by Tabor Evans
The old man was hunched forward over a fat, open book on the table before him. There was a bottle there, a shot glass, and a cigarette sending smoke curling up from an ashtray into the shadows above the table. He looked up at Longarm, squinted his startlingly blue eyes that contrasted the pastiness of his pockmarked face, and then placed round-rimmed spectacles on his nose, and looked again.
“I’ll be damned,” he said in a throaty voice. “I do believe we got us some business, Cocheta.”
The girl kept her eyes on the guitar and continued strumming the instrument that the rain now threatened to drown out entirely.
“Come on in,” the man said, gaining his feet a little awkwardly, a little drunk. He stuck the quirley in the corner of his mouth. His peasant’s pajamas hung on his long, rangy frame as he walked around the far end of the bar and came up behind it.
“Whiskey? Tequila? Come on, name your poison.”
Longarm walked into the room and set his saddlebags and his rifle on the bar. “Tequila.” He removed his hat, tilted it to drain water from the brim, set it on the bar, and ran a hand through his damp hair.
“Tell me, amigo,” the barman said as he splashed liquor into a shot glass, “are you amongst Leyton’s men or are you a lone desert wanderer seekin’ shelter from this welcome desert rain?”
“How ’bout if we say I’m both and neither?” Longarm threw the shot back and held up two fingers to indicate a refill.
The barman chuckled and looked up after he’d refilled the shot glass. “The secretive sort. I don’t blame you. This is the country for it. Loose lips get men killed.”
He chuckled again, swiped the back of his hand across his mouth.
“I’m just glad to have some company over here, not to mention the business. Ever since that Mex bitch, Concepcion, rolled in here with her wagonload of whores and tequila, and set up shot in the old hotel yonder, my income has taken a deep dive. Oh, I get a few freighters and desert rats now and then, but most of the business, like Leyton’s and Mercado’s boys, stay holed up over at Concepcion’s.”
“How long they been holed up over there?”
Leaning forward against the bar, the pasty-faced old man considered Longarm over the tops of his spectacles. “Didn’t I see you ride in with ’em a few minutes ago?”
“So what if I did?”
The man smiled conspiratorially and then splashed more tequila into Longarm’s empty shot glass. “On the house. To answer your question, they been comin’ an’ goin’ for about two months now.”
“Why?”
“I don’t ask that question. No one does unless they want their heart carved out with a dull stiletto.”
“Concepcion seems mighty curious.”
“Yeah, well, that old puta’s too curious for her own good. Her old ticker’s likely gonna be dried and hangin’ from Mercado’s neck when him and Leyton finally get what they’re here for and ride on south across the border.”
The old man leaned on his arm, shifting his head a little closer to Longarm and lowering his voice though no one was here except the Apache girl strumming the guitar.
“You law?”
Longarm knew he was treading in very shallow water, but he had a feeling he wasn’t going to learn what the outlaws were here for, and why they’d killed the rangers and the U.S marshals, unless he tipped his hand to this man.
“For the sake of argument,” he said, “let’s say so.”
The man nodded once. “Don’t tell no one I said this, because I’ll deny it an’ call you a raving lunatic, but I got it in on fairly good word from an old desert rat who knows this desert as well as most Apaches do that—”
Outside, a horse whinnied above the pounding rain. Men’s voices rose. One was speaking Spanish with a heavy American accent.
Presently, boots pounded the porch floor. A man’s medium-tall, compact frame appeared in the saloon’s open doorway, clad in a dripping, yellow, India-rubber rain slicker. Rainwater sluiced off his gray, high-crowned Stetson.
The man’s voice resonated above the frequent thunder and driving rain. “Well, if it ain’t my ole friend Custis Parker Long his own mean an’ nasty self!” The man laughed, showing white teeth under a salt-and-pepper mustache and a long, pitted, hawk-like nose. The whiteness of his teeth and his eyes stood out against the old-leather color of his weathered skin.
Longarm turned toward the door, stiffening, sliding his right hand very slowly across his belly toward his gun. “Well, well,” Longarm said, managing a grin despite the cold hand of fear splaying its fingers across his back. “If it ain’t my old pal Captain Jack Leyton.”
