Arroyo de la Muerte

by Frank Leslie

  ARROYO DE LA MUERTE

  (Canyon of Death)

  Bloody Arizona Book 4

  Frank Leslie

  Volumes in the Four-Book Series:

  Bloody Arizona

  Wildcat of the Sierra Estrada

  Chiricahua Blues

  Arroyo de la Muerte

  A MEAN PETE PRESS PUBLICATION

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Peter Brandvold

  Cover Photo by Peter Brandvold, Chiricahua Mountains, Arizona

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address peterbrandvold@gmail.com.

  Peter Brandvold has written well over one hundred action westerns under his own name and his pseudonym, Frank Leslie. Born and raised in North Dakota, he has lived all over the West. He currently lives in western Minnesota with his dog. Follow him here: facebook.com/peter.brandvold. Follow his blog at: www.peterbrandvold.blogspot.com. Check out a complete list of his westerns at: www.amazon.com.

  ARROYO DE LA MUERTE

  Chapter 1

  JULIA TAGGART rolled toward Yakima Henry on the large, canopied bed in Yakima’s private room at the Conquistador Inn in Apache Springs, Arizona Territory.

  The single white sheet slipped down far enough that he could see she wasn’t wearing a stitch. Her rich chestnut hair was pinned atop her head, sausage curls dangling down against her cheeks. Her full, pale, pink-tipped breasts sloped toward the mattress as she scuttled toward him. The Town Marshal of Apache Springs sucked a slow breath, filling up his lungs, tensing his entire body.

  How he’d yearned with a near-savage desperation to hold this beautiful, beguiling woman again in his arms and to never let her go…

  He turned his head away from her as she pressed her cheek against the small of his back and snaked her left arm around his waist. She splayed the fingers of that hand across his flat belly, over his shirt still dusty and sweaty from the long trail to and from the stagecoach that the Apaches had run down.

  His old deputy, the Rio Grande Kid was safe for now, over at Doc Sutton’s place. The stage passengers were safe, as well. At least, those who’d survived the Chiricahuas’ attack. Yakima’s junior deputy, Galveston Penny, was asleep in Yakima’s office, only a few drunks in the cells flanking the young ex-cow puncher. All was well in Apache Springs to which the railroad had just come. All was well…for now. Yakima had time for a little personal enjoyment.

  Julia groaned and lowered her splayed hand to just above the large brass buckle of his cartridge belt, digging her fingers in, kindling a fire in the big half-breed’s loins.

  “Get undressed, Yakima,” she said, pressing her soft lips against his back. “I don’t care what my sister means to you. I’ll be goddamned if I just don’t care!” Julia, whose father owned the Conquistador Hotel & Saloon, managed the place herself. It would have been easy for her to slip into his room even if he hadn’t locked it.

  Yakima looked down at the hand on his belly.

  He wanted desperately to grab that hand and turn to her and give her what she so urgently desired but he’d be damned if he could do it. She’d been teasing him by sending her whores to his room, a different one every night. Tantalizing him, mocking his goatish male desires, and trying to keep him away from her younger sister, Emma. Thus, he couldn’t have been more surprised to find the willowy, chestnut-haired, gray-eyed creature here now herself…in his bed.

  He squeezed her hand and thrust it back behind him.

  “Get out, Julia.” Yakima rose from the bed and in two strides he was in the chair by the door. He doffed his hat, let it tumble onto the floor, and, leaning forward, his head nearly to his knees, he ran a big, copper paw through his long, coal-black hair. “Get out!”

  She stared at him in shock, her gray eyes wide, touched by the pearl dawn light angling through a window behind her. Her lower jaw hung. It was as though he’d slapped her across her beautiful face. She didn’t say anything. She just knelt there, naked save for one arm drawn across her breasts. A tender nipple peeked out from between her fingers.

