Navarro

by Ralph Compton

  The girl’s attention was drawn to the front door, her expression turning suddenly sour. Following her gaze, Navarro saw Edgar Bontemps and a tall Mexican enter the “church.” Bontemps wore his dusty trail garb, ratty wool poncho, and torn moccasins, with a brace of .45s on his hips.

  The tall Mexican wore the braid-encrusted sombrero and stitched boots of a rurale officer, probably a captain or a major, judging by the quality of his clothes. His jet-black mustache was carefully waxed and upswept to frame his pitted nostrils. The two big Dragoons on his pistol belt were pearl-butted and custom-engraved; the sawed-off shotgun hanging down his back was silver-plated, the stock inlaid with colored glass. Over a white silk shirt he wore a short charro-style jacket of gray-green brocade.

  He and Bontemps shouldered through the crowd to Ettinger’s table. Ettinger stood, smiling broadly and shaking the rurale’s hand, as if he couldn’t be happier to see the man.

  As Ettinger and the rurale conversed standing up, Bontemps tapped the shoulder of one of the buscaderos, who reluctantly set his cards down, stood, and strolled up to the bar. Grinning, the slaver adjusted his pistols, doffed his bowler, and sat down, taking over the bodyguard’s hand.

  A minute later, Ettinger and the rurale walked away from the gambling table. Tom’s heart started beating irregularly when the two men stopped at the couch where Karla sat with the three Mexican miners. Ettinger lifted her chin, giving the rurale a look at her face. The rurale nodded and grinned.

  Smiling like a proud horse trader, Ettinger pulled Karla off the miner’s lap. The rurale held his arm out formally. Karla looped her own arm through his, and the man led her through the crowd toward the stairs at the room’s rear.

  Behind them, Bontemps grinned and, cupping a hand to his mouth, told the man to enjoy himself and that he’d have a bottle of his best mescal sent to his room.

  Navarro watched the rurale and Karla disappear up the staircase. His ire must have been written on his face, because the Mexican dove had stopped squirming. Regarding him cautiously, she stood, muttering under her breath, then sidled off to be swept away by a knob-nosed, bull-necked miner in a cloth cap and denim jacket.

  Standing, Navarro manufactured a neutral expression, and strode toward the right end of the bar at the front of the church. Tending the altar bar was a fat, middle-aged brunette in a silly pink dress with white ruffles, and a tall, sallow-faced American gent with pomaded hair and a stained green shirt buttoned to his throat. As the woman drew beers, sloshed liquor into shot glasses, and swept change from the bar with her pudgy white hands, she kept up a running harangue against the sallow-faced gent’s inability to move faster “than an April calf in a mud creek.”

  Angrily, she turned to Navarro and shrieked, “Name your poison—I ain’t got all night!”

  When Navarro’s tequila shot was plunked down before him on the plank bar winging out from the altar, he watched the woman bustle away to fill another order. He tossed back the shot, slid his eyes right and left. Sure no one was watching him, he took three steps straight back and crouched at the foot of the stairs. Turning and staying below the wainscoted railing shielding him from the rest of the room, gritting his teeth as he hoped against hope no one had seen his crazy move, he crawled on hands and knees to the top.

  As he gained the shag runner in the second-floor hall, he took a deep breath and stood. Hearing the near-deafening roar from below—the piano player was banging out a rousing Mexican festival tune while others clapped and stomped to the beat—he moved quickly along the hall lit with a wavering umber glow.

  Several doors were open, revealing empty, tidy rooms. Through several others he heard heated murmurs and squeaking bedsprings, the soft thuds of a headboard hitting the wall.

  Navarro had no idea which room Karla and the rurale were in. He began sweating in earnest, his chest squeezing, when he heard the deep rumble of Spanish-uttered curses. Karla groaned a protest.

  Navarro reached for the doorknob. Locked. Taking two steps back, he whipped his right boot back, then forward, connecting soundly with the door. It snapped wide, slammed against the wall. On the bed before him, the naked rurale lay sprawled atop Karla, who was still dressed, her gown pulled down around her waist. The rurale was on his knees, tying Karla’s wrists to the bedframe with his pistol belt.

