The girl shuddered as she stared up at the sinister creature. “They say you’re protected by Apache devils,” the girl muttered. Her voice was thin, rife with caution.
“Guided, more like,” the Kid said. “Not even an owl can protect me from some of the trouble I manage to court.”
He swung down from his saddle and began leading Antonia to the front door. “Come on, if you’ve a mind. I told you I knew a place to shelter for the night, and this is it. If you don’t like it . . . or the company . . . you’re free to drift.”
The Kid led Antonia into the church, pleased to see that the desperadoes had left a crackling fire near the front of the church, where an altar had once stood though it had long-since crumbled to jutting shards. What looked like a rabbit was spitted over the low flames.
The Kid had nearly finished unsaddling Antonia before slow clomps sounded, and he turned to see the girl leading her impressive Appaloosa through the large open doorway.
CHAPTER 5
TOMASINA DE LA CRUZ
The Kid walked back into the church after a thorough scout of the ridge, after both horses had been unsaddled and he’d made the girl comfortable by the fire. The blaze’s warmth was welcome on such a damp and chilly evening.
She sat beside the fire, knees raised, a blanket over her shoulders. She was leaning forward and clutching the toes of her low-heeled, silver-tipped black boots. On the soles of each a red turtle had been stitched in red.
Her eyes were chocolate brown sprayed with flecks the same color as her hair, which, threaded with faint crimson highlights, hung straight down across her shoulders.
The Kid stopped before her, his rifle on his shoulder, and thumbed his brown Stetson back off his forehead. She looked up at him coyly, bouncing back and forth nervously on her rump while clutching her boot toes—an alluringly girlish gesture, thought the Kid.
But then everything about her—the smoothness of her skin, the fullness of her lips, the depth of her gaze, the sunset red of her hair—was strangely, almost uncomfortably alluring. Even her brandy-like smell, which he’d noticed on the trail, was intoxicating.
She glanced at a tin plate on which lay the lightly charred rabbit that the desperadoes had been roasting over the fire. Only a quarter of the carcass was missing. A cup of black coffee sat next to it, smoking.
“I left most of it for you, senor,” she said softly.
The Kid leaned his rifle against the wall and sat down near his saddle. He doffed his hat and gloves, scrubbed his hands through his close-cropped, coal-black hair, brushed a buckskin-clad sleeve across his broad, weathered forehead, and then set the plate on his knee.
He tore the rabbit in two, and glanced at the girl, who watched him steadily, expectantly, as though waiting for him to break out in song.
“The Rio Concho Kid,” she said, making him uncomfortable again with her close, dubious scrutiny. “I did not know when I walked into Senor Dominguez’s cantina that I would find such a man as you there.”
“Just my luck.” The Kid pushed a chunk of the rabbit into his mouth.
“I should have known that only the Rio Concho Kid could have killed Chacin Velasco so swiftly, without flinching.”
She seemed to wait for the Kid’s response, which did not come.
“How many men have you . . . ?” She let her voice trail off, her eyes brightening with trepidation, realizing that she might have crossed a dangerous boundary. “If you don’t mind me asking, senor.”
“Enough that I can clear a church of the devil’s hounds right fast,” the Kid said, taking another bite of the rabbit. “You gonna tell me who you are and who you’re runnin’ from and why, or you intend on keepin’ it under your hat?”
He continued to eat, and when the girl said nothing, he glanced at her. She was staring up into the darkness beyond the fire’s umber, cinder-stitched glow. “The owl?” she said.
“Ah, don’t mind him,” said the Kid. “He comes, he goes. Tumbleweed, that one. Sorta like me an’ ole Antonia. But, unlike me, he’s somehow managed to keep a price off his head. Now, if you don’t mind explainin’ why I’m not still pleasantly drunk and half asleep at Dominguez’s place, and who I should be watchin’ out for . . .”
“I am Tomasina De La Cruz,” she said in her quiet, mysterious voice that was as captivating as the rest of her. “And I am on the run, as you say, from General Constantin San Gabriel.”
