Red Moon

by Ralph Cotton

  The Ranger had laid the blanket he’d gotten in Trade City just outside the small circle of firelight, into the darkness farther back in the overhang. On the other side of the fire, Foster Tillis had done the same thing, a common caution among lawmen, Sam noted to himself. But after an hour, still awake, he waited and listened until he heard snoring from Tillis’ side of the fire. Then he left his blanket folded against his saddle, crawled away—in case Tillis was feigning sleep—and took up a position standing back along the inner stone wall.

  Before another hour had passed, he heard the roan grumbling and grousing under its breath. Beside the roan, the coach horse stood still and quiet without a care in the world as a silhouette stepped silently into sight against the gray night. The Ranger watched coolly as a hand reached out and tried to settle the roan. But the roan would have none of it, and the silhouette moved away, circled wide around the fire toward his blanket on the stone floor.

  Sam watched and eased forward from the shadows as a hand holding a gun rose, the black silhouette moving closer toward his saddle and blanket. But all at once the silhouette froze, seeing the empty blanket outside the circle of firelight.

  “Uh-oh,” the voice said quietly, seeing the mistake. But it was too late.

  Sam sprang forward, threw his arm around the silhouette’s neck from behind, stuck his Colt against the side of the person’s head and held tight.

  “Drop the gun or go down with it,” he said.

  The seriousness of his voice left no room for question. The big gun fell to the stone floor with a loud clank.

  “Don’t shoot, Ranger! It’s me, Jenny Lynn!” the silhouette said fast, her voice shaking. “The gun is dropped, see?”

  Sam, hearing Tillis thrash and rise quickly to his feet, swung the woman around to face Tillis.

  “Here she is, Tillis,” Sam said, making it up as he went. “Just like you told me she would be.”

  “Foster, you bastard,” Jenny Lynn shouted. “You told him I was coming?”

  Tillis slumped and shook his head.

  “Jesus, no, Jenny Lynn! I didn’t tell him, but you just did,” he said, sounding disappointed in her. “He was lying, reaching for anything he could.”

  “He didn’t tell you I was coming for him, Ranger?” Jenny Lynn said, sounding confused.

  “Not in so many words, ma’am,” said the Ranger. “But he told me.” He lowered the gun from her head and uncocked it. “He’s been telling me all day somebody’s coming for him. I just didn’t realize it was you.”

  He turned her loose after running his hand up and down her rain slicker for any other gun. As she stepped away with her hands raised, Sam stooped and picked up the bone-handled Colt he’d last seen in the satchel along the edge of floodwater.

  “Well, well, look who’s here,” he said, looking at the Colt, turning it in his hand.

  “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea here, Ranger,” said Tillis, moving quick, trying to salvage whatever he could from the failed attempt at freeing him. “She wasn’t going to shoot you. Were you, Jenny?”

  “No, I wasn’t,” the woman said straight-faced.

  The Ranger just watched and listened, hefting the bone-handled Colt in his hand.

  “The gun is nothing more than an inducement—a stage prop if you will,” she said. “What I was getting ready to do was awaken you, threaten you with the gun and make you take the cuffs off him. But I wouldn’t have shot you, I promise.”

  “That’s comforting to know,” said the Ranger.

  “Ranger, I know there’s no way for me to prove it now,” the woman said. “But I so hope you’ll take my word for it.”

  “What’s your play in all this?” the Ranger asked.

  “Well—” she said, fishing for a place to start explaining herself. “I’m not a dove, as I was pretending to be.” She gave Tillis a glance, then looked back at the Ranger. “I’m what Mr. Pinkerton calls a lady operative. We sort of fill in where—”

  “How’d you get here?” Sam asked before she finished.

  “I arrived by horse, Ranger,” she said, looking at him as if he should already know that answer.

  “A buckskin horse?” he asked, sounding confident in what he said.

  She looked trapped, worried.

  “Well . . . yes, in fact it is,” she said.

  “You stole it from Trade City right before the twister hit there,” the Ranger said.

  “Actually, she did not,” said Tillis. “I acquired the horse.”

  “Stole it,” the Ranger corrected.

  “Acquired,” Tillis insisted. “But have it your way.” He dismissed his actions with a shrug. “What else could I do? We’re in pursuit of a robber—a killer, in fact. We had to have a horse. We had no money to purchase one. I would have returned it afterward, or given the owner a purchase voucher on behalf of—”

  “So you’re horse thieves,” Sam said bluntly, getting tired of hearing him justify what he’d done.

  “I wouldn’t say we’re horse thieves, per se,” said Tillis.

  “But the man in Trade City whose horse you stole would say you are,” the Ranger replied.

  “Please, Ranger, let’s not split hairs over this,” said Tillis.

  “I can take the two of you there so you can settle whether or not you’re horse thieves, per se,” the Ranger said. “Mexico doesn’t hang horse thieves. Instead they horsewhip you and stick you in prison for a few years, let you think about what you did, decide how you might have done it different.”

  The two looked at each other. Tillis took a breath and tried to release the tension in the air.

  “My goodness, I ask you,” he said, “how did things ever get so messed up? Where did we go so far apart on things?”

  “I can tell you.” Sam looked at them, not about to let them off the hook. “It all started when you posed yourselves to me as a hardware drummer and a saloon dove instead of being honest.”

  “All right,” said Tillis. “I admit it was a mistake, not being honest with a fellow lawman. But we had spent so long, worked so hard. I had gotten so close to Orez, I couldn’t risk letting anyone know who we are.”

  “How close were you, considering he nearly beat you to death?” Sam asked.

  “Something went wrong, Ranger,” Tillis said. “Things that wouldn’t concern you.”

  “Good enough,” the Ranger said with finality on the matter. “Come morning I’ll hand the two of you to the federales at Picate, and I’ll pick up Orez’s trail and track him down.”

  “You’ll never find him,” Jenny Lynn put in quickly. “We know where he’s going. You don’t. You need to keep us with you.”

  The Ranger shook his head. “I don’t usually partner with people who come at me with guns in the middle of the night, then start seeing who can lie the quickest when I get the drop on them.”

  “But, Ranger, we’re not lying to you now,” Tillis said. “We’ve told you who we are, what we’re doing here!”

  “You haven’t told me everything, Tillis,” the Ranger said.

  “We have told you everything!” said Tillis. “I swear we have.”

  “Be careful what you swear to,” the Ranger cautioned him. “If you swear you’ve told me everything, how are you going to convince me when you decide to add some things to it?”

  • • •

  In the night, the Ranger sat in the shadow of the overhang watching Foster Tillis’ and Jenny Lynn’s every move without them seeing whether or not his eyes were open. He’d purposely left the two seated beside the fire talking quietly, sorting things out between themselves. The Ranger had escorted them both to where she had left Audie Murtzer’s stolen buckskin Morgan hitched along the trail. Now the Morgan stood comfortably beside the roan and the coach horse that Tillis rode.

  With his ear tuned to the roan, the Ranger m
anaged to doze on and off, knowing that any attempt they made toward taking the horses and riding off in the night, the cross-natured roan would let him know right away. Besides, he reasoned to himself, Tillis wasn’t going anywhere without first getting rid of the handcuffs.

  Near dawn when the Ranger straightened and noted that the whispering conversation between the two had ceased, he stood up and walked to the fire.

  “Time to go,” he said.

  The two went about preparing their horses for the trail. Taking their silence to mean they had decided to leave the situation as it stood and say nothing more on the matter, the Ranger saddled the roan, gathered his belongings and stood waiting until the two led their horses onto the path down the side of the rocky hill.

  Once mounted on the trail, they rode toward the hill town until the Ranger spotted the overturned buckboard lying off the trail down the steep hillside to their right. Strewn along the rocky slope, the iron strongboxes lay empty, their tops flung open. No sooner had the Ranger seen the wagon and the iron boxes than Tillis and the woman saw them too. They reined their horses up in front of the Ranger and stared down with solemn expressions.

