Teto turned to Carrico, with his loaded pistol pointed loosely toward him.
“Wade, she was scared and sick and being shot at,” he said. “Does that do it for you?”
Carrico only shook his head and looked away.
“Were the lawman and the rurales working together ?” he asked, changing the subject.
Teto gave a little laugh and said, “I’d have to say so, Wade, whether they meant to be or not.”
Carrico let out a breath, chuckled a little to himself and said, “If they weren’t, I expect they damn sure should have been. That turned into a real tight spot there for a minute or two.”
Paco Sterns looked back warily along the hill trail.
“We have the horses. Let’s vamos,” he said.
“What about the squirrel and our money?” Erin asked just to get a feel on where things stood with Teto.
“As soon as it’s safe, we find the squirrel and skin his back with a bullwhip,” Teto replied. “But for now, our situation has changed. We do not risk getting ourselves killed over money.” He grinned. “Not when there is a whole country full of it waiting across the border.”
Chapter 27
The Ranger had spotted the lone rider moving along the high trail in the afternoon sunlight. As soon as he saw the bulging feed sacks hanging over the horse’s rump, he realized it was the Mexican, not one of the Gun Killers, riding the high trail away from town. He lagged back a safe distance and kept out of sight. He wasn’t after the money. Yet, he would bet that wherever the money went, Erin Donovan would follow. And wherever Erin Donovan went . . .
He let his thoughts fade as he watched the Mexican guide the horse down the rocky, sloping hillside to the lower trail, leading out of town across the rolling desert floor. From the looks of the battered Mexican, and the way he sat slumped loose in his saddle, Sam doubted he could make it very far without pitching sidelong into the dirt.
Never underestimate the healing power of money, Sam reminded himself, letting the Mexican get to the bottom of the treacherous hillside and on to the lower trail before nudging his dun down behind him. Sam stayed back out of sight and followed the hoofprints of Hector’s horse until they turned off the lower trail back toward a bleak, little adobe hovel.
The house stood at the end of a worn path, beneath a hillside covered with cactus, creosote and mesquite brush. Sam had a hunch that this was the Mexican’s home, or at least a place where he felt safe enough to lie low and rest himself overnight—let himself heal a little.
Or meet someone? Sam asked himself, looking all around, studying the lay of the land. We’ll see. . . .
He rode the dun away from the trail, found a rise strewn with brush and cactus and stepped the horse down out of sight. He climbed down from his saddle, took the Swiss rifle case from beneath this bedroll and opened it on the ground. Instead of taking out the rifle, he only took out the scope. Lying down at the edge of the rise, he made himself comfortable and looked across the purple evening toward the open front window of the adobe.
It’s going to be a long night, he told himself, the brass-trimmed scope to his eye.
At a camp, lit only by the pale light of a half-moon, Wade Carrico stooped down and shook Teto Torres by the shoulder.
“Teto, wake up,” he said. “She’s gone.”
The Mexican outlaw leader sat up, rubbing his face, and looked at Carrico with a questioning expression.
“The hell are you talking about, Wade?” he asked angrily.
“I’m talking about your woman,” said Carrico, his voice turning equally angry. “I watched her go get her horse and lead it away from here.”
“You didn’t try to stop her?” Teto asked.
“I figured it being your woman, you wouldn’t want me laying hands on her,” Carrico said. “There’s been bad blood between us over her as it is.”
In truth, Carrico was glad to see her go. Had he stopped her and brought her to Teto, she would’ve lied and put him in a tight spot. This way, Teto had no one to blame but Erin herself.
Teto just stared at him for a moment, realizing he was right.
“How long ago?” he asked.
“No more than five minutes,” Carrico said.
“Damn it,” Teto said, “she’s always been bad about slipping off in the night.” He stood and looked down where Erin had slept on a blanket beside him. When he’d gone to sleep, she’d been lying against him, her arm over his chest.
“Want me to start grabbing everybody’s horses?” Carrico asked.