Chapter 29
Captain Jack Leyton walked into the saloon. Mercado followed him, glowering angrily at Longarm.
Obviously the Mexican now knew he’d been duped. The big man with the Big Fifty—a tall, beefy man with dark skin but green eyes and dressed much like a vaquero—walked in behind Mercado. He had his Sharps on one shoulder.
The rest of Mercado’s men filed in behind the big man. They were all holding pistols in their hands, and they walked into the room, spreading out in a ragged semicircle to Longarm’s right.
“Custis, get your hand away from that .44, now, damnit!” Leyton said with disgust. “You ain’t gonna shoot your way out of here, and you know it!”
Longarm looked at the men holding pistols aimed at his belly and glowering at him. The Apache girl had stopped playing her guitar now, and she was watching the events unfolding before her with only vague interest, the way one might watch a couple of coyotes fighting in the street.
Longarm lowered his hand to his side. Rage burned in him as he glared at the pompous, self-assured Leyton, who now removed his hat and tossed it atop the bar beside Longarm’s rifle and ran both hands back through his thick, wavy, salt-and-pepper hair.
“Why’d they have to send you, of all people, Custis? Now, I’m most likely gonna have to kill you, and that genuinely grieves me. We was pals!”
“Why’d you do it, Jack? Why’d you kill those men—lawmen, just like you and me?”
Leyton sighed. The rain had let up some but it was still slashing against the sides of the building in the blowing wind, making the ceiling and the walls creak. Thunder pealed occasionally, causing the puncheon floor to vibrate and the bracketed oil lamps to ring.
The ranger said, “Let’s have a drink, and I’ll spell it all out for you. Might as well. You’re here now, and I reckon I’m gonna have to kill you here pretty soon, anyway.” He shook his head again grimly and looked at the barman, Kimble Dobson, who stood tensely behind the counter.
“Bottle of your best whiskey, Dobson. Three glasses. Tequila for my men.”
Leyton glanced at Mercado, who was still glowering indignantly at Longarm, and canted his head toward a near table. The Mexican walked over and both him and Leyton sat down. The others watched Longarm, guns aimed at the lawman’s belly.
When Longarm finally sat down across from Leyton and Mercado, facing the front door, the others, including the man with the Big Fifty—Fuentes—lowered their weapons and sank into chairs around two tables near the front.
No one said anything except Dobson, who said sharply, “Cocheta!” as he looked nervously through the dusty bottles lining the shelves on his back bar.
The girl rose from her chair with a bored, tired expression, set the guitar down against a ceiling support post, and started toward the bar. One of Mercado’s men reached out and pinched her ass. She gave a sharp grunt and turned her fiery eyes on the man who’d pinched her.
The men laughed, but the man who’d pinched the girl soon cowered slightly under her menacing glare. Mercado snickered. Jack Leyton smiled, and then watched as the girl walked around the far end of the bar and came up behind it to help Dobson.
“Pretty, ain’t she?” said Leyton. “A pretty savage. Mercado thinks she’s a witch.”
“She is a witch,” Mercado said, watching her now as she set a couple of trays atop the bar while Dobson filled shot glass
es. “Her mother was a sorceress, her father a shaman. Her family is well-known amongst my people south of the border.”
Longarm only hazily wondered how the girl had come to be with Dobson, living here in this virtual ghost town. All eyes, including his own, were on the strangely silent girl as she came out from behind the bar, picked up a tray with a bottle and three filled shot glasses on it, and set it on Longarm, Leyton, and Mercado’s table.
Indeed, she was an Apache beauty, with a smooth, oval face the color of dark honey. There was a wild, unbridled aspect to her that was hard to pin down and a coppery sheen in her otherwise chocolate eyes.
Apparently, she wore no underclothes beneath her red calico blouse, which was unbuttoned to reveal an enticing view of her cleavage. Longarm could see her large breasts swaying behind the fabric, her nipples pushing out the cloth as she bent to distribute the shot glasses. Her blue-black hair, coarse as a horse’s tail, hung down to just above her round ass. A faintly feral musk emanated from her. It smelled like the cooling desert in late fall.