  Yakima looked up at her from beneath his black eyebrows mantling almond-shaped, jade eyes set deep in a darkly chiseled, severely-feature face with the high, tapering cheekbones of his Cheyenne mother. The green eyes, clear as a high-mountain lake, were compliments of his prospector father’s Old World German lineage. They were sometimes cast as softly as a spring rain in a meadow, sometimes forged as hard as diamonds, glinting with the savagery of his Cheyenne warrior ancestors. He stared back at the raving, naked beauty on the bed before him, trying to bring that savage sharpness to his gaze but unable to get them out of that rainy spring meadow.

  Julia saw the lie in those eyes.

  Slowly, she shook her head. “You don’t want that.”

  She dropped her arms from his breasts. She unfolded one long, alabaster leg in turn, placing her long, delicate feet onto the Oriental carpeted floor and walked over to him, knocking his sweaty black hat aside as she knelt between his wide-spread knees.

  She placed a hand on each knee. She shook her head again.

  “No,” she said knowingly, able to read him like a book. “That’s not what you want.”

  “Yes, it is,” he said without conviction, again lowering his hand, running it through his sweat-damp hair. Putting some steal in his voice as well as flint in his eyes, he said, “Get out of here.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want you here.”

  Julia glanced down between his spread knees and said with a caustic laugh, “You and I both know that isn’t true.”

  He closed his legs and wrapped his hands around her wrists, lifting them off his knees and pushing her back away from him, keeping her wrists in his hands. Her breasts jostled against her chest, rose and fell sharply as she breathed. He took his eyes off of them.

  “Get out of here. I won’t tell you again.”

  “What is it? What’s happened?”

  Raising his voice and hardening his jaws, Yakima said, “Get out of here, Julia!”

  “What has happened?”

  “It’s your…” He struggled to get the words out. Each one pierced his heart like a bayonet. “It’s your sister.”

  She stared at him. He couldn’t meet her gaze.

  Again, she shook her head, narrowed one eye shrewdly. “I told you…I don’t care. You can have her, too. I don’t care.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “No, I don’t. I know you don’t love her. Maybe you love to meet her out in the desert on your trysts after sunset. You like to lay with her. You enjoy punishing her with…” She let her eyes flick at his midsection. “But you don’t love her. You love me, Yakima. We both know it. I saw it in your eyes earlier. It’s true if anything in this world has ever been true before!”

  She leaped up off her knees and pressed her mouth against his. He tried to push her away, but he couldn’t do it. She pressed her mouth harder against him, opened his lips with her own. Groaning, she slid her tongue between his lips.

  Yakima felt his body yielding. His hands opened. She grabbed one of his with both of hers, placed it against her right breast as she kissed him with an urgent hunger, the nipple turning hard against his calloused palm.

  He opened his mouth and began returning her passionate kiss, lapping at her tongue, her teeth…but then he remembered that damned wanted circular her father was blackmaili
ng him with, and he summoned the strength out of the dark depths of his soul. He pulled his head back from hers, lifted his hand from her swollen breast, placed both of his hands on her upper arms.

  He shoved her away from him, hardening his jaws and gritting his teeth. “It’s over, Julia. We can’t see each other anymore. I’m sorry for harassing you, trying to get you entangled in me again. It was wrong. We can’t be together and that’s final.”

  “No!”

  She lurched up toward him again. This time he shoved her away with more power than he’d intended. She flew backward, dropping onto her bottom and falling back against the bed.

  She gazed up at him hurtfully, her flushed cheeks turning ashen. She drew a deep breath and said slowly, “What has happened? What has gotten into you?”

  Yakima had been only vaguely aware of running footsteps in the hall outside his door. Now they were growing louder. So loud that he had to raise his voice to say to Julia, “Ask your father. He’ll tell you the whole thing. That’ll take care of it. You’ll realize then that it has to be over between us. You have to move on, Julia.”

  She stared at him in exasperation and shock as the footsteps fell silent. They were replaced by a loud hammering on his door. “Yakima! Marshal Henry!” It was the voice of his junior deputy, Galveston Penny. “Come quick, Marshal. Julian Barnes was stabbed somethin’ awful over at Senora Galvez’s place, an’ the ranny who cut him’s on the run!”