The Kid choked on a bite of rabbit, and scowled across at her. “How in the hell—if you’ll pardon my privy talk, senorita— did you manage to lock horns with that fork-tailed Apache-killer?”
Tomasina De La Cruz jerked a look at him, her eyes feisty. “I did not want to lock horns with him! I did not want to lock anything with him!” A chinking appeared in her armor as her voice trembled, and a shiny veil dropped down over her eyes. “It was my father who did. He wanted me to marry that dirty old man!”
“Why?”
She turned away from the Kid once more and raised her knees higher, wrapping her arms around them, as though for protection against some unseen beast in the darkness. “It was the arrangement. You see, my father owns a hacienda on the other side of a mountain pass from the General, who came to the country of the Rio San Gezo only a few years ago. Having been in the military most of his life, he never married.”
“And then he met you.” The Kid knew how the General must have felt. The girl had a definite pull. The Kid felt it himself. A pull like only one other he’d ever felt.
“Si, he met me when my father invited him to La Colina de Rosa, on the opposite side of the Forgotten Mountains from the General’s hacienda. He told me later he fell in love with me the first time he laid eyes on me.” Tomasina shivered with revulsion.
“I take it the feeling wasn’t shared.” The Kid had been rolling a quirley with chopped Mexican tobacco and brown wheat paper. Now he reached for a brand in the fire, touched it to the quirley, sucked the peppery smoke deep into his lungs, and blew it out through his nostrils.
“No,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “No, no . . .”
“And the General is not a man to take no for an answer.”
“Si.”
She nodded gravely and then turned to the Kid again. “La Colina de Rosa has fallen on hard times. Our side of the mountains is in a drought. For the past three years, all the clouds pass over us and continue on over the mountains to drop their snow and rain on the General’s hacienda. His creeks run deep with water, his grass grows stirrup-high. His cattle are fat and happy!”
Tomasina spat this last out like a bone as she kept her angry, wet gaze on the Kid. “My father and mother thought it best I marry the General, who could better provide for me. No one cared that I loved another!”
This last she fairly screamed. The scream rocketed around inside the church for too long, and the Kid winced and cast his gaze toward the open doorway, worried someone might have heard.
“Senorita, I know you’re upset, but—”
She cut him off with “The marriage was arranged despite my protestations, senor.”
“Despite the fact you were in love with another.”
“Si—Ernesto Alabando.” She whispered the name, stretching her mouth to show all her small, pretty white teeth in an adoring smile. Slowly, her jaws drew taut, and she pressed her lips together until they formed a knife slash across the bottom half of her face.
Again, she turned her blazing eyes on the Kid.
“I tried to run away to Ernesto. The General, however, is a jealous man, and a suspicious one, as well. He had ordered a man, a gun-toting leper—a bounty hunter—to keep a watchful on La Colina de Rosa . . . and me. When the leper foiled my attempt at escape, the General demanded we be married straightaway. After the ceremony at La Colina, he took me to his rancho. That night, after a grand but quiet meal—just the two of us and his servants—he ushered me off to his sleeping quarters, and disrobed me.”
Tomasina De La Cruz clutched herself and shuddered as thoug
h deeply chilled.
“The thought of lying with this wheezing, warty, lusty old dog who had made me so unhappy, so lonely for Ernesto, my one true love—he so incensed me, you see, that before I knew what I was doing, I had grabbed one of the General’s own fancy stilettos and stuck it in his guts!”
She cried for some time into her hands, her shoulders jerking, burnished copper hair falling down over her raised knees to hide her face.
“Pardon me, senorita,” the Kid said after what he thought was a discreet length of silence. “But . . . did you say the Leper?”
CHAPTER 6
A PLEA AND AN OFFER
Tomasina De La Cruz lifted her head, sniffed, brush tears from her cheeks, and nodded. “Si. El Leproso.” She turned to him. “You know this man—this hideous creature?”
The Kid tossed his quirley stub into the fire. “Yeah. I know him.”
The image of the man’s misshapen face cloaked by a flour sack with the eyes and mouth cut out, caused icy fingers of dread to walk up and down his spine.
