Dillinger (v5)

by Jack Higgins

  The heat and the dust was unbelievable. They stopped beside a clump of organ cactus and Villa gathered a few dry sticks for a small fire and made coffee while Dillinger topped up the Chevvy's tank with gas from the cans in the trunk. Then he checked the radiator and groaned.

  'We must have been boiling away more water than I thought.' He got out the jerrycan. 'I was saving this in case the canteen ran dry and we had to drink this.' He poured what was left in the jerrycan into the radiator carefully, not wanting to spill a drop.

  He and Villa sat with Rose on the running board and drank coffee as darkness descended. Dillinger said, 'Good to give the old car a chance to rest.'

  'Just like horses, eh?' Villa said.

  Dillinger patted the side of the Chevrolet. 'If she lets us down, I wouldn't give much for our chances when the sun comes up tomorrow.'

  'Death, my friend, comes to all of us. The dice were thrown a long time ago. The result is already known, but then, you know this, I think, Mr Dillinger.'

  Dillinger looked at him calmly. 'Rose knows, but how did you find out?'

  'I saw your picture in the paper in Durango a couple of months back. I recognized you on the train, in spite of your new moustache. When we spoke, privately. When you let me go.'

  'You told nobody?'

  'I owed you, my friend, and besides, we are, after all, in the same line of business. Life is a pretty wild poker game.'

  Villa tilted his hat and closed his eyes, turning his back so that Dillinger and Rose could lie side by side through the dark night.

  It was in the middle of the night that Dillinger awoke because he felt a hand on his shoulder. He was about to leap up, ready to draw or fight, when he realized it was Rose's hand.

  'You are a restless sleeper,' she whispered. 'I only wanted to say I love you.'

  Dillinger turned over on his back. The sky was full of unexpected stars.

  They got a good start early, the Chevvy making time, when there was a sudden loud bang as the left front tyre burst. The Chevrolet slewed wildly and Dillinger fought with the wheel as the car spun around and finally came to a stop.

  They sat for a moment in silence. Dillinger said, 'Anybody hurt?'

  Villa said, 'I think I just spat out my heart, a saying we have, but never mind.'

  'I'm OK,' said Rose.

  'Let's inspect the damage.'

  The tyre was in shreds, but the worst was the fact that the rear axle was jammed across a sizeable rock.

  'Jesus!' Villa said. 'The horse is dead.'

  'Not so fast,' Dillinger said, getting down on his hands and knees and inspecting the situation. He glanced up. 'It seems to me that if we raise her off the rock with the jack and give her a good push she should roll clear soon enough.'

  It was a solution so ludicrously simple that Rose laughed out loud in relief.

  Dillinger got the jack from the trunk and positioned it under the part of the axle that was free. Villa started to pump. Gradually the Chevrolet lifted.

  'OK,' Dillinger said. 'Let's try.'

  It took both of them and Rose all their strength. For a moment, it looked as if it wasn't going to work and then the jack tilted forward and the Chevrolet ran free.

  Dillinger had a spare and the changeover took only minutes.

  'OK, let's push on.'

  Villa said, 'One thing, my friend. I know Rivera of old. Even if we succeed in this matter, he will send me back to prison to face a firing squad.'

  'And me?' Dillinger said.

  'My observation tells me that it would be unwise to turn your back on him.'

  They got back into the car. Dillinger said, 'So why don't you make a break for it while the going's good.'

  'Because there is the child to consider. Because I am a man and Rivera is not,' Villa said simply. 'The same for you, I think.'

  Dillinger smiled. Knowing Rose was listening to their exchange, he said, 'It's what we think of ourselves that's important.'

  He pressed the starter and drove away, singing another of the Hit Parade tunes that reminded him of home, 'Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?'

  16

  Dillinger waited for Villa beside the Chevrolet, the Thompson ready in his hand. There was the sound of falling stones and the Mexican came down the slope through the brush above him, his clatter waking Rose in the back seat.

  'Nobody there,' Villa said. 'We've beaten all of them to this place, amigo.'

  'Great,' Dillinger said. 'So what if Ortiz and his band arrive first? Long odds for the two of us.'