  Chapter 2

  Yakima would have welcomed a distraction from the emotional mud bath that he and Julia had just taken together. But not the kind of a distraction his young deputy had just shouted through his door. Not the possible murder of one of Apache Springs’ most prominent businessmen.

  “Hold on,” he said to the door.

  Yakima rose from the chair. He ripped a sheet off the bed and wrapped it around Julia slumped on the floor before him, looking up at him incredulously, hurtfully, her hair now hanging in a tattered bun down over one pale shoulder.

  He lifted her to her feet and led her to one side of the door. He opened the door, concealing Julia with it, and gazed at Galveston Penny, the skinny, tow-headed young deputy in a store-bought, ill-fitting suit standing before him, eyes bright with alarm.

  The kid, in his early twenties, flung an arm out, gesturing down the hall toward the stairs. “Marshal Henry, Julian Barnes was stabbed over at--”

  “I heard!” Yakima crouched to retrieve his hat from the floor and then picked hip his Winchester Yellowboy repeater from where he’d leaned it against the wall.

  Young Penny stared through the door saying haltingly, “He took off like a bat out of hell. You, uh…you, uh…want me to get after him?” The deputy sounded about as eager to go after the killer as he was to saddle a grizzly. “It’s uh…it’s Gabriel Mankiller.” He swallowed.

  Yakima rested his rifle on his shoulder and reached for the doorknob. As he did, he glanced at the deputy still standing in the open doorway.

  Penny was staring at a pair of ladies’ lacey pink pantalettes lying on the floor near the bed, which was where Julia must have dropped them when she’d arrived and undressed.

  Galveston turned to Yakima and with a faint, wry curl of his mouth and with humor flashing in his eyes, said, “I mean…if’n you’re busy an’ all…”

  “Oh, shut up—I’m not busy!”

  Galveston stumbled back into the hall, flushing. “Well, hell—I didn’t mean nothin’ by it. I just…”

  Yakima grabbed the door and started to pull it closed as he stepped into the hall. He stopped and met Julia’s gaze through the crack between the wall and the other end of the door, between the hinges. Her gaze held his for a split second as she pressed the sheet against her bosom.

  Yakima cursed under his breath and continued into the hall, drawing the door closed behind him.

  He hurried down the hall toward the stairs, Galveston trotting along beside him, trying to match his stride. “I just meant,” the kid said, “you know…I mean…I figured them under-frillies weren’t yours, Marshal Henry.” He chuckled and glanced sidelong at his taller, darker boss.

  Yakima sobered him quickly with a look.

  “Uh…sorry,” Galveston said.

  “Gabriel Mankiller, you said?”

  “That’s right. He stabbed him upstairs at Senora Galvez’s place. There was another fella with him—that Mex you hauled in last week for slappin’ down that Chinaman tracklayer.”

  “Damaso Guzman,” Yakima recalled. He also recalled that Guzman was the type of sidewinder he’d figured he’d have to turn the key on again.

  “Yeah, that…that’s the one! Got a big snarling wildcat tattooed on his forehead. Carries two knives on his belt, another in a sheath on his chest.”

  “Right wholesome fella, Guzman. You know why they attacked Barnes?”

  “The doxie Barnes was with said Mankiller grabbed Mister Barnes’s wallet off a dresser and lit a shuck with Guzman. A witness to the attack, passing in the hallway at the time of the incident, corroborated Miss Ella’s story.”

  Yakima arched a brow at his young deputy, impressed. “’Corroborated’, eh?”

  Galveston grinned. “Yes, sir. I heard the county attorney bandy that one around in court the other day.”

  They were tramping down the broad carpeted stairs, dropping into the Conquistador Inn’s main, smartly outfitted drinking hall with a large horseshoe bar cleaving the room down its middle. No lamps had been lighted yet, so shadows reigned. The chairs were tipped over atop the tables. The place wouldn’t open until seven o’clock though one of Julia’s barmen was milling around behind the mahogany, stocking shelves warily and yawning.