The girl crawled over to the Kid, knelt beside him, and placed both her hands on his right forearm. Her eyes were large as saucers, rife with beseeching. “Then you know what an awful man he is. A beast.”
“A beast, all right,” the Kid said, nodding, looking down at the girl’s slender hands on his arm. “And damn handy with that shotgun of his.” It was a sawed-off, double-barreled coach gun that the Leper, a Mexican bounty hunter, kept loaded with rock salt, because most of the higher-paying bounties were for men brought in with their ghosts intact.
The salt would make a mess of a man, but, if delivered to the right areas, it rarely killed, although its victims often wished they were dead.
“Por favor, senor,” the girl said, squeezing his arm. “Will you help me? It is most likely that the General will send El Leproso for me, as he did once before.”
“Help you do what, senorita? Help you get where?”
“To San Gezo. A two-day ride, only.”
“What’s in San Gezo?”
“Ernesto,” she whispered, stretching her lips back away from her small, white teeth again. “My life’s one true love. He will take me away to somewhere the General and El Leproso will never find us!”
The Kid looked down at her hands again. They burned into him, evoked a passion he’d rarely felt in his twenty-eight years. He lifted his gaze to her eyes. They were like a deer’s eyes, wide with earnest pleading and boundless love, gazing up at him from beneath her brows.
Her rich, red lips were parted. Behind her shirt, her breasts rose and fell slowly, heavily.
Ernesto was one lucky boy!
The Kid tore his arm from her grip, and turned away, repelled by his own passion evoked by this girl’s love for her beau. Of course the General had tumbled for this girl. What man wouldn’t?
Lucky Ernesto!
The Kid stared at the church wall left of the fire. It danced and pulsated with reflected firelight. But it was the Kid’s own shameful lust he saw there in that crenellated, flame-lit wall.
This girl was a succubus. She had him in her snare.
But she loved another.
He jerked with a start when he felt her arms wrap around him from behind. He watched one arm snake across the other one, over his belly. She pressed her body against his back. It was warm, supple, yielding. He could feel her breasts mash into him.
They, too, were warm, compliant.
Frowning, he turned, placed his hands on her naked shoulders. Her head came up with the rich mass of copper hair. Her eyes bored into his. He lowered his own gaze, and a hot shaft of desire was plunged into his loins.
She’d taken off her shirt. She sat before him with her lovely, pale breasts bared to him, the pink nipples like tender rosebuds.
“I told you back in the cantina, Kid,” she said softly, in that gut-wrenchingly sexy voice of hers, the tip of her pink tongue flicking at her lips as she spoke, “that if you helped me I would make you a very happy man. Well, maybe not happy. I know what happened to you, Kid. Everyone has heard about . . . your family . . . your woman . . . the soldiers. All the death, all the killing. The bounty on your head back north of the border. But at least let me reward you for your efforts tonight, as promised.”
As he stared at her, rapt, she smiled gently and placed her hands on his. She lifted his hands, cupped them to her breasts.
She whispered very softly, “I have never lain with another. Not even Ernesto. Not yet. I guess that was partly my appeal for the General.”
The Kid’s tongue lay heavy in his mouth. “And . . . you would ...lay ...?”
She smiled that surreal smile of hers. “You are a good man. Ernesto wouldn’t mind. I will by lying with him soon.”
Her soft, smooth skin fairly burned in the Kid’s palms. The pink nipples raked him gently. He’d just started to roll his thumbs across the tender buds when the owl’s ear-rattling shriek rose, echoing like large stones rattling around in a barrel plunging down a steep, rocky hill.
The Kid looked past the girl toward a rear door, and shouted, “Tomasina, down!”
He shoved the bare-breasted girl away to his right. At the same time there was a bright flash and a thunderous roar.
As the Kid reached for his holstered Schofield .44, he grimaced against the tooth-gnashing sting of the rock salt tearing into him.
CHAPTER 7
EL LEPROSO
The Kid groaned as he used his right hand to raise the Schofield. He looked toward the rear door to see the shadowy figure in high black boots, long gray duster, gray mask, and a low-crowned, black sombrero trimmed with silver stitching take one long step toward him, shifting the sawed-off shotgun in his hands slightly.