  The man had just whipped his head toward Navarro when, bolting forward, Tom punched him soundly across the jaw. Several bones in the man’s face broke with a dull crack. With a clipped scream, he flew off the other side of the bed.

  Tom grabbed one of the big Dragoons from the man’s pistol belt, leapt upon the bed, and plucked a pillow from beside Karla. He stepped off the bed, knelt over the groaning rurale, and slapped the pillow over the man’s face. He cocked the Dragoon, jammed the barrel into the pillow, and fired one belching round. Black smoke wafted, and feathers flew.

  The rurale’s arms fell to the floor, and his body relaxed.

  Leaving the smoking pillow over the man’s head, Navarro leapt onto the bed, and untangled the pistol belt from the headboard, freeing Karla’s wrists.

  Pulling her dress up, she stared groggily at him, tears veiling her eyes. “Tommy?”

  “I’m gettin’ you outta here, kid.” Navarro shook her harshly. “Can you follow me, run when I tell you?”

  She blinked and nodded, tears flowing over her eyes and down her pale cheeks.

  Navarro grabbed the rurale’s double-barreled shotgun off the dresser, broke it open to make sure it was loaded, snapped it closed, and looped the lanyard over his neck and right shoulder.

  He grabbed the second Dragoon from the pistol belt, shoved both behind his waistband, and pulled Karla off the bed.

  “Let’s go!”

  Chapter 24

  Holding the double-barreled barn-blaster barrel out before him, and Karla’s right hand in his left, Navarro stole a glance up and down the hall.

  A door had opened across the hall. A bare-chested man with a thin blond mustache peered through the crack, drunk eyes bewildered.

  Navarro shot him a poignant look and raised the shotgun. The man stepped quickly back and slammed the door.

  All the other doors were closed. The din rose up the stairs, as raucous as before. Apparently, only the man across the hall had heard the pistol shot, or paid it any heed.

  Moving sideways down the hall, Navarro glanced over his shoulder at Karla stumbling along behind him on bare feet. “We’re gonna walk down the stairs nice and slow,” Tom told her. “You keep just back from my right shoulder. When I say go, you light out for the front door and hightail it across the street. There’ll be a woman and an old man waiting for you with horses.”

  Eyes wide, Karla bobbed her head.

  Navarro led her down the stairs, moving at a normal pace, not too slow, not too fast. His back was stiff, nerves taut. He stared straight ahead, sliding his eyes left to peer into the main hall below, all but invisible beneath a heavy layer of tobacco smoke.

  He felt the vibrations of the piano in the steps beneath his boots.

  Men howled, cheered, cheerfully berated one another.

  The fat woman and the dour man scurried around behind the bar, drawing sudsy beers or tipping bottles over shot glasses. Before the bar and about halfway across the room, Ettinger and Bontemps played cards with the border bucks.

  Holding the shotgun down low at his right side, his finger curled through the trigger guard, Navarro pulled Karla to the bottom of the stairs, then slowly turned, and walked along the bar. Ettinger and the others at their table were intent on their cards or each other.

  When he and Karla had walked ten feet, Navarro turned again and strode passed the piano player and through the crowd toward the front door. He glanced around the room, neck hairs tingling. When it came, it would come from Ettinger’s table on his right flank.

  He squeezed Karla’s hand and stared at the doorway a hundred feet beyond. If he could get Karla halfway there safely, he’d go back inside for Billie.

>   Sudden movement on his left. Navarro turned, raising the shotgun. The miner upon whose lap Karla had been sitting before Ettinger had turned her over to the rurale faced him, his Indian-dark face burnished red with exasperation.

  “Qué es esto?”

  Tom glanced at Karla. “Run.”

  Karla bolted past the incensed miner, hair flying as she dashed for the door. Tom turned around, bent his legs to Ettinger’s table. Billie was sitting on Bontemps’ knee. He grabbed her arm, jerked her off the slaver’s knee, and heaved the girl out ahead of him, rasping in her ear, “Run to the door!”

  Billie whipped her stricken gaze at him.

  Backing away from the table, Navarro trained the shotgun on Bontemps, who’d bolted out of his chair and froze, crouching, with both hands on his .45s. The buscaderos stared at Navarro blandly, cigarettes or cigars in their teeth, cards in their hands.