“Mute, they tell me,” Leyton said, looking up at the girl admiringly.
“Oh, but she wasn’t born that way,” Mercado said. He looked up from the girl’s swaying breasts to her face and said commandingly, “Show them, senorita!”
She glowered down at the man. She did not look at Longarm or the others but kept her blandly malevolent gaze on Mercado as she reached up and pulled her neckerchief down to reveal a thick, nasty-looking scar across her throat.
Longarm felt himself inwardly recoil at the grisly wound.
“Christ!” Leyton said.
As the girl swung haughtily away from the table and retreated behind the bar, Mercado said, “Soldiers cut her throat when she was a little girl. Raided her camp, killed her family and all the others in her band. Cut her throat and left her to die. Only, being the demon she is, she didn’t die. Dobson found her and adopted her.”
The Mexican gang leader favored the tense barman with a sly look. “It’s my guess he’s sold his soul to the devil and partakes of his adopted daughter’s lovely wares nightly. Eh, Dobson, you old rapist? But who could blame him—living under the same roof as that?”
The other Mexicans laughed uncertainly, their limited understanding of English preventing them from getting the full gist of their leader’s tomfoolery.
“Enough of that,” Longarm said, casting his wrathful gaze on Leyton once again. “What’s your game, Jack? Why’d you murder those men?”
“Ah, shit, Custis,” Leyton said, looking down at the filled shot glass in front of him. “I didn’t kill those men. That was Vonda’s doin’. Or the doin’ of them stupid killers she has runnin’ with her.”
Longarm still couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea of Vonda being an outlaw much less having had anything to do with the lawmen’s killings. She’d seemed so lazy and sexy and benignly stupid. He’d let it go for now. Eventually, he hoped, everything would become clear.
He waited, holding his acrimonious gaze on Leyton and suppressing his urge to drill six bullets into the man from beneath the table.
Leyton was reading Longarm’s mind. “Yes, Vonda. Smarter than she looks. A saloon girl. A devilish one. Hell, a leader of men albeit a tad on the emotional side. She married that cork-headed Stretch a year ago, but he doesn’t know what she’s up to. Eight of Stretch’s men are hers…and mine, includin’ his segundo, Wade, and Tallahassee Smith. She was in on this thing from the beginning—a whore from Texas with money on her mind. Big money, and a small gang of Texas bank robbers to go along with her aspirations. But to make a long story short, a couple of her men were out looking for the new route for the gold shipment last month when they came upon the rangers and the marshals down from Broken Jaw and drilled all five because our boys thought the lawmen had gotten savvy to our game down here.”
Longarm said woodenly, “Stretch’s segundo and Tallahassee Smith.”
Leyton chuckled and threw back half his shot. “I was in Tucson at the time and didn’t even know about Big Frank tellin’ the others about the gold from that old stage shipment. Shit, that one-armed bastard is so full of shit he’d float in shallow water. If Santana really did bury that gold where he told Big Frank he did, it’s long gone. Some old desert rat got it, or maybe one of Whip Azrael’s boys, back before Vonda came on board and convinced Stretch he needed more men, and a new segundo an’ such, and suddenly our cutthroats were in Stretch’s bunkhouse and that fool didn’t even know it!”
Leyton threw back the last of his shot and refilled his glass from the bottle on the table between him and Mercado, who sat listening with a sly smile on his mustached face, hands laced on his small paunch.
Longarm said, “So, what’s game, Jack? Might as well tell me, since we was pards once and you’re gonna kill me an’ all.” He gave his ex-friend a cold grin.
Leyton told him between peals of thunder and sips of a second whiskey shot that the Bolivar Company out of St. Louis had a secret gold mine in the hills south of Nogales. The company had been hauling the gold up from Nogales in nondescript freight wagons—two wagons loaded with a quarter-million dollars in gold bars every three months—to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad in Las Cruces. From Las Cruces, the gold was shipped to the government mint in New Orleans.
Leyton had learned about the Bolivar Company mine and about the gold from a former colleague of his who’d gone to work as a freight guard. The former colleague had convinced him to throw in with Javiar Mercado and the Texas outlaw saloon girl known as Vonda, to rob one of the gold shipments and be set up moneywise for the rest of their lives.
