Hector let the rifle slump in his right hand, but he raised a finger for emphasis.
“You must give me your word not to try to kill me again,” he said with a half smile, the soothing feel of the cocaine surrounding him.
“You have my word, Pancho,” Erin said, stepping and putting her arms around him. “I will never try to kill you again.”
From the other room, the Ranger stepped out of the darkness and into the moonlit bedroom, his Winchester rifle in hand.
“Easy, Pancho,” he said quietly, having heard the woman use the name while he’d stood listening from the other room. “I’m not after either one of you.” He glanced at Erin as he spoke.
Hector’s rifle lowered and hung in his hand.
“How long have you been there, Ranger Burrack?” Erin asked, taking a step back from Hector.
No longer “Sam.” Ranger Burrack now, Sam noted.
“Not long,” he said. He stepped around to where the Starr lay on the remaining loose straw.
“This money is ours, Ranger,” Hector said firmly with a warning tone to his voice. He turned with the Ranger, keeping squarely faced toward him.
“If this was U.S. territory, I’d take the money and turn it in,” Sam said. “Down here, I have no claim on it. I don’t even know which side of the border it came from.”
Hector gave Erin a look. “Do you believe him?” he asked.
“I believe him,” she said. “He’s here for the Gun Killers, nothing more. Right, Sam?”
“Right,” Sam replied. He looked closely at Erin.
Erin thought she saw disappointment in his eyes. “Sam, I didn’t mean to—”
“Take the money and get going,” Sam said, cutting her off. “There’s nothing to explain.”
Erin hesitated, then said, “Sam . . . there’s enough money here for us to share it. If it hadn’t been for you dogging the gang so hard . . .”
The look Sam gave her caused her words to trail to a halt.
Hector looked at the two of them with curiosity. Was something playing out here, or was it just the cocaine toying with his mind?
Sam grabbed the big Starr revolver, walked over to the open window and laid it on the sill. He picked up the candle, lit it and placed it in the window beside the gun.
“The gun battle is over. They’re on their way,” he said.
“You will not fight them alone,” Hector said, stepping forward. “I will stay and fight beside you.”
“No,” Sam said, “I fight alone. This has nothing to do with you.”
“Nothing to do with me?” said Hector. “Look at what they did to me.”
Sam gestured a nod toward the sacks of money on the floor.
“The money is what did that to you,” he said. “It’d be a shame to get yourself killed before you enjoy what it brings you.”
Hector looked at the sacks of money, then up at the woman. He tipped his swollen, battered head a bit.
“You are right, Ranger,” he said. He stepped out and stood between the sacks on the floor. “But before I go, I tell you this. If you think you have seen the last of me, you are wrong. I will soon return to Rosas Salvajes and take my cantina from whoever is running it.”
“Good luck, Pancho,” Sam said, trying to dismiss the matter. He picked up the big Starr and turned it back and forth in his hand.
But Hector wasn’t finished. He thumbed himself on the chest, the cocaine still hard at work, doing its job, starting to bring things to the surface that usually only boiled and simmered deep inside him.
“I will tell you something else,” he said. “You and your country have not heard the last of Pancho Pasada. I will use this money and whatever resources I have to bring other men like myself together. Bold men! Men who will not be denied what is ours just because you have made a mark in the dirt between our country and yours. We will be coming, Lawman from Nogales,” he said in a scornful warning.
“I’ll be waiting,” Sam replied quietly but firmly. He held the big Starr up, his thumb over its hammer, knowing that the longer they talked the farther apart they would find themselves.
“Now get going.” He reached out arm’s length through the open window, pointed the revolver straight up and fired it once.
Hector and Erin stared at each other in amazement, hearing the blast, seeing the streak of blue-orange muzzle fire.
Sam fired it again, this time two shots.
“Oh my . . . ,” said Erin. Why had it not fired for her?
He fired again, three shots. Then he laid the empty smoking gun on the windowsill.
“Are we through talking, Pancho?” he asked.
Hector started to say something more, but the woman took his arm and pulled him away.
