by Ralph Cotton
Jenny let out a short scream and tried to reach over and help him shove the rock. But it was too late.
“Holy God!” she shouted as she saw the rock turn over against all of Tillis’ efforts and flop on top of him, smashing the helpless man down into the mud and the bags of money beneath it. The weight of the rock jarred the soft earth and settled atop Tillis with a deep thud, pinning him from his waist down.
“Get it off me! Get it off me!” Tillis shouted, near panicked, the weight crushing him below his waist.
“What can I do? Tell me!” Jenny shouted, tearful, near panic herself.
Behind her, a man stepped into sight, walked over near the rock and looked down at Tillis.
“If I was you,” he said calmly to Jenny Lynn, “I’d use a rope and horse.” He smiled. “Hope I’m not butting in.”
Jenny Lynn gasped, turning to face Hardin.
The gunman smiled and touched his wet hat brim, a long Colt hanging in his hand, his thumb over the hammer. He wagged the gun barrel, gesturing to where more rocks of similar size lay strewn on the ground a few yards away.
“That’s what we used, Orez and me,” he said. “To get the rock from there over to here? We roped that big boy, tied our horses to it, yanked it up right out of the ground.” He turned his smile down to Tillis. “Once it was unstuck, it rolled for us like a big ol’ croquet ball.”
“Who—who are you?” Tillis asked in a halting voice. He tugged on his gun handle, trying to free it up. Hardin looked at what he was doing but didn’t seem concerned.
“I’m Evan Hardin,” he said. “Part of that money you’re trying to steal belongs to me. The rest belongs to my pal Wilson Orez. I expect you’ve heard of him?”
“We’re not stealing it,” Jenny said. “Part of it rightfully belongs to us. We set up some big-paying jobs for Orez.”
“I see,” said Hardin, water dripping from his hat brim. “So you were going to only take some of it? Leave the rest of it, make sure we all got what was coming to us?” He chuckled. But then his chuckle stopped abruptly, his friendly smile vanished, as he swung a pointed finger at Tillis.
“If you get that gun pulled, you’d better shoot yourself instead of me. Because without me, you’re going to die right there, half in, half out of your grave. Nightfall, when the critters come for you, guess how good you’ll taste to them, all fresh and screaming while they chew out your eyes and dig their way inside your skull through the empty sockets.” He licked his lips as if imitating a wolf or a coyote.
Jenny Lynn stood staring, mesmerized by his vivid words.
Tillis lay crushed down into the money bags, his Colt mashed beneath his coat just at the edge of rock lying atop him. He’d managed to get his hand inside his coat and around the gun handle, but he hadn’t been able to pull it free. His hand fell in submission.
“Please!” he begged, nearly hysterical. “Get me out of here, mister! For the love of—”
“Hush, now,” said Hardin, cutting Tillis off as if he were an unruly child. “Blaspheming never helps, especially not at a time like this.”
“Please help me get him out of there!” Jenny said, finally coming around. “Do you still have the rope?”
“Come to think of it, yes, I do still have it,” said Hardin. “It’s on my horse, just around that big boulder there.” He lowered the Colt into his holster. “Why don’t I just get it for you?” He pointed in the direction of the path around the big boulder.
“Plea-please,” she said.
Hardin started to turn and walk toward where he’d left his horse. But he stopped in second thought.
“Oh, before I go get that rope, we need to talk about what’s in this for me,” he said, rubbing his thumb and fingers together in the universal sign for greed.
“Anything! Anything!” shouted Tillis. “Hurry, please. I can’t feel my legs! You can have my share, all of it, please!”
“Hear that?” Hardin asked Jenny Lynn, a bemused expression on his face. “Can’t feel his legs. Wants to give me his share.” He stepped in closer to Jenny Lynn. “Does that mean you’re willing to give me your share too?”
Jenny Lynn stalled and didn’t answer.
“Well, does it?” Hardin said.