Only problem was they’d just finalized plans for their first robbery on information relayed to them by Leyton’s former colleague when the Bolivar Company had unexpectedly changed the route and hadn’t informed the gold guards until they’d been well on their way across the Mexican border and heading north into Arizona Territory. The outlaws had figured it had been too risky for their inside man to get the information out to them. Or that his ploy had been found out.
Possibly, he’d been unofficially done away with. The punishment wasn’t unheard of.
“The former route was across Azrael’s Double D range,” Leyton said. “Unbeknownst, we reckon, to Azrael himself. I reckon when a gold company’s in cahoots with the U.S. government and Mexico, they figure they can do what they want. Anyway, I knew the new route had to be somewhere around here, too, because Azrael’s land is about the only place the route could go because of the mountains on both sides of it. Since they must have taken several bullion shipments along that route recently, we figured we’d cut their sign. Hard to hide the tracks of one heavy wagon and a four-mule hitch as well as a good half dozen or so horseback riders.”
“Since you look so pleased with yourself,” Longarm said, “I take it you did cut it.”
Leyton glanced behind him at the big man with the Big Fifty, who sat sipping a beer and a tequila shot and staring owlishly at Longarm. “Fuentes and the man you killed, Maximillian, stumbled onto it a couple days ago.
“Not only did he discover the new route, my friend, but Fuentes and I spied the wagons crossing the border. Early today. Moving at a snail’s pace. Tomorrow, we ride out, wait for them, and hit them!”
Leyton slapped his hands together sharply, causing several of the Mexicans in the room to jump.
He laughed, pleased with himself, and Longarm thought he must be an imposter. The Jack Leyton he’d known was nothing like this gold-hungry monster before him who saw the killing of five good lawmen as merely a sad misstep. Then, again, a fortune in gold will bring out the worst in just about everyone. Longarm had seen it many times in the past.
Leyton added, “I just sent a rider back to the Double D with the information, including the place where we’re all going to meet and wait. As slow as the gold wagon’s moving, there’s no hurry. The rain might slow them further. Whenever they arrive, we will be there, waiting.”
Longarm hardened
his jaws. He looked at Leyton and then at Mercado grinning like the cat that ate the canary beside the ranger. He looked over at the six other men parked at two tables on the room’s right side. Longarm’s trigger finger itched.
The muscles in in his back and legs were bunched, coiled, ready to spring.
He had to fight hard to keep himself from bounding up, blasting away with his .44. Leyton and Mercado’s pistols were holstered. He might be able to shoot both of them. Might. The others were watching him closely, reading his mind, a few quirking their lips as though daring him to attempt what he was on the verge of attempting.
If he did manage to take out both gang leaders sitting across from him, he’d be dead a half second later. On the other hand, he was likely on the verge of death right now.
What did he have to lose?
Leyton and Mercado stared at him, both with similar expressions on their faces, their eyes bright with the whiskey they’d been swilling. Longarm’s heart thudded heavily. His trigger finger kept itching.
“Custis, let it go,” Leyton said. “There’s not a damn thing you can do to stop us. We got us a brand-new Gatling gun we stole from the rurales—the locals—just across the border. We’ve been planning this takedown for over a year. Shit, Vonda even got herself hitched to that stupid Stretch Azrael so she could keep a closer eye on his range and add his money to our takedown. Them Azraels are loaded, don’t ya know, and Vonda’d never let even a single three-cent piece slip between her greedy fingers. Besides, she liked ole Stretch’s company, I reckon. She likes big men, Vonda does. Likes to use ’em and break ’em like a branch over her knee.”
The ranger grinned lustily. “That’s a girl that can’t get enough of it. I wouldn’t doubt it if you found that out for yourself.” He winked.
Longarm’s ears couldn’t burn anymore than they already did. He was trapped. He knew the whole story, and like Leyton said, there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
“What happened to Sullivan?” he asked.
Leyton grimaced, glanced over his shoulder at the big man with the Big Fifty lying across his table. Fuentes said, “Maximillian,” and then slid his right index finger across his throat and grinned.