  'Three of us,' Rose said.

  'True, but the only well is inside the chapel,' Villa said. 'He will need water before trying the desert. If we are inside and he is out ...' He shrugged.

  'OK. What about the car?'

  Villa glanced about him at the steep walls of the arroyo on either hand. 'We leave her here and go the rest of the way on foot.'

  'The hell you say. Look Villa,' Dillinger said, 'those Apaches find this heap they'll burn it or kick it to death. I want this car. I love it.'

  Rose had wandered around a bend. 'Hey, car-lover,' she called out. 'Come and see.'

  Villa followed Dillinger past the curve to where there was a huge recess between the stones, a shallow natural cave. 'Drive your true love in here,' Rose said. 'If you throw a few branches over it, they'll never see it unless they smell the gasoline first.'

  It was, both Villa and Dillinger agreed, a perfect hiding place. Dillinger impulsively kissed Rose on the cheek. 'Leave it to a woman.'

  Dillinger drove the car in as far as he safely could, and then the three of them, like kids, threw brush and branches on it till it nearly disappeared from view.

  'Let's go,' Dillinger said.

  'Our leader leads,' Rose said to Villa.

  'I mean it,' Dillinger said. 'We don't want to get caught here, the three of us against a mob of them.'

  And so, over the barren mountainside, through brush and shale, they finally came over the rim of an escarpment and, with a rush of feeling, Dillinger saw the chapel.

  It stood four-square to the winds, firmly rooted into the ground at the very edge of a small plateau perhaps twenty-five yards wide and bordered by a few scattered pines and a tangled thicket of greasewood and mesquite.

  The chapel itself was built of granite with a roof of overlapping stone slabs perhaps twenty feet above the ground. The door was of heavy oak bound with iron and there were two narrow arched windows on either side of it and a row of similar windows under the eaves.

  Villa opened the door and stepped inside, and Dillinger followed him. There was a small altar with a wooden cross, a lantern hanging from a chain, and two benches against the rear wall. It was very quiet, the pale dawn light slanting down from the upper windows. Villa took off his hat and crossed himself as he went toward the altar.

  The well was sunk into the centre of the floor and was constructed of some strange, translucent stone shot with green fire that tinted the water, giving the place its name.

  Dillinger turned slowly, examining everything. There was a stout locking bar on a swing pin behind the door, and the lower windows had wooden shutters that fastened on the inside.

  'Anyone would think the place had been built to stand a siege.'

  'In the old days it was a refuge for the mule drivers on many occasions,' Villa said. 'It is a mystery why the water should come up here and nowhere else. That is why they built the chapel in the first place more than two hundred years ago.'

  Through the windows on the other side the view was magnificent. The chapel stood on the extreme edge of the shelf looking out across the desert to the Devil's Spine and there was a drop of almost a thousand feet to the valley floor.

  'I feel as if I could almost reach out and touch it,' Dillinger said, nodding across at the mountain.

  Villa grinned. 'You would need a long arm, amigo. It is at least fifteen miles away. The desert air plays strange tricks.'

  They slept the sleep of the dead. When Dillinger finally awo
ke, he saw Rose still sleeping and imagined what it might be like waking up in a real house in Indiana late on a Sunday morning and seeing Rose in the bed beside him.

  There was the slightest breath of wind, a dying fall. But in the sound he detected a footfall. And then another. He reached for his Thompson, got up noiselessly, and then kicked open the chapel door. Nachita was standing in the open doorway, rifle crooked in his arm.

  Nachita and Chavasse led their horses in through the door. When all the animals were hobbled together at one end of the building, the old Apache cut a switch of brush from the thicket and walked backwards to the chapel, smoothing their tracks from the sand.

  He barred the door and turned to face them. 'When they come, no one must make a move till they have dismounted. Then, with all of you taking aim, I will call out in Apache language. I will go out and bargain with Ortiz while he and his men are in your gunsights.'

  'That's crazy,' Rivera said, gesticulating with both fists. 'We should kill as many as possible with the first volley. Then bargain with Ortiz.'