  “It looks like Wilson Orez decided to lighten the load,” the Ranger said. “He must’ve been getting ready to climb up into the Twisted Hills and disappear up into the Blood Mountains.”

  Tillis and the woman looked at each other. After a moment, Tillis turned to the Ranger.

  “It’s foolish, the three us not working together to get Orez, Ranger Burrack,” he said, his stitched and puffy face appearing to be healing slightly.

  “I agree,” the Ranger said, crossing his wrists on his saddle horn. “From everything I’ve seen of Orez, he’d be hard enough even for three of us.” The Ranger saw Tillis and Jenny Lynn give each other a guarded glance. He saw Jenny Lynn shake her head ever so slightly.

  All right, Sam told himself. He could wait.

  He turned the roan back to the trail and gestured them forward in front of him. They rode on until, over an hour later, they stopped at a trail that turned off to the right and snaked across a flat stretch of desert floor to a long row of foothills leading up into a rugged mountain range. Behind them, the familiar black cloud had begun creeping forward at a quicker pace than it had traveled the night before. Pale lightning flicked at the far end of the earth.

  “Here’s the trail to Picate,” the Ranger said. As he spoke, in the near distance the three of them saw a column of uniformed Mexican soldiers riding in their direction. “If I’m lucky, maybe this patrol will take you off my hands. I can get back under way. Either way, you’ll both be in Picate before evening. Odds are you’ll both be in a cell waiting for beans and goat meat before nightfall.” He turned the roan toward the trail and gestured the two ahead of him. “They can send for Audie Murtzer in Trade City and have him come claim his stolen horse.”

  Without a word, Jenny Lynn gave Sam a defiant look and started to turn her horse. But Tillis looked at the cuffs on his wrists and slumped on his horse’s back.

  “Hold it, Jenny,” he said. “I didn’t come this far to end up in a Mexican prison for horse theft.”

  “You’ve told him all we can tell him,” Jenny Lynn said.

  “We both know that’s not true,” said Tillis. He turned to the Ranger. “All right, Ranger, you want the truth, here it is.”

  As Tillis spoke, the woman looked away, toward the storm closing in from the distant horizon.

  “We both really are detectives with the Pinkerton Detective Agency,” Tillis said. “We both started searching for Wilson Orez over a year ago—a year and seven months to be exact.” He gave Jenny Lynn a glance. She only stared away more intently.

  “I was working under cover,” Tillis said, “posing as a hardware drummer whose scheme was to sell stolen army guns and snake-head whiskey to the Indians. I managed to get closer to Wilson Orez than any lawman so far,” he said. “So close that he began paying me big money for information I could get on valuable rail and stage shipping coming across the border under the new trade agreement.”

  Sam quietly watched him and listened, feeling as though the words out of Tillis’ mouth this time would be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

  “At first even taking money from him and setting up the jobs seemed like a surefire way for me to nail him any time I felt like it. Meanwhile I was hanging on to the money he gave me, telling myself, I should say convincing myself, that when the time came I would take him down, turn the money over to my superiors. My intentions were honorable. At first, in any case.”

  The woman turned in her saddle, looked at him, then looked away.

  “What he means is, until he started trusting me,” she said.

  “I never said that, Jenny Lynn, and I wasn’t going to,” said Tillis.

  “It needs to be said,” the woman replied. “I was the one keeping tabs on the money, Ranger. I was the one to start spending it. At first, just on things I thought we needed to keep the case going—better food, better lodging. Then new clothes for myself. . . .” She let her words trail as she shook her head slowly. “It soon started adding up. I lost control of it.”

  Sam drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly, gazing off at the Mexican soldiers riding toward them, getting closer now. He shook his lowered head.

  “Two detectives gone wrong,” he murmured. “You took sides with the thief and murderer you were sworn to bring to justice. That’s as low as it gets in this occupation.”

  “I know that, Ranger,” said Tillis.

  “So do I,” said the woman. “We had both realized what a terrible thing we’d done. We were out to fix it when things went wrong and Orez turned on us for no reason.”