  Ettinger slid his chair back and heaved to his feet. “Just who in the hell do you think you are, you son of a bitch?”

  “Why, it’s ‘Taos Tommy’ Navarro,” Bontemps said, glee dancing in his eyes. “I thought you was dead!”

  The room had fallen nearly silent beneath muttered exclamations. Still backing away from the table, holding his shotgun on Bontemps, Navarro glanced behind him to see Billie stumbling toward Karla, who was waiting at the back of the room.

  Navarro swung his gaze forward. Ettinger triggered a pocket pistol. The bullet nipped Navarro’s left leg. Someone behind him screamed, and a thump rose as a miner hit the floor.

  Bontemps slapped leather with both hands.

  Navarro swung the shotgun to Ettinger and tripped the right trigger. The shotgun boomed and jumped. In the periphery of his right eye, Navarro saw the screaming mine manager bounce off the bar clutching his gaping middle.

  Tom swung the barn-blaster back toward Bontemps, and dropped the left hammer. The slaver dove to his right, and the head of the buscadero behind him erupted in a fine red spray.

  As the other buscaderos leapt to their feet, filling their hands, Tom chucked the empty shotgun toward Bontemps, who was crawling around behind a table, and pulled both Dragoons from his waistband. One of the bodyguards had beat him to the mark. The bullet whipped past his right ear and shattered a stained-glass window behind him. A girl shrieked.

  Dodging two more pistol shots, Navarro crouched and cut loose with both Dragoons, shattering glass behind the bar and punching lead through two buscaderos. A pistol roared on his left. He quarter-turned and fired three quick rounds at Bontemps, punching holes in the table the slaver crouched behind and, as the man flinched, bloodied his right eye.

  “Ahhhh!” the slaver screamed, dropping both pistols and clutching his wounded eye as he dropped to the floor.

  Navarro wheeled and ran toward the door, leaping the men and the girls who’d dropped to the floorboards, arms crossed on their heads. He was ten feet from the door when a gun barked behind him. The slug burned a path along Tom’s right elbow. Wheeling, Navarro fired his last three rounds.

  The tall bartender slammed back against the broken mirror and dropped with a wheeze. At the same time, the fat woman rose up from behind the bar and rested a long-barreled shotgun along the bar top, squinting down the barrel.

  The gun exploded as Navarro leapt through the front door and ran toward the open wrought-iron gate, where the two main guards lay sprawled in glistening blood.

  Navarro cast a look into the street beyond the gate. Twenty yards right of the fountain, four horses stood staring toward him, twitching their ears and swishing their tails.

  Louise Talon and Billie sat one. Hawkins was helping Karla onto Navarro’s packhorse.

  Waving an arm, Navarro shouted, “Go!” He grabbed his and Hawkins’ gun belts from the apple crate, slung each over a shoulder, and ran limping across the yard toward the bay Hawkins was holding for him.

  “Tommy!” Karla cried, whipping a look behind as she and the other two women galloped east.

  A shot popped to Navarro’s left, the slug pinking the fountain with an angry twang. Tom turned to see several men sporting mine company badges running toward him.

  “Hold it!” one shouted, leveling a shotgun.

  Navarro grabbed the reins from Hawkins’ hand, tossed the old hide hunter his cartridge belt, and leapt into his saddle. As Tom and Mordecai spurred their mounts into lunging gallops, the shotgun exploded. The shooter was too far away for the buck-shot to do anything but sting Navarro’s back and cause his horse to shake its head and whinny.

  Pistols barked, the slugs tearing dust clods at the horses’ hooves. In seconds, the mountain man and the Bar-V segundo were splitting the wind amid the shacks at the ragged eastern edge of town, bringing the women into view ahead.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” Hawkins yelled, glancing at Tom over his right shoulder. “I never figured that old dog could hunt!”

  “He can’t,” Navarro yelled, urging the bay even faster as the street became a road. “He just got lucky!”

  A hundred yards before the river, which was gleaming silver in its wide, shallow bank, Navarro rode up abreast of Karla. He reached over, grabbed the reins from the girl’s hands, then gigged the bay on ahead of her and on past Louise and Billie, swinging right at the river and loping upstream, into the broad, dark night.