  “What’s the commotion?” the barman, whose name was Ivor Ingersoll, asked as Yakima and Galveston hurried toward the front door.

  Galveston turned to yell anxiously, “Mister Barnes was stabbed in the back by that big Apache, Gabriel Man—”

  He stopped when Yakima elbowed him. “Stay focused here, Galveston.” He pulled open the front door and stepped outside, turning to his skinny junior deputy moving out behind him, and asking, “How bad off is Barnes?”

  “All I know is he was screamin’ awful bad when I was over at the Senora’s place, and there was blood all over the bed. The poor girl he was diddlin’ when Mankiller sunk that knife in his back was curled up on the floor, looking more red than white!”

  “Was she injured, too?”

  “No, just scared out of her wits, I think. Which is understandable, if you ask me. Can you imagin’ lay there starin’ up at the ceilin’ waitin’ for your jake to…you know…an’ then seein’ that big Injun come in and--”

  “Galveston--stay focused, son!”

  “Sorry, Marshal!”

  “Did you send for the doc?”

  “Of course!”

  “Did Mankiller and Guzman ride out together?”

  “That’s what I was told—yessir!”

  “How long ago and in which direction?”

  “Ten minutes.” Galveston flung his arm to indicate west. “That way!”

  Yakima glanced at a zebra dun he thought was Galveston’s tied to a hitchrack fronting the Conquistador. It was the only horse on the street at this early hour. “Is that your hay burner?”

  “Of course. You wouldn’t expect me to walk the two blocks over here from the jailhouse, would you?” There was no irony in the younker’s tone.

  “No, no—of course not. I’m gonna take your horse.” Yakima walked over to the zebra and pulled the old Winchester carbine from the saddle scabbard and tossed it to Galveston. “Take your rifle. Go back over to the Senora’s place and gather as many witnesses together as you can, and note what they tell you. Write it down. The way things are goin’ around here”—he cast a quick glance at the two shiny silver rails running down the dead center of the town’s main drag, leaving about thirty open yards between the rails and the opposing business establishments on each side of the street—“we’re gonna have to start
following the book as close as we can. The lawbook, I mean. We’re gonna need all the evidence we can get when we talk to the circuit judge about this deal.”

  As he swung up onto Galveston’s horse, Yakima scoffed at how civilized the town was becoming. At least, it was becoming more populated. The more people, the more “progress” coming to Apache Springs in the wake of gold being discovered in and around the Sierra Estrada in the western foothills of which the booming town sat, Yakima had noted a definite decline in actual civility.

  The current incident with Barnes was just more evidence.

  “You should gather a posse, maybe, Yakima,” Galveston said as he gazed leerily up at the tall half-breed straddling his horse. “I mean, that Mankiller’s name is right fittin’, I heard tell. And Guzman.” The young man shook his head. “He’s just as bad.”

  “No time for a posse.” Yakima reined the zebra west along the town’s main street. “Keep the lid on the town—will ya, Galveston? I’ll be back as soon as I can!”

  “Be careful, Marshal!” the deputy called.

  Yakima booted the zebra into a lope between the rails that shone with more and more definition to his left, as the sun inched up the horizon to the east, behind him.

  He followed the trail on out of the ragged outskirts of the town, whose edges were stretching farther and farther out into the rolling desert spiked with greasewood and ocotillo and the finger-shaped sentinels of saguaro cactus. As the sun rose, shadows stretched across the rocky desert along both sides of the wagon trail, which was a floury line curving and foreshortening into the misty distance beyond Yakima.

  The Dragoons were a long, dun-colored razor-back stretched out ahead of him, gaining more and more definition as the light grew. The Sierra Estrada, a spur range jutting off the western edge of the Chiricahuas, fell back behind him.

  For three miles the trail followed the two silver rails of the Central Arizona Company’s spur line, which connected Apache Springs with Benson and Tucson and all points west and east—to so-called “civilization” itself. Yakima had liked the town much better when he’d drifted here two years ago, just wanting to cool his heels after a bout of bad trouble up north, and break a few rocks in his own quest for a modest El Dorado.