  'And kill the child?' said Nachita in anger.

  'I didn't say shoot at the child,' Rivera shouted.

  'It could be hit by accident. Or any one of them we missed could throw the child off the mountain,' Nachita said. 'I am here to set free a child who is paying for your sins. I am not here idly to kill my fellow Apaches who are following a leader who is as mad as you are.'

  Rivera looked ten years older than when Dillinger had first met him. A muscle twitched in Rivera's right cheek. He gripped his rifle tightly. Dillinger was ready to let loose the second Rivera made a wrong move.

  Rivera looked at each of their faces. Then to Rose he said, 'What about you? What do you think?'

  Calmly, Rose said, 'In all our years, this is the first time uncle, you have asked my opinion as if you meant it. I think all these younger men believe that Nachita, who led us here, should have a chance to do things his way. As he said at the outset, a good plan is one that works. If his fails, there are always the rifles.'

  Dillinger had to restrain himself from actually clapping his hands in applause, just as he did in movie houses when an actor said something he agreed with strongly. He'd never thought he'd meet a woman who was more than his equal, and here she was, as brave as a man, and saying the right thing with an eloquence he never had.

  Suddenly they all heard the sound of trotting horses.

  A moment later the first Apache turned the corner of the bluff and moved into the clearing. Ortiz was almost directly behind him.

  He sat his horse with an insolent and casual elegance, a supremely dangerous figure in his scarlet shirt and headband. The moment he appeared, Rivera gave a sort of strangled cry, and raised his rifle.

  'Don't do that, you idiot!' Dillinger shouted.

  The shot, badly aimed, caught the pony in the neck and Ortiz pitched forward into the dust. He rolled over twice, came to his feet with incredible agility and plunged into the thicket as Rivera fired again.

  His companion was already wheeling his pony to follow him when Chavasse, Dillinger and Villa all fired at once. He toppled from the saddle and his pony galloped back along the trail.

  Rivera kept firing into the brush, pumping the lever on his rifle frantically, until Chavasse pulled the weapon from his hands.

  'It's too late, you damned fool. Can't you understand?'

  Rivera stared at him, his face pale, a translucent film clouding his eyes. Suddenly, eight rifles blasted at once from the thicket, bullets passing in through the windows and thudding into the plaster on the opposite wall.

  Chavasse pushed Rivera to the floor and Dillinger and Villa crawled along beneath the windows closing the shutters. In each shutter there was only a small loophole, but plenty of light still slanted down from the upper windows. One or two more bullets chipped the outside wall or splintered a shutter. Then there was silence.

  Dillinger peered cautiously through a loophole. Ortiz's pony and the dead Apache still lay in the centre of the clearing. Everything else was still.

  He started to turn away and from the next window Chavasse said, 'What's that?'

  A branch was being held out into the open, a rag of white clothing dangling from the end and Villa said, 'They want to talk terms.'

  'That remains to be seen,' Dillinger said. 'It could be a trap.' He turned to Nachita. 'What do you think?'

  Nachita shrugged. 'There is only one way to find out.'

  He unbarred the door and walked outside. For a moment he held his rifle above his head, then he leaned it against the wall and went forward. Ortiz emerged from a thicket to meet him.

  Rivera took a single step forward and Villa swung his rifle toward him. 'I think not, Don Jose.'

  For a moment Rivera glared angrily at him, and then something seemed to go out of the man. He turned away, shoulders sagging.

  Nachita and Ortiz were talking in Apache, their voices carrying quite clearly in the stillness. There was a sharpness to their exchange. After a while, Nachita turned and came back, leaving Ortiz standing there, shouting things after him.

  'What is it?' asked Rose, taking old Nachita's hands in her own.

  'Ortiz does not wish to deal with me. He says that because I consort with all of you, I am a traitor to the Apache nation.'

  'What does he want?' Dillinger demanded.

  'You,' Nachita replied. 'He says you of the white car are the leader.'

  'No.' Rose moved forward. 'He can't be trusted now. He might do anything.'

  Her concern was plain for everyone to see. Dillinger smiled and put down his sub-machine gun. 'Hell, angel, you take a chance every day of your life.'

  Rivera said, 'I am the one who should be discussing terms.'

  Dillinger looked at him calmly. 'Thanks to you, I'm not sure we're in shape to do that any more.'

  He stepped into the hot sun and walked across the clearing. Ortiz waited for him, hands on hips.

  Dillinger halted a few feet away and Ortiz said in English, 'So, you came over the mountain. I had not thought it possible.'

  'You haven't asked me out here to exchange pleasantries,' Dillinger said. 'What do you want?'

  Ortiz said, 'Take a message to Rivera. Tell him that if he gives himself to me I shall hand over the child. The rest of you can go free.'

  'How can we be sure she's still alive?'

  'See for yourself.'

  He stepped into the thicket and Dillinger followed. They pushed their way through the brush and emerged into a clearing in the pine trees where the ponies were tethered. An Apache squatted beside them, the only one in sight. Juanita de Rivera sat on a blanket a few feet away from him, playing with her doll.

  She looked pale, the eyes too large in the rounded childish face, and Dillinger dropped to one knee beside her. 'Hello, Juanita, remember me?'

  Her velvet suit was covered with dust, torn and bedraggled. She passed a hand across her eyes and said, 'Will I be seeing Mama soon?'

  Dillinger patted her on the shoulder and stood up. 'How much water have you got?'

  'Enough,' said Ortiz.

  Dillinger shook his head. 'You've come fifty miles at least since your last water hole and you were expecting to find plenty here.'

  'Tell Rivera he can have half an hour,' Ortiz said. 'After that there will be no more talking. I have allowed him to live long enough.'

  Dillinger pushed his way through the thicket, aware of the unseen eyes on either side and crossed the clearing to the chapel. He stepped inside and closed the door.

  Rivera moved forward eagerly, 'What does he want?'

  'You!' Dillinger told him bluntly. 'If you hand yourself over within half an hour he'll give us the child and let us go free.'

  'You have seen Juanita?' Rose demanded. 'How is she?'

  'A little the worse for wear, but otherwise unharmed.' He turned to Rivera. 'What about it?'

  The Mexican's face was deathly pale and beaded with sweat. He struggled for words and said in a low voice, 'Is t
here no other way?'

  'From the moment you ruined Nachita's plan for us, we lost any real advantage we might have had.'

  'But what about the well? They must need water badly.'

  'They could last for a couple of days,' Villa put in.

  Dillinger turned to Nachita. 'What would happen if we did turn him over? Would Ortiz keep his word and let us ride out?'

  'I'm not sure,' Nachita said. 'He is in this thing too deep. He has nothing left to lose. To a man like Victorio honour was everything. Ortiz is a different breed. Besides, I think he is mad now.'

  'What about water?'

  'I would say they have none. I noticed the condition of Ortiz's pony when I went to speak with him.'

  Dillinger nodded, a slight frown on his face as he considered the situation. He said slowly, 'Do you think he might kill the kid if we turn down the exchange?'

  Nachita shook his head. 'If he had intended to kill her lightly he would have done so. I think he will keep her with him now until what happens happens.'

  There was a short silence as they all considered his words. It was finally broken by Villa. 'It pains me to admit it, but it would seem that a grand gesture from Don Jose would appease Ortiz only for a moment.'

  'I'll test the water one more time,' Dillinger said.

  He picked up a canteen, filled it from the well and went back outside. As he crossed the clearing, Ortiz stepped from the thicket.

  Dillinger stopped a few feet away. 'Nachita says you have no honour.'

  No anger showed on Ortiz's face. He shrugged and said calmly, 'So be it. What happens now is on your own head.'

  Dillinger held out the canteen. 'For the child.'

  'You would trust a man without honour?' Ortiz said. 'How do you know I will not drink this myself?'

  'Only you can prove that you are still a man.'

  'Then follow me,' Ortiz commanded.

  Once again he led the way into the thicket to where Juanita sat on her blanket. She seemed happy to see Dillinger so soon again. Ortiz knelt and held the canteen for her as she drank. When she finished, the canteen was still more than half full.