  “That’s right,” said Tillis. “We’d already decided to make things right before they went any further. I could have salvaged the whole operation with what I would have coming for these last robberies I set up for him, the stagecoach and Trade City Bank. But it turns out, Orez had already decided he was through with me. I tried to talk to him when he and his men were robbing the stagecoach.” He gestured at his face. “This is what I got.”

  “And now,” said Sam, “you want me to believe you’re both after Orez and the money you know he has, so you can clear everything and make yourselves right again?”

  “Yes, we’d like you to believe that, Ranger,” said Tillis, looking him squarely in the eye. “It happens to be the truth.”

  Sam looked at the federales drawing closer, recognizing the young captain at the head of the column.

  Tillis and Jenny Lynn looked at the soldiers too, their expressions turning tight and grim.

  “Don’t you believe people can see their mistakes and change, Ranger?” Tillis said.

  Sam didn’t answer. Instead he sidled his horse over to him as the soldiers drew within a few yards of them.

  “Stick out your wrists,” he said. “I’ll be taking back my cuffs now.”

  The two sat crestfallen. A tear ran down the woman’s face.

  Putting the cuffs away, Sam turned to her.

  “Get off the stolen horse, Jenny Lynn,” he said. “Get up behind Tillis. “You’re riding double now.”

  She and Tillis gave each other a puzzled look as the column slowed to a halt and the young captain recognized the Ranger.

  “Ah, Ranger Burrack,” he said. “What do you bring us this time? More prisoners, I bet?”

  “This time I bring you a stolen horse,” Sam replied. He took the Morgan by its reins and led it forward. One of the men broke ranks, rode forward and took the horse from him. “It was stolen from a man named Audie Murtez, in Trade City. I know he’ll be happy to get it back.”

  “Sí, and we will get it to him immediately,” said the captain. He gave a grin and said, “Now that you have turned to chasing down horse thieves, soon both of our countries’ horses will be safe.�
�� He looked around to make sure his men appreciated his joke; then he turned back to the Ranger.

  The Ranger nodded amiably to show he was a good sport. Seeing the questioning look on the captain’s face as the man eyed Tillis and the woman, Sam said, “These two acquired the horse.” He shot Tillis a look. “Knowing it was stolen, the woman brought it to me—woke me in the middle of the night to take it from her.” He shot Jenny Lynn a glance, then looked back at the Mexican captain.

  The young captain eyed the three of them each in turn, curious at the sight of Tillis’ bruised and sewn-up face, wolfish at Jenny Lynn, her bare knee and calf dangling down the big horse’s side, showing below her muddy, hiked-up skirt.

  “Is everything else good, Ranger?” he asked, looking Sam up and down, his battered hat, the swallow-tailed dress coat, a pair of scruffy miner boots the townsfolk at Trade City had given him.

  The Ranger nodded and touched his fingers to his hat brim.

  “Good as ever, Captain,” he said. “If you’ll permit us, we’ll ride with you into Picate, try to get to shelter before this storm gets to us.”

  “Blast these storms for the devils that they are,” the captain swore toward the black distant sky. “Sí, ride with us, Ranger Burrack,” he said with a dismissing toss of his hand. “I know our horses will all be safe with you along.”

  Chapter 19

  At the town livery stable in Picate, Tillis and the woman traded in the big coach horse for two saddle horses complete with tack and saddles. Sam paid the forty-dollar difference in the trade with a gold coin from his saddlebags. While thunder slammed and the storm moved in behind the familiar hard-blowing rain, he and Tillis stood in the open door of the livery barn. They looked out at a silvery gray rain blown sideways beneath a black sky. The roan and the two new horses stood eating grain from a long wooden trough.

  “I won’t forget this, Ranger,” Tillis said between the two of them, feeling better without his hands cuffed, without looking through the black iron bars of a jail cell the way he’d anticipated doing once they arrived at Picate. “I’m going to pay you back the forty dollars, every penny,” he added, still rubbing his freed wrists.