by Lyle Brandt
This morning was just one more of a thousand days when he had overslept and risen from a harlot’s crib unwashed, smelling of sweat and other things, achy and with his stomach knotted, but still knowing he must eat and then get back to camp, where Pancho Villa would be waiting for him, ready to dispatch another team for rest and recreation in Ascensión.
Across the table from him, Jesús Zarita was looking green around the gills. His breakfast order was a lone fried egg, and he had barely touched it but was on his second cup of coffee, sipping timidly instead of gulping it as Rocha did. Some of the fresh stains on his shirt were obviously vomit, but he had not brought a change of clothes with him to town, and thus would spend the day’s ride back to camp looking and smelling like an alcoholic hobo from the city’s slum.
“You need to ride downwind of me today,” Rocha taunted his friend. “You smell like a hog in muck.”
“No one is likely to mistake you for a blossom either,” said Zarita.
“But the difference would be that I don’t care.” Eyeing his comrade’s plate, Rocha asked him, “Do you intend to eat that egg?”
Zarita made a sour face, and Rocha took that as a negative response, spearing the fried egg with his fork and stuffing it into his maw as one lukewarm bite. That done, Jesús pushed back his chair and rose, left money for his own meal on the table by his plate, and told Rocha, “Vamos, amigo. We are late already.”
“Thanks to you,” Enrique muttered in reply.
Zarita brayed laughter, saying, “At least I left my woman satisfied. Can you say that?”
Cursing, Rocha followed him out and down the street, into the livery, where an old man with thinning hair and spotty whiskers was engaged in saddling their animals. The outlaws left him to it, since his fee was paid up in advance, but checked the girth and billet straps to make sure both were properly secured. Once mounted, they rode out into the morning sunshine, Rocha reaching up with one scarred hand to shade his eyes beneath the brim of his sombrero.
As they reached the outskirts of Ascensión, Enrique Rocha checked the pocket watch that he had stolen from a traveler outside of Torreón, some five or six years earlier. Its owner had no further use for it, since he was dead, and Enrique had admired the crisp engraving on the inside of its pop-up lid that read con amor para siempre, annabella.
He had no idea who Annabella was or had been, much less how her everlasting love had ended or how long ago. Sometimes Rocha pictured her, a different woman each time, as he drifted off beside a campfire, needing help to fall asleep. It was all ancient history, of course, but sometimes Enrique fantasized that he might meet her one day, smiling as he let her see the watch and bent her to his will.
A half mile out of town and westward bound, he glanced back toward Jesús and found him slouching in his saddle like a man who could not quite decide whether he was sick or just exhausted. Enrique jeered at him, “You should have had some desayuno. Were you never told that breakfast is the most important meal you eat all day?” Zarita produced a retching sound, Rocha laughing as he added, “Or you ought to hold your liquor better, eh, amigo? Set a good example for the rest of us.”
* * *
* * *
They should be here by now,” Sonya Aguirre said.
“Be patient,” her twin, lying in the desert grass beside her, answered. “They will have been up most of the night, drinking and whoring. We can start to worry if we don’t see them by noon.”
“I want to get this over with, Dolores.”
“As do I. But we cannot control when two drunken bandidos stumble out of bed.”
Sonya frowned at that. Replied, “But what of Papa? He needs us to care for him.”
“He has the staff to deal with that,” Dolores said. “Right now, he needs the stolen horses more, to close that army sale.”
“And we have no idea yet as to where they are,” Sonya retorted.
“Which is why we wait for these gusanos to arrive and point the way for us.”
Gusanos. Maggots. Sonya thought that fit the raiders well enough. Perhaps one of them fired the shot that killed Eduardo, while his various amigos made off with their father’s herd.