“Help me with the money,” she said to Hector. Having taken a set of saddlebags from behind her saddle, she tossed them on the floor beside the money sacks. To Sam she said, “He has taken cocaine powder for his pain.”
“I figured as much,” Sam replied, watching Hector stoop down, open the sack and start stuffing the money down into the saddlebags.
Erin took a pair of saddlebags from behind Hector’s saddle and put them on the floor to be filled.
She stepped in closer to the Ranger. “Sam, I feel like there is something I should say or do.”
“There’s not,” Sam replied.
“You did save my life,” she said softly.
“And you saved mine,” Sam replied. “Now get moving before you end up in the middle of things here. You’ve got your baby to think of, and a life waiting for you in Ireland.”
“Sam,” she said, “I must confess to you. I’ve never been to Ireland in my life.”
He just stared at her.
“It’s true,” she said. “My father came from Ireland before Bram and I were born. He was a Texan who came to Mexico in forty-six to fight in the Mexican army in the Batallón de San Patricio. I am named after Ireland, but I was born here in Mexico. My mother was Mexican. This is my native land.” She gestured a hand toward the darkness, taking in all of the wild, rugged terrain.
“So, the story about you and your brother, Bram, being orphans—?”
“Lies,” she said bluntly, “along with everything else I told you. I lied to you. I lied to Teto and Luis. I have lied to everyone throughout my life because I was born on the wrong side of the border.”
The wrong side of the border . . .
Sam shook his head and gazed out across the dark purple night. In the east, silver sunlight began to swell above the jagged, black horizon.
“There’s no right or wrong side of the border,” he said. “We’re all the same.”
“That’s easier to believe when you come here from Nogales,” she said. “It’s harder to believe when you go to Nogales from here.”
Sam stared out in silence for a moment.
“Why are you telling me the truth now?” he asked quietly.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose I just needed to tell someone the truth—just once in my life.” She paused and added, “You were honest, and fair with me.”
“How do you know?” Sam said quietly. He turned and looked at her. “How do you know I was being fair and honest? I could have been lying—playing along with you just to get you to lead me to the Gun Killers.”
Sam glanced at Hector, who was still busy stuffing the money into the saddlebags. Reward money for the Gun Killers? he thought, but he didn’t say anything.
“You could have been, but you weren’t,” Erin replied. “I would have known if you were.”
“So you think,” Sam said. He looked at her for a moment longer. “Get out of here, Erin. There’ll be things happening here you won’t want to see.” He turned and handed her the big Starr revolver. She shoved it back down into her waist.
Chapter 30
Teto and the five other Gun Killers put their horses into an easy gallop when the candlelight reappeared in the purple darkness. Riding up alongside Teto, Wade Carrico called out t
o him above the squeak of tack and the rumble of hooves.
“We need to slow down, Teto,” he said, “in case this turns out to be some kind of trap.”
“Keep your mouth shut, Wade, I’m warning you!” Teto called back to him.
“Listen to me, Teto, damn it,” said Carrico. “Whoever lit the candle did it to guide Erin to them, not us.”
Teto started to slow down, considering Carrico’s words. But as he did, the signal shots rang out in the night from the same direction as the candlelight.
“Aw, hell,” said Carrico, seeing Teto boot his horse up into a faster gallop.
Teto laughed as all six of them raced along the dark trail.
“Don’t you ever get tired of being wrong, Wade?” he called out.
Carrico cursed to himself as he booted his horse right alongside Teto’s.
“This little Irish trollop is going to get us all killed one day,” he swore under his breath.
They rode on.
Four miles ahead of them, in the open rear door of the Pasadas’ abandoned adobe hovel, Sam stood and watched Erin and Hector swing up into their saddles and turn their horses east into the first rays of rising sun. Sam raised a hand to Erin as she looked back at him from her saddle.
“Keep moving until you put a few river crossings between here and yourselves,” he said. But then he caught himself and stopped—he didn’t need to tell Erin Donovan anything when it came to leaving no trail.
But she looked back and raised her hand. Then she turned and put her horse forward, her pair of bulging saddlebags tied down firmly behind her saddle.