“No,” said Teto, “just mine. I’ll get her. I’ll see what this is all about.”
As he spoke to Carrico, Teto thought about the missing money, the missing Mexican. He thought about his brother, Luis, standing with the knife in his chest, declaring that Erin carried his child in her womb.
“Alone? Shouldn’t I go with you, at least?” Carrico suggested. He stared at Teto in the thin light of the moon, but the leader’s face revealed nothing.
“No,” Teto said, “you should do like I said and get my horse for me. I’ll find her and bring her back. We’ll catch up to you and the others on the trail.”
As Teto pulled on his boots and gathered his hat and gun belt, Carrico hurried to where the men had lined their horses along a rope stretched between the two scrub piñons. When Carrico returned to Teto, the outlaw leader climbed up into his saddle and looked down.
“Keep the men on this trail. Keep moving north,” he said to Carrico. “I’m putting you in charge until I get back and catch up to you.”
“You got it,” Carrico said. “But are you sure this is the right thing—”
“Not now, Wade,” said Teto. “I’ve got no time to argue with you.” He gave a wry smile that went unseen in the pale moonlight. “She’s my Irish princess.”
Without seeing Teto’s smile, Carrico thought his words sounded weak for the leader of a gang like the Gun Killers. His were more the words of a small child still yearning for his mother’s milk.
“Go, then,” Carrico said, raising a hand, not knowing how else he should respond to such a frivolous statement.
As Teto left, his horse’s hooves clacking away across the wide rock shelf lying beneath them, heads rose from saddles and blankets. The remaining Gun Killers frantically gathered around Carrico in the darkness.
“Easy, fellows,” Carrico said. “It’s only Teto going after his woman.”
“What the hell?” Ludlow Blake asked, his Colt hanging in his right hand, his hair disheveled.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Truman Filo, his rifle in hand.
“There’s no kidding here, Filo,” Carrico replied quietly. “He left me in charge. Anybody don’t like it, make yourself heard.”
“It’s all right with us, you being in charge, Wade,” said Paco Sterns.
The gunmen stared after the sound of the horse’s hooves until the animal crossed the rock shelf and stepped off onto softer ground.
“There he goes,” said Filo as the hooves fell silent. “Jesus, after all that went on between them back in Wild Roses? Now she up and runs off?”
“Nothing new for her,” said Paco Sterns. “She’s always running off . . . always in the night too.”
“Yeah, but why is Teto always following her?” said Filo. “Hell, let her go, is what I would do.”
“Really?” said Carrico, contemplating the situation as he spoke.
“Hell yes, really,” said Filo. “Damned if I’d go running after her, in the middle of the night—make a fool of myself in front of my men.”
“Not even for a hundred thousand dollars?” Carrico asked in a quiet tone.
“Oh,” said Filo.
The gunmen stood in dead silence while Carrico’s words sank in.
“Damn it!” Jete Longley said at length.
“Let’s get our horses!” said Ludlow Blake.
“Easy, fellows,” Carrico repeated, holding up a hand in the darkness to stop them.
“You mean w
e’re not going after them?” asked Jete Longley. “You’re the one mentioned the money!”
“That I am,” said Carrico. “There might be money behind this, and there might not. So let’s keep our heads in case we’re wrong.”
“What do you say, then?” Filo asked.
“We’re going after them, sure enough,” said Carrico. “But we’re going to shy back and see what it looks like before we go accusing anybody.”
When Hector had arrived at the abandoned adobe that once was his home, the first thing he’d done was water the horse and himself. Then he’d forced himself forward, led the tired animal inside the hovel and into the back room that served as a stall. He’d lifted the money sacks from the horse’s back and dragged them to what used to be his and his wife’s bedroom.
There he’d laid the sacks of money on the dirt floor and gathered loose straw and a ragged blanket that had been thrashed about and shredded by playing coyote pups. When he’d finished making a pallet of money, straw and blanket, he’d crawled atop it and lain on his back, hoping his pain would subside with sleep. But it did not.