Although she had been raised on breeding horses, working daily at the rancho, Sonya never thought about the animals they raised and sold as being hers. Sometimes she wondered whether Dolores felt the same, as if they both were set aside, assigned to lesser roles than Papa Alejandro—who had built the hacienda up from scratch—and his firstborn, Eduardo, who as son and heir stood to inherit everything. It was expected, understood, that Sonya and Dolores would find husbands and that their esposos would team up with Alejandro and Eduardo at the ranch, or else remove their wives to some other location, where they would produce children in turn and pray for healthy sons.
But there was no Eduardo now, and that changed everything.
Their father, as a widower who showed no interest in marrying again, would likely never have another son and heir. Or, if he did, the boy would lag so far behind his half sisters in age that they would likely wind up running things while he was still a child of tender years. As much as it pained Sonya to admit it, Alejandro could not live forever, even if he still possessed the will to try.
There had been no chance to discuss the matter since the raid that turned the twins’ lives upside down, though it preyed on Sonya’s mind and she imagined that Dolores felt the same. From infancy, it seemed that they had shared most thoughts between them, often finished each other’s sentences, and when Dolores broke her arm while falling from a horse at age nine, Sonya felt a corresponding stab of pain before she learned about the accident.
That was the way of twins, and Sonya reckoned it would never change, unless . . .
There had been so much killing on their trek across Chihuahua, with no end in sight, she had to wonder how she would react if something fatal should befall Dolores in their campaign to retrieve the stolen herd.
“¡Dios no lo quiera!” Sonya muttered, God forbid, then checked to make sure that Dolores had not heard her.
No. Her sister’s eyes were still fixed on the east-west trail that served Ascensión and that should bring the two bandidos riding unawares into their trap.
What was delaying them so long? How much could two men drink in one night? How often could they perform with working women in a smelly two-bit crib? The waiting set her nerves on edge, no matter how she tried to calm herself.
Another thirty minutes passed before Dolores said, “Two riders coming.” As she spoke, she passed her pocket telescope to Sonya. Through the glass, Sonya immediately saw the pair of horsemen drawing closer, magnified by the action of the spyglass’s lenses.
Ignacio Fuentes had given them a short description of the men he called Enrique Rocha and Jesús Zarita, but drooping sombreros hid their faces for the most part, and since neither twin had glimpsed the two villistas previously, Sonya could not verify whether these were the right two men. She turned and signaled for Ignacio to join them on the rise and watched him crawling toward her on all fours, not wishing to expose himself against the skyline if the riders glanced in their direction.
“Take this,” she instructed, passing the spyglass to Fuentes. “Are those two the men you met?”
Ignacio focused the telescope to suit his eye, taking a longer time than Sonya would have liked before he said, “Creo que sí.”
“You think so?” Sonya challenged him. “Keep watching and don’t answer until you are certain.”
Fuentes held the telescope in place against his right eye. Downrange, Sonya saw one of the riders draw a watch and chain from his vest pocket, open it, and raise his chin to check the time.
“Sí, señorita,” Fuentes said this time. “There is no doubt. The one in front is Rocha, so the other has to be Zarita.”
“If we take the wrong pair by mistake,” Dolores cautioned him, “it will go badly for
you.”
Handing back the telescope to Sonya, Fuentes said, “I’m certain. There is no mistake.”
“Bien.” Sonya spoke for her sister and herself as one. “Go and prepare to close the trap.”
* * *
* * *
Jesús Zarita felt no better for his time spent in the saddle than when he had left the Lucky Lizard sixty minutes earlier. The desert sun seemed bent on baking his tequila-addled brain despite the shade from his sombrero, and the warm wind blowing in Zarita’s face served only to increase his nausea. The rocking of his horse with each step that it took was also sickening. If they did not reach camp soon . . .
“Por el amor de Dios,” he called out to Rocha, leading their two-man parade by half a dozen yards. “How much longer?”
Rocha half turned in his saddle, glancing back, and cracked a wicked smile. “Do you remember nothing from our journey yesterday?” he answered in a mocking tone.
“I asked a simple question,” groused Jesús.
