wrapped in dirty adhesive tape from his back pocket, he dumped five more shells into his hand, shoved the can back into his pocket, then fed the bullets one by one into his gun.
“Even so, you shoot like hell,” Ruby said, smiling a little.
“He was shooting at me. He didn’t know I wasn’t trying to kill him.”
“So he shoots like hell too, thank God,” Ruby said wearily. “You both shoot like hell so you’re both alive and God is smiling. But I’m not. I’m unhappy because I think Claudio shot too close and maybe hit him.” Then she added, “We’ll lay off him now because it’s going to be one cold chingadera up here tonight, and we don’t want him to freeze to death.”
“If he did, so what?”
“We don’t need that kind of trouble,” she said sadly, still hunched patiently against the storm like a horse, with her eyes squinched half-shut, immobile. “He’s got the idea now and we don’t want to push our luck.”
Once he had reloaded, Eliu was up and moving nervously about again. He trotted down the slope for the pack and brought it uphill, along with the radio, depositing them at the base of the large rock. Then he collected the rifle and the agent’s hat. There was a clean bullet hole in the hat, and he stuck his finger through the hole and wiggled it, grinning up at his mother, who said, “That was a nice thing for Claudio to do. He’s got a real sense of humor.”
Eliu pointed at Kyril Montana’s rifle, with part of the stock and the bolt area blasted and bent and the scope shattered, asking, “What about that?”
“That was a nice shot, a very important shot for us. It’s lucky the wind wasn’t blowing this hard when he took that shot.”
The hail abated, and they both looked down the slope to where Claudio García, kicking hard, was driving his horse up toward them. As he joined them and swung off his mount the storm ended. The sky remained gray, threatening, the valley dark, their ridge and part of the meadow around the ninth Little Baldy Bear Lake a sheer, dully gleaming white.
“Bravo,” Claudio growled, standing there staring at the pack, the radio, the rifle, the hat. Eliu turned the pack upside down and kicked through the things that fell out, the dehydrated food packages, socks, extra shirt, matches, and the posse’s picnic garbage.
“Put it all back in,” Ruby said. “And when it’s all together we’ll tie it to the saddles and take it down to where the earth is soft and bury it. We don’t want to get caught with any of this stuff.”
She set a cigarette between her lips and thumbed a wooden match to light it, blew out the match and put it back in her jacket pocket. Moving quickly around the rock then, she scuffed in the hail to see if any other equipment belonging to the agent was scattered around, and in the process she collected all the expended shells that she could find. Satisfied nothing else was there, she moved quickly down the slope to the small rock behind which the agent had first crouched, scuffing all the way down and all around that rock, and after that she loped quickly over to the larger rocks where the pack had been and kicked around in the hail until certain that nothing else remained.
Claudio squashed up the hat and stuffed it into the pack and, with Eliu’s help, lashed the pack and the useless rifle to the back of his saddle.
“Did you see where he entered the trees?” Ruby asked.
Her son shook his head. Claudio laughed: “I couldn’t see the end of my own nose.”
“We better get going,” she said, leading them on foot slowly up the slope toward the ridge, away from the direction Kyril Montana had taken. “I don’t want to freeze my ass off up here tonight.”
“I guess we scared him enough,” Claudio said uneasily, snapping his cigarette butt downhill. He was tired and a little shaken; frightened, actually, because maybe the agent could identify them, or maybe they had hit him; maybe they had botched this thing badly, maybe they should have killed him—Claudio, for one, had wanted very much to kill him, and he was still shaking from how difficult it had been to miss.
“I wonder,” Eliu said quietly, “if we should have killed him.”
Ruby cuffed him gently behind the head. “What are you, a total pendejo?” she asked unhappily. “If we had killed that cop they would have rounded up all the men in town and cut off their heads and hung them from their patrol car antennas.”
“Well…” Eliu said uncertainly, “at least I guess he got the point.” And he felt a little sick.
Claudio García shrugged tiredly: “Yeah, I think he got the point.”
They were on top of the ridge. Smiling unhappily, Ruby mounted her horse. “Come on, you stupid men,” she muttered quietly, affectionately. “Let’s go home where it’s warm.”
* * *
At 2:00 P.M. on the afternoon of the first day’s hunt for Joe Mondragón, the subject of this hunt, accompanied by his wife, by a brother-in-law, Eloy Quintana, and by Jimmy Ortega, walked into state police headquarters at Doña Luz. The dispatcher, Emilio Cisneros, was the only man holding down the fort.
“I hear somebody’s looking for me,” Joe said cockily. “Where in hell is everybody?”
“You’re supposed to be up in the mountains,” the dispatcher said.
“Does it look like I’m up in the mountains?”
“No.”
“Well, then, why don’t you get on that radio and call in one of your trigger-happy goons so’s I can find out what’s supposed to happen to me.”
“Sure … listen,” said the flustered dispatcher. “Bill Koontz is parked up at Louie’s Café. Why don’t you just drive up there…”
“Wonderful.”
Joe and his entourage left state police headquarters, piled into Eloy Quintana’s dilapidated pickup, and in a cloud of violet-colored exhaust, drove back up the highway to Louie’s Café.
Bill Koontz was sitting at the counter tapping up tostada crumbs with his middle finger and licking them off when Joe and his people walked in.
Joe sat down beside him. “Emilio down at the pendejo factory said you was up here, so that’s why I came. What am I supposed to do now?”
“Well, shit now…” And after the state cop had picked up his jaw, he asked: “Ain’t you supposed to be up in the mountains? There was thirty-five guys up there looking for you early this morning and they’re not back yet.”
Impatiently, Joe said, “Look, all I want to know is what am I supposed to do, that’s all.”
“The guy you shot, Pacheco, he’s gonna be okay.”
“That asshole came at me with a gun,” Joe said. “He was crazy—”
“Yeah, I know. There’s even a couple witnesses…�
� Koontz removed a dollar from his wallet and paid the girl behind the counter. “Let’s go back down to headquarters,” he said, adjusting his cap. “There’s a bunch of stuff’s gotta be filled out. Then I guess we’ll turn you over to Bernie when he gets back, I don’t know…”
“What am I gonna be charged with?” Joe asked nervously.
“I’m not sure. Where’s that gun you shot him with?”
“Out in Eloy’s truck. On the rack.”
“Maybe you better give that to me,” Koontz said.
Joe got the rifle from his brother-in-law’s truck and gave it to the state cop who put it in the back seat of his patrol car, and then the Quintana truck followed Koontz’s car back to the Doña Luz state police headquarters. Once there, Koontz called Xavier Trucho.
“We got Joe Mondragón,” he said. “Now what exactly do you want done?”
“How’d you get him? Did the posse smoke him out of the mountains? Is he alive?”
“He walked into headquarters about two-fifteen. I wasn’t here, I was up at Louie’s Café having a bite to eat. So Emilio sent him up there. He just walked in and sat down beside me and we talked a little, and he gave me the rifle.”
“Which rifle?”
“The one he shot Pacheco with.”
“Where the hell is he now?”
“Right here. He’s just sitting over there on a bench reading a magazine.”
“You’re kidding me, you son of a bitch!”
“He’s over there. Honest to Christ. I swear to it.”
“There’s an assault warrant out on him, ain’t there? That fucking Pacheco refused to die.”
“Well, I’m not positive … I’d have to check with either Bernie or Maestas down in Chamisaville. Is that what we decided? If it is it don’t make no sense…”