The Kid sucked back the pain of the salt wounds in his chest, shoulder, and neck, and cut loose with the Schofield, which leaped and roared in his hand. The bounty hunter known as the Leper jerked back slightly. The shotgun issued another blast of deafening thunder, flames jutting from the second barrel.
One of the Kid’s slugs had hit its mark, however, and most of the rock salt hurled from the Leper’s second barrel sprayed the fire, scattering ashes and half-burned branches. The Leper got his boots under him and dashed behind a large stone pillar on his right, about ten feet from the door.
The Kid’s slugs chewed into the pillar, pluming rock dust and shards. When the Schofield’s hammer clicked on an empty chamber, the Kid holstered it, grabbed his rifle from where he’d leaned it against the wall, and quickly jacked a fresh round into the breech.
He ran toward the half-naked girl lying on the floor near the fire and saw the Leper edge his shotgun out around one side of the pillar. The Kid fired the Winchester, jacked and fired two more times as he dove onto the girl, keeping her down and shielding her tender skin from a possible rock-salt blast.
The Kid lifted his head in time to see the Leper run out from behind the pillar toward the open door—a black-and-gray blur, the silver on the man’s black sombrero flashing like starlight.
A jeering laugh rose like a scream.
The Kid’s Winchester belched three more times, spitting orange flames and hot lead toward the bounty hunter. The Leper was too quick, however. The Kid’s shots merely hammered the church walls around the door as the killer bounded out into the darkness from which he’d come, laughing.
“Stay here!” the Kid told the girl, and, as the horses pitched and whinnied shrilly near the front of the church, he ran for the back door, punching cartridges through his Winchester’s loading gate.
He bounded out the back door and stopped ten feet out from the church, aiming his Winchester from his right hip and whipping his gaze around, expecting a gun flash or the flicking of the Leper’s jostling shadow.
Nothing.
Then a laugh sounded in the distance directly out from the church. The Kid wheeled to face it, saw the pale shapes of tombstones stretching away in the starry darkness, with here and there the large shadow of a shrine or an ancient cryp
t.
Out among those hunched figures, a gun flashed. A pistol popped. The bullet screeched past the Kid’s left ear and spanged shrilly off the rear wall of the church behind him.
The Kid ran ahead and left and dove behind a near tombstone as the pistol flashed twice more, one slug tearing up gravel just inches behind the Kid’s left boot. The other barked into the face of the stone behind which the Kid crouched.
The Kid shifted his rifle to his left hand—he’d become accustomed to shooting well with either—and edged his left eye and his Winchester around the gravestone’s left side. He couldn’t be sure in the darkness, but he thought a pale figure moved among the stones beyond him, about forty yards straight out from the church’s back door.
Ka-chooo! Ka-chooo! Ka-choo—Ka-chooo!
The Winchester’s reports echoed loudly off the church and caused the horses inside to whinny again shrilly.
The Leper’s infuriating, mocking laugh rose again, this time from the Kid’s right and maybe a little farther out from where the bounty hunter’s gun had flashed.
“Kid, it’s been a while!” he yelled in Spanish. “This works out well for me, amigo. I can bag two heads on one ride—yours and the girl’s! Amigo, the General wants her bad!”
“Over my dead body!”
“That is very much my intention, my friend.”
“He must want her alive,” the Kid yelled, staring around the right side of his covering gravestone now, desperately trying to pick the bounty hunter out of the darkness. “Thus the rock salt!”
Despite the burning, bleeding wounds in his chest and shoulder, the Kid knew he’d been lucky so far. Usually, El Leproso didn’t make such careless missteps as that which he’d made inside the church. The man’s judgment had no doubt been clouded by Tomasina’s heartrending beauty.
The Kid had no idea who the bounty hunter was behind that mask—if man he was and not a demon, as was surmised by the superstitious peons of northern Sonora. The Kid only knew that the bounty hunter known as El Leproso was as cold-blooded a killer as you’d likely ever find this side of the Sierra Madre.
Thunder Over the Superstitions Page 17