“A simple answer for a simple mind, then, mi amigo. Two more hours at the very least.”
“I don’t believe it took that long before,” Zarita came back at him, not quite whining.
“You were younger yesterday,” said Rocha, laughing at him. “I believe Concetta stole the best of you away last night.”
“She stole three pesos, I can tell you that.” Zarita moped.
“And you did not complain, cobarde?”
“I decided she was worth it,” Jesús said.
Another laugh at that. “Mingling with whores and sinners,” Rocha said. “You should not try to match your namesake from la Biblia. Unless, of course, you can turn water into wine.”
“That’s blasphemy,” Jesús protested feebly.
“Then I ask forgiveness in your name,” said Rocha, laughing all the louder.
They rode on another hundred yards or so with Rocha chuckling to himself, Zarita muttering under his breath. He wished that he could think of some way to get even with Enrique, maybe slip a scorpion into his bedroll one night soon, then thought that with his own luck, he would be more likely to receive the deadly sting.
Perhaps, instead, he could—
Before another plan could take shape in Zarita’s fuzzy mind, a voice cried out from somewhere up ahead. “¡Deténganse donde están!”
Stop where you are, that would have been in English, and Zarita reined up instantly, while Rocha walked his steed a little closer to a long, low ridge that lay before them to the west. At once, a rifle shot rang out. Zarita ducked his head and heard the bullet whisper past him. Even as he ducked, not trusting his sombrero to repel a rifle shot, he glimpsed a line of mounted figures on the ridgeline, etched in silhouette against a clear blue sky.
Bandoleros, Jesús thought, but would not highwaymen plying their trade in this part of Chihuahua know on whose toes they were stepping? Hard upon the heels of that thought, it was clear to him that transient robbers would not recognize himself and Rocha as villistas. To a stranger’s eye, they might appear as simple travelers and ripe for picking.
Rocha must have had the same thought, as he called out to faceless riders, “¡Estás cometiendo un error!”
“There’s no mistake,” the man who had first spoken answered in English. “You are Pancho Villa’s men. We need to have a word with you.”
Jesús muttered a curse on hearing that. It meant a gringo barking orders from the ridge, backed up by others—eight of them now visible, five faces shaded and obscured by hats. The other three wore nothing on their heads except long hair tied back, which made Zarita wonder whether they might be indios.
And what could that mean for his chances of surviving the ambush?
If all they wanted was, in fact, to talk . . .
But how could he trust that?
Enrique Rocha plainly did not. Leaning to his right, he dipped a hand to reach his Henry rifle in its saddle boot, snatching the weapon free and raising it to fire. He did not pump the rifle’s lever action, since he always kept a live round in its chamber for emergencies like this one, but Zarita did not like his chances of debilitating more than one or two of their opponents.
As it happened, Rocha could not manage even that.
Before Rocha had a chance to fire his Henry, Jesús saw a puff of rifle smoke rise from up range. A heartbeat later, he heard lead rip into flesh, propelling Rocha over backward, tumbling from his startled horse’s croup and tumbling to the ground. Enrique was already twitching through his death throes as the echo of the shot that killed him reached Zarita’s ears.
Slowly, not wishing to be slain in turn, Jesús hoisted his hands skyward, remaining mounted only by the pressure of his knees against his horse’s ribs beneath the fenders of his saddle. Once the ambush party saw that he was not holding a gun, they galloped down to meet him, fanning out as they advanced, ready to fire if Jesús changed his mind and tried to draw a weapon.
As they closed the gap, the gringo leading them ordered, “Take off your pistol belt and let it drop. Then slip your rifle clear and toss it, nice and easy like.”
“Sí, jefe,” Jesús answered.
“Play your cards right,” said the Anglo, “and you just might make it home alive.”
* * *
* * *
Clint’s riders led their captive to a deep arroyo that would flood during a heavy rain but posed no threat aside from lurking rattlers with a clear sky and a bright sun overhead. One of the Mescaleros dragged the other outlaw’s corpse into the same ravine, while Kuruk claimed the dead man’s mount.
That did not tip the scales much against fourteen hundred eighty-seven stolen animals, but Clint supposed it was a start—and partial payment to the Mescaleros for their losses up to now.
Jesús Zarita fessed up to his name and ties to Pancho Villa without any argument, while glaring daggers at Ignacio Fuentes, remembering their first encounter at the Lucky Lizard in Ascensión. When Clint inquired about the raid in Doña Ana County, Zarita denied that he was present, and it didn’t matter much if he was lying or told the truth. In either case, the odds were good that he must know where Villa had stashed Alejandro’s herd and what he planned to do with them.
On that score, though, their hostage balked. He seemed more frightened of his boss than any pain he suffered for refusing to answer—at least, he did before Kuruk stepped up behind him, yanked off his sombrero, tangled fingers in his hair, and laid the sharp edge of a skinning knife against the dark edge of Zarita’s widow’s peak. It took a bit of pressure, just enough to send a rivulet of crimson coursing down between his eyes, before he squealed and started pleading for the chance to spill his guts.
And once he started yammering, the challenge was to keep his train of thought on track, instead of veering off on dead-end sidings. Yes, he knew where Villa was—or where he had been yesterday, when Jesús and his dead amigo left camp for Ascensión. A herd of horses, likely stolen, was nearby, penned up in a box canyon that had grass aplenty and a flowing stream to keep them healthy while Pancho was waiting for his buyer to arrive.
Who was the buyer?
When Zarita spoke Zapata’s name, Clint recognized it instantly, from stories printed in the Rio Grande Republic and the Albuquerque Journal. Writers for those papers disagreed on whether Emiliano Zapata was a revolutionary or a plain old everyday bandido, and the truth of it made little difference to Clint. Regardless of his trade or politics, he had a good-sized force of caballeros under arms who did his bidding—which reportedly included killing federales on occasion and relieving small-town banks of cash reserves.
A gang like that could always use fresh horses, and the ones they did not keep would bring more cash into Zapata’s war chest at the point of sale.
Unless Clint and his people stopped them first.
“Okay, enough,” Clint said, damming their captive’s flow of words before he
drifted off into confessing local crimes that Parnell cared nothing about. “Here’s what we need from you. You’ll lead us to the place where Villa keeps the herd, and if the animals are where you claim they are, we turn you loose.”
Zarita’s eyes turned shifty, peering at the ring of enemies surrounding him. He swallowed hard and said, “Maybe I draw a map for you instead?”
“No good.” Clint’s tone allowed for no further negotiations. “Even if you did that, we’d still have to take you with us all the way and make sure that you weren’t lying.”
“But, jefe, if Villa finds out that I betrayed him—”
“We don’t plan on telling him,” Clint said. “Show us the horses—all of them—and we can tie you up somewhere away from trouble while we get them moving.”
“And if Villa finds me there, he knows what’s happened all the same!”
“We’ll leave one of the Mescaleros with you,” Clint replied. “We get the horses and he’ll cut the ropes. Of course, he’ll have to knock you out, keep you from running to alert your friends. That can’t be helped. You’ll still be better off than Rocha. When you come around, skedaddle. Find yourself some other reprobates to waste your time with.”
Zarita had another thought, frowning. “But what if he has moved the horses, jefe? Anything is possible.”
“Was that part of his plan?” Parnell demanded. “Tell it straight now, if you want to keep on breathing.”
“No lo sé, señor. How would I know? I am not Villa’s confidente. He would tell such things to Javier Jurado, his right hand, not to a poor lacayo like myself!”
“Well, if you’re just a flunky like you say,” Clint answered back, “it’s all the more reason that we can’t trust your word. Odds are you wouldn’t know a thing.”
“But all the caballeros talk, jefe. Some of them placed the horses where I say they are.”