It was dark when the pain forced him awake. As he sat up stiffly on the pallet, he saw red eyes flash in the darkness across the dark empty room.
“Get out you . . . son of a bitch,” he growled in pain, grabbing a handful of straw—the nearest thing he could find to throw at the prowler. He heard paws race away through the empty house and out the rear door.
Hector dragged himself up to the open window, where he stood in the pale moonlight for a moment, as if to deliver himself from the greater darkness and remind himself he was still alive. Noting a lump in his trouser pocket, he reached in and found the folded-over, nearly empty leather bag of cocaine powder that Sidel Tereze—or one of the other doves, he thought hazily—had left on the small table in Three-Hand Defoe’s living quarters.
No, his living quarters, he corrected himself. Or, it had been his living quarters, before the Gun Killers arrived, wanting what he had so foolishly thought belonged to him.
He turned the leather bag in his hand and shook his head slowly. Would things have been different had he kept his head clear and his wits about him? He had to think about that for a moment. He could not blame the tequila and ground cocaine powder for the loss of his wife and son. He had lost them well before he’d started drinking and using the powder.
He unwrapped the leather bag as he thought about it. He shook out a small mound of the powder onto his palm and looked at it, seeing it silvery blue in the slanted moonlight. Pain throbbed behind his swollen eyes, inside his raw, puffy lips.
After a moment, he let out a breath, closed the leather bag one-handed, folded it over and shoved it back down into his trouser pocket.
Here goes, he told himself. Lifting his palm to his mouth, he took the mound of powder onto his tongue and swallowed it. He licked his bruised and battered lips, and in seconds noted the pain had left them.
Outside, across the roll of the desert floor, Sam had been lying at rest, his head on his forearm. But he perked up when he saw the faint glow of a candle move through the hovel and stop inside the window.
Didn’t the Mexican realize that a light, even one this faint, could be seen a long way across these rolling flatlands?
Yes, Sam decided, of course he realized it. That’s why he lit it.
Raising the scope back to his eye, Sam studied the window, seeing the shadowy silhouette of the Mexican move about inside.
Getting around pretty good, Sam noted, for a man as battered as he’d appeared to be earlier.
In the distance, along the rolling trail, Erin saw the dim candlelight as soon as it reached out from the window into the dark night.
Was it Hector? she wondered, riding with the big Starr out across her lap in quick reach. The wolves had taught her a terrible lesson about traveling in the dark in this wild, brutal land.
Yes, it must be, she thought. It was about where he’d said his house would be, two miles west of Rosas Salvajes. Anyway, that’s where she was headed, she told herself. She looked back along the trail behind her. Then, in spite of the darkness, she booted the horse forward, up into a gallop on the sandy trail.
Nearly an hour had passed by the time she reached the house. She had already slowed the horse back to a walk as she turned onto the narrow path leading to the front door. But before she made it all the way to the house, Hector called out to her from within the darkness.
“Is that you, Irish señorita?” he asked, his voice sounding stronger.
“Yes, Hect—Pancho,” she said, catching herself. “It’s me, Erin Donovan. I’m alone. Don’t shoot.”
After a second, Hector stepped out of the darkness, holding a broken ax handle in his hand.
“Don’t worry. I have no gun,” he said. He eyed a rifle butt sticking up from a saddle boot. It was a rifle Paco Stern had given her in case they ran into more rurales on the trail.
Erin stopped her horse and slipped down its side. She made no offer of the rifle to him.
“You sound a lot better than you did earlier,” she said, leading the horse toward the house twenty yards away. “Where’s the money?”
“It is safe inside,” Hector said, walking along beside her. He seemed tense but well, walking straight, with almost a little bounce in his step.
“What has gotten into you, Pancho?” she asked.
“Cocaína!” Hector replied readily, his swollen lips even allowing him to speak better in spite of their rawness.
“Careful with that stuff,” Erin warned him.
“Sí, I will be careful,” Hector said.
Erin followed him into the house, leading her horse to the room where Hector had stalled his.