  At a hide-parting clip, Tom led the group along the stream for nearly a mile, then followed a cart trail up the snaggle-toothed ridge rising northward. Near the ridge’s lip, he turned his horse off the trail, stopped, and reined back toward the valley. The women were approaching, weary horses blowing and lunging floppy-footed into the grade.

  “Keep pushin’!” Navarro called to Louise. “Take the girls on over the ridge.”

  Slumped forward in her saddle, Karla followed Louise and Billie up the ridge. Hawkins halted his horse on the trail before Tom, rested both hands on his saddle horn.

  “Those badge-toters must’ve grabbed some horses off the street,” Hawkins said, breathless.

  Navarro stared out over the valley, listening. The moon was rising over the far ridge like a big dented quarter. Above the usual night sounds rose the thumps of pounding hooves and men’s voices raised in anger. Back down the trail, shadows moved along the stream.

  “My eyes ain’t what they used to be, but they look to be four.”

  “Five,” Navarro said. “Keep the women moving.”

  “What’re you gonna do?”

  “We can’t keep this pace up forever. I’m going to get these five off our trail. Discourage anyone else from following suit.”

  Hawkins pulled his rifle from his saddle boot. “You’re gonna need help.”

  Tom shook his head and shucked his own Winchester. “Keep moving. I’ll catch up to you in a few minutes.”

  Hawkins chuffed and, gigging his horse on up the ridge, grunted over his shoulder, “That ole dog’s luck ain’t gonna hold forever.”

  Hearing Hawkins’s hoof falls dwindle down the other side of the ridge, Navarro turned his horse from the valley, followed the trail for another thirty yards, then turned into the rocks along the crest. Dismounting, he tied his horse to a shrub, then made his way back through the rocks. He levered a shell, lowered the hammer to half cock, and hunkered behind a boulder on the right side of the trail.

  He removed his hat and cast a glance into the valley, shimmering silver under the rising moon, the opposite ridge climbing darkly on the other side of the stream. A hundred yards down the shaggy cart path, shadows danced in the moonlight. The running hoofbeats and leathery tack squeaks grew louder.

  As the riders approached riding two by two, Navarro made out several badges pinned to shirts or jackets. Two of the five wore high-peaked sombreros. Probably rurales out to avenge their leader’s death in Ettinger’s Lady of Sorrows.

  Navarro waited till the men were ten yards down the grade, their horses slowing as they approached the crest. Navarro stood, snapped the Winchester to his shoulder, and fired four quick rounds into the group.


  As the men fell from their saddles and horses screamed, rearing, Tom ran into the trail, drew a bead on a badge glittering in the moonlight, and fired, the ping resounding as his bullet plunked through the tin and into a heart.

  The man grunted and tumbled off his buck-kicking horse’s rump and lay groaning in the sage right of the trail, his three fallen comrades spread out around him.

  Navarro had taken the group by complete surprise. Only one man managed to snap off a shot, the slug spanging off the rocks around Navarro as the shooter tried to get his pitching mount under control.

  Tom lowered himself to a knee, drew a bead on the man, and dropped the hammer. The bullet punched through his left shoulder. The rurale screamed and twisted around as his horse leapt high, its front hooves flailing skyward.

  Pitching off the left side of his horse, he hit the ground with a dull thud. His horse ran screaming straight up and over the crest and down the other side.

  Two other wounded men groaned and cursed along the trail. The thuds of the fleeing horses dwindled in the quiet night.

  The rurale had dropped behind a rock. Crouching, Tom waited. The man’s silhouetted head appeared, hatless. His gun glittered. Tom fired, his round barking off the rock a few inches from the rurale’s head.

  The man cursed in Spanish, bolted to his feet, turned, and ran east along the ridge’s rocky spine. Tom triggered a shot and followed, leaping rocks. The man snapped off two shots as he ran.

  Running toward him, Tom returned fire, jacking and levering his saddle gun. His third shot evoked a grunt, but the man kept running, his shadow staggering. The rurale triggered off another wayward shot, and Tom returned it.

  The man groaned. His shadow fell.

  Tom approached the fallen man at a walk, holding the Winchester out at his waist.