“I don’t know,” said Jenny Lynn. “I mean, I hadn’t thought about it.” Her eyes darted back and forth between Hardin and Tillis like a trapped animal. “I—I need my share of that money. Isn’t his share enough? He’s the one stuck with a rock on his belly.”
Hardin laughed and shook his head as he raised the Colt from its holster again. Jenny Lynn’s eyes widened.
“I swear, you people kill me,” he said. “You’re both bargaining with money that doesn’t even belong to you.” He cocked the Colt and raised it.
• • •
Following the main trail as far back as where he, Jenny Lynn and Tillis had found the overturned buckboard, the Ranger slowed the barb to an easy gallop and cut up a steepening trail running alongside a stream of runoff water. Beneath a familiar black sky, blowing rain and thunder and lightning looming low above him, he rode the desert barb along a higher, more treacherous route that would lead him to the place where they had found the dead outlaw atop the bloody rock.
Higher to his right lay the southern end of Twisted Hills, a line of rugged rock hills so named by the Apache long before the lathed boot of the white man had stamped its imprint on the desert lands. Above the Twisted Hills stood Blood Mountains, where Orez would have them believe he’d fled to. But the Ranger wasn’t falling for it. Huh-uh. . . .
Orez wouldn’t have attempted to carry all that money by horseback with a posse breathing down his neck. Neither would he have ridden off and left it unguarded, taking a chance on its being gone when he returned for it. Orez was still here, the Ranger told himself, pushing the barb on through the driving rain.
By midmorning the fierceness of the storm had only lessened a little as the Ranger rode upward diagonally away from Twisted Hills, away from the longer, safer switchback trails and took a shorter, rougher route that would have staggered most horses. He noted that the hard-boned desert barb didn’t seem to mind.
When he knew he had ridden well past the switchbacks below, he rode back down through the rain on a steep narrow path to the main trail—a trail that he knew would have cost Tillis and the woman twice as long to travel.
No sooner had the barb’s hooves touched the main trail than he heard gunshots in the distance, six of them, slow, steady, the timing seeming deliberate. Turning the barb sharply toward the gunfire, he tapped his bootheels to its wet sides and put it forward in a run along the muddy trail. He could almost picture in his mind what had just happened at the boulder where he’d found Freeman Manning’s body. The money would be there; he was sure of it.
• • •
Jenny Lynn stood wide-eyed in front of the rock where Foster Tillis lay helpless and spent. He’d had to give up on drawing his gun from under the weight of the heavy rock for the moment. He lay catching his breath, the rock crushing down on him. Jenny Lynn felt her nose burn from the smell of gunpowder drifting around her in the falling rain. On the ground in front of her, Hardin was writhing in the mud, his Colt only inches from his fingers as he gasped and struggled, dark blood spewing from his bullet-riddled lungs.
“I—I was coming back,” he managed to say, trying to push himself up, his palms sinking into the mud. “I swear . . . I was.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Orez, stepping forward, drawing his big knife from its sheath. He reached down, gripped Hardin by his hair and raised his head at a sharp angle.
“No, no!” said Hardin.
But his words turned into a gurgling sound as the edge of cold steel sank deep and sliced hard, leaving a dark streak of blood spewing out from the beard stubble on his throat. Jenny Lynn half covered her face and winced at the quiet deadly sound o
f steel cutting through human flesh and tendon again and again until she shuddered as she heard the thump of Hardin’s head splash in the mud.
“There, it’s done,” Jenny heard Orez say. She opened her eyes and watched him stoop and wipe his knife clean on the muddy ground. A flash of lightning cast him in a stark gray-purple light.
She closed and opened her eyes again, this time looking at the young, strange Mexican woman who stood ten feet behind Orez, her face a mask of terror, the gun she’d used to shoot Evan Hardin still smoking, hanging in her trembling hand.
“You done well, Rosa,” Orez said to Rosa. He stepped over to the stunned, shaking young woman and took the gun from her hand. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” he said to her.
She trembled so hard she couldn’t answer. Instead she shook her head as best she could and stood, her left arm across her midriff, gripping her right arm at the elbow. She managed to look at Jenny Lynn, whose eyes pleaded with her as Orez dropped the spent cartridges from the big Colt, reloaded it and put it back in Rosa’s hand.
“Now her,” he said evenly, giving a short nod toward Jenny.
“Her too?” said Rosa, her face pale, ashen.
“Yes, her, too,” said Orez, stepping forward, staring at Jenny Lynn as he helped her point the Colt at the helpless woman. “Today is the day for everybody to die.” He cocked the Colt for Rosa.
Behind Jenny, pressed under the rock, Tillis was struggling again to raise his Colt, knowing it was the only chance he had to save himself, as slim as he knew that chance might be. But it was no use; the pistol wasn’t coming out. He would die here, he told himself, helpless, with a loaded gun in his hand.
“Take your time, Rosa,” Orez coached her, stepping away from Rosa, closer to Jenny Lynn. “Take good aim and squeeze the trigger, the way I showed you.”
Please, Jenny Lynn said silently, her lips forming the word, but unable to say it aloud. She saw the young woman standing behind the gun, ready to pull the trigger. But in a flash of hope, Rosa turned the gun away and aimed it at Orez’s back. Jenny gasped aloud at the explosion as the hammer fell.
Orez winced and jerked in place, then straightened and turned around, walking stiffly back to Rosa Dulce, his hand on the bone handle of his big knife.
“You must have misunderstood me,” he said in a soft, even tone. “I meant for you to shoot her, not me.”
Chapter 21
The worst of the storm had passed when the Ranger arrived at the path leading up to the big boulder. He stepped down from the California saddle and led the speckled barb the last few yards, his Colt in his left hand, his Winchester and the horse’s reins in his right. When he eased his way around the boulder, he saw the young Mexican woman sitting in the mud.
“He’s . . . gone,” she said, barely above a whisper.
Still, the Ranger looked all around before stepping any closer. He saw the scalped and decapitated heads of two men and one woman, standing in a row across the top of the overturned rock where the gunman Freeman Manning had spent the last minutes of his life.
More warnings? he asked himself, staring at the heads, rain pouring down their sightless, open eyes, pink blood still running down the rock into the mud. Beside the rock, he saw the empty hole and a short shovel lying in the mud. That’s where the money had been buried, he told himself.
When the posse was on Orez’s trail and Orez knew that much money would only slow him down, he had his men roll a rock over beside the boulder, scratch out enough dirt to bury the bags, then roll the rock back atop everything. Smart thinking, Sam had to admit.
He let the barb’s reins fall from his hand and walked over to the woman. Looking all around to make sure it was clear, he then stooped down beside her and examined her bloody, mud-streaked face, her wet, filthy clothes and the rope lying in a pile on the ground beside her.
“Are you wounded anywhere, ma’am?” he asked, looking at a splotch of watery blood on the wet ground, another a few feet away. He wasn’t about to ask if she was all right. She clearly wasn’t, wound or no wound.
“I—I’m afraid if I stand up, I’ll fall in half,” she said in a raspy voice.
The Ranger raised a cold arm from across her waist and looked closely at her. He saw no blood.
“I see no wound,” he said.
She didn’t respond to his words. Instead she let her arm fall back limp across her lap when he turned it loose, and she looked all around slowly.
“I killed them all, you know,” she said quietly. “I shot them dead.”
“No, ma’am, I didn’t know that,” Sam said. “Did Wilson Orez make you do it?”
She shook her head slowly, as if having to consider it for a moment.
“Make me? No,” she said. “But I already knew that I had to do whatever he wanted me to do. He told me today everybody dies.” She took on an uncertain look. “Is that the same thing as him making me?” she asked.
Sam didn’t answer right away. He laid his rifle across his wet knee, reached out and wiped a fleck of mud from under her eye. Finally he said quietly, “There’s all kinds of ways of making folks do things, I expect. Who are you?”
“I’m Sweet Rose,” she said with a slight but painful-looking smile.
Sam just looked at her.
“My name really is Rosa Dulce,” she added.
“You’ve been leaving me signs along the way?” he said. “String, pieces of your skirt hem?”
She looked surprised.
“You found them,” she said. “You knew I was here.” She stiffened her expression a little. “Did you come for me, or the money?” she asked.
“To tell you the truth, I came for both,” Sam replied. “But mostly I came for you,” he said. “Whatever you did, I know he must’ve made you do it. So, if it comes down to anybody questioning—”
“I shot him too,” she said bluntly.
“You did?” said Sam, looking back at the splotch of watery blood on the ground.
“I did,” she said, barely shaking her head. “It didn’t bother him. He took the gun from me, replaced the bullet and put it back in my hand. He said, ‘This time, get it right.’ So I went ahead and killed them both.”
“Don’t talk about it now,” the Ranger said. “Just keep telling yourself that you’re safe, that it’s over. That’s enough for now.” He looked around. Orez had taken all the horses to carry the bags of money. “How bad is he bleeding?” he asked.
“He’s bleeding a lot,” she said. “But it doesn’t bother him. I don’t think he can be killed.”
“He can,” Sam said. He took her hands in his and stood up, helping her to her feet. “There, see? You didn’t fall apart.”
“He knows you’re tracking him,” she said.
“He does? How does he know that?” the Ranger asked. Even as he asked, it dawned on him that Orez hadn’t left a horse for her.
“Because he’s seen you now,” she said. She gave him a strange, thin smile. “He said he would know for sure when he sees you come here. I think he knows everything, about everything.”
Sees me come here? Sam looked all around warily, his eyes going up along the cliffs and ledges above them.
“He knows about the string and the cloth I left for you,” she said. “I told him everything last evening.”
“Come with me,” he said quickly, realizing Orez had meant what he’d told her. Today everybody dies. He had only left her alive to keep him standing in the open. Orez was up there, behind the breaking clouds, waiting for his shot.
Still scanning the cliffs and the hill line, Sam took her arm and started to lead her to the shelter of the large boulder. But before they moved a step, she gave a loud grunt and slammed against him. He caught her in his arms as he heard a distant rifle shot resound from somewhere in the swirl of rain on the barely visible hill line above them.
Withou
t a second between shots, Sam dragged the woman to the shelter of the boulder as mud from the next bullet sprayed up, followed by the explosion. Quickly he leaned her back against the boulder and looked at the gaping wound in her chest.
“See?” she said, choking, gasping for breath. “He was right, today everybody dies,” she said. “Just like he . . . said we would. . . .” Her head fell over onto her shoulder and she seemed to relax in the mud and the falling rain.
Sam closed her eyes with his wet gloved hand, then turned and looked around the edge of the boulder in the direction the killing shot came from. Who in the world could make such a shot as that? he asked himself, feeling the icy reality of just how deadly this man was. He looked up as thin breaks in the black sky drifted across the obscured ledges and cliffs.
Don’t let him throw you, he warned himself. If Orez had gotten his way, one of those two shots would have left him lying dead in the mud beside the young woman.
You wanted me to fear you. All right, you’ve got that, the Ranger told himself, looking over at the three heads standing drenched in the pouring rain. “But so what?” he murmured aloud to himself. He’d felt fear before, more times than he cared to recall. He forced himself to his feet, his back against the boulder, and stood there for a moment.
He understood fear. He’d learned that fear wasn’t the lack of courage. Indeed not, he told himself. He’d come to know that there could be no courage without fear being the challenge it had to overcome. He took a breath, stepped out from the boulder and walked to where the barb stood in the open, staring at him through the rain.
Why hadn’t Orez shot the horse if he didn’t want to be followed?
He didn’t know; he didn’t care. Whatever Orez had in mind, it was getting ready to play out, he thought, gripping his rifle tight in his wet, gloved hand. He felt whatever fear he had fall away under the icy current that swept through him. He gathered the barb’s reins, stepped up into the saddle and touched his heels to the horse’s sides.