“I knew you would come here for the money,” Hector said as she closed the door and turned to face him.
“And you were right.” Erin smiled. “Now may I see it?”
“Sí, this way,” Hector said. He walked into the bedroom and gestured toward the pallet on the floor.
“Oh, so this is how it is,” Erin said knowingly, eyeing the makeshift bed in the light of a short candle.
“No, no,” Hector said quickly. “I am showing you the money. It is there, in the pallet.”
“Oh, I see,” Erin said, relieved. She shook her head, embarrassed. “You must excuse me, Pancho. I’m not used to men being such gentlemen as you.”
Hector understood, but he only nodded, walked over to the window and picked up the short candle from the sill. “Now that you are here, if you will permit me, I will put out the light, lest we draw trouble for ourselves.”
From his spot in the dirt, Sam watched Hector appear in the window and blow out the candle. But before the young Mexican extinguished the flame, Sam caught sight of the woman’s shadowy silhouette in the room behind him. She held a big revolver out at arm’s length, aimed toward the back of Hector’s head.
Chapter 28
Staring out the window, Hector had been speaking and did not hear the sound of the big Starr revolver cock six feet from his head. Or, if he had heard it, he simply had not recognized the sound, Erin told herself, the gun leveled and ready to fire.
“You trusted me to bring your part of the money to you,” Hector said to her as he stared out into the purple, Mexican night. “It was a trust I could not betray, short of death.”
“Yes, and you trusted me to get you out of Rosas Salvajes alive,” Erin said, sighting down the long gun barrel. “So our trust of each other was well founded. Now we are evened up.”
“Sí, now we are even,” said Hector, feeling the cocaine boiling in his system, making him feel strong, bold, invincible, his pain gone for the time being. “Now you can take your part and go,” he said. “I will hide my part until I have ridden back to town to claim what is mine.”
“You’re going back to Rosa Salvajes?” questioned Erin. “To run the cantina?”
“Yes, until I find someone else to take it over,” said Hector. “It belongs to me now. I
will not give it up.”
Gripping the gun tightly, Erin shook her head.
“You are a bold, brave and honorable man, Pancho,” she said with regret in her voice. A tear formed in her eye. She sighed. “If only you weren’t so crazy, you wonderful squirrel.”
She clenched her teeth and pulled the trigger.
“Crazy? Am I so crazy,” he said, staring straight ahead into the night with no idea what had just happened behind him, “to want what every man wants for himself, a place on this earth that he can call his own? A home, a good woman, a family? A way to work and feed and shelter his family, to be able to hold his head up as a man and stand before the world unashamed?”
Erin stared at the big revolver wide-eyed, stunned that it had misfired. She shook it and looked at it again, as if shaking it might be all it needed. She started to cock the gun, raise it and try again, but Hector turned around facing her in the darkness before she could do so. He continued talking with no letup, feeling the affects of the cocaine forcing him to say things he might otherwise never say.
“No,” she said, “that’s not crazy at all.”
“When I have taken back what is mine,” Hector continued as if she weren’t even there, “I will find myself a woman, and I will treat her like a queen. We will have a son. He will not replace the son Ana took from me, but that is all right—”
“You had a son, Pancho?” Erin asked. She held the gun back behind her, trying to get her thumb over the big hammer to recock it. But she couldn’t.
“Sí, I had a son,” said Hector. He shrugged. “He was not the blood of my blood, but that did not matter. Even though he was the son of another man, I loved him as my own, and I treated him no different than I would have had he been—”
“Oh?” She cut him off again. “You mean your wife had been widowed?”
“No,” said Hector. “She had a child out of the church. He was born shortly after we were married. The Padre at San Carlos blessed us on our wedding day and said that in God’s eyes, it was meant for us to marry, and to give the boy a name. I would be his father. Everything should have been fine. But I am a poor man, and I could not meet even our most basic needs. That is why she left me. That is why she took my son, and went to join the boy’s real father.” His voice cracked with emotion.
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