Hector sidled his horse over closer to her as they rode along, his own money-filled saddlebags riding behind his saddle.
Sam watched them become smaller and more grainy as they rode on, until the purple darkness seemed to reach in and swallow them.
Walking back inside the adobe, to the window where the candle sat burning on the sill, he stood and listened closely until he heard the sound of hooves moving across the desert floor.
“Time to go to work,” he murmured to himself, stepping away from the open window.
When Teto and his men were close enough that they could see the window framing the glowing candlelight, they slowed to a stop and sat staring for a moment at the abandoned adobe, checking their rifles and the pistols on their hips.
“Everybody spread out,” Teto said in a lowered voice. He nudged his horse forward at a walk. “Nobody shoots until we find out what this is.” He looked over at Carrico. “Wade, flank us like earlier. Get behind the house, but don’t get an itchy trigger finger.”
“I never do,” Carrico said, pulling his horse away from the others.
With their mounts spread a few feet apart, Carrico off covering their left flank, the five horsemen advanced their horses forward slowly and stopped again twenty yards from the glowing candlelight.
“Wait here,” Teto said to the other four horsemen. He gigged his horse forward and rode on to the front of the adobe.
“Hola the house,” he called out to the open front door, seeing the flickering candlelight dimly throughout the abandoned hovel.
He waited for a tense, silent moment. The men sat their horses, staring at the candlelight, guns in hand, ready to fire.
“Erin, my Irish princess!” Teto called out, mocking her pet name. “I know you are in there. I followed you as soon as you left. Come out!”
Another silence. Then Teto said to the adobe, “I will come and drag you out if I have to. Or you can come out on your own. You can tell me everything and I will forgive you.”
Another silence.
“Damn it, what’s he waiting for?” Paco Sterns said sidelong under his breath.
“He’s loco for the woman,” Jete Longley whispered back from a few feet away. “Him and Luis both were always crazy over her.”
“You need to keep that kind of talk to yourself, Jete,” said Blake.
“I’ve been thinking,” Teto called out to the shadowy hovel, “the squirrel didn’t get himself loose. You cut him loose. You and him partnered up on the money—don’t try denying it!”
“Jesus,” Sterns whispered, “has he lost his mind?”
No one replied. The men only stared and listened.
“My brother was not lying,” Teto called out. “You stabbed him! Were you sleeping with my brother—my brother who I killed for you?”
“Je-sus!” Sterns whispered again, this time with more emphasis. “We trusted these two holding our money?” He shook his head in disbelief.
Behind the house, Carrico had climbed down from his horse and looked all around on the ground.
“Teto, I’ve got two sets of hooves leading away from here,” he called out. He hoped his information would shut Teto up. Nobody wanted to hear this kind of raving from their leader.
“Damn it to hell!” Teto shouted. He hammered his bootheels against his horse, sending it recklessly bolting in the open front door of the abandoned hovel.
The men looked at each other in the silvery darkness of dawn.
“She’s gone!” Teto called out, appearing at the window in the candlelight, down from his saddle, his rifle in hand. His horse milled a few feet behind him. “But she was here! So was our money!” He held up the empty feed sacks. “I found these . . . and I found three gold coins lying on the floor!”
“All right, Teto!” Carrico called out from behind the house. “I’ve got their tracks! What the hell are we waiting for?”
“You heard him, damn it!” Teto shouted, still standing in the light of the candle. “Don’t just sit there. Let’s get after the—”
The men heard a rifle shot reach in out of the darkness and cut Teto Torres’ words short. They saw the impact of the bullet pick their leader up and hurl him backward like a limber scarecrow. Teto hit the wall on the other side of the room and slid down, trailing blood.
The men took control of their spooked horses before the animals could rear and bolt away. Turning his horse quickly, Paco Sterns pointed at the gray sliver of smoke thirty yards away.
“There’s the shooter!” he cried out, pointing with his big Remington revolver.
The three other men turned their horses in time to see a streak of blue flame explode from Sterns’ gun barrel. But as Paco Sterns’ shot blasted out, so did a second shot from the Ranger’s Winchester rifle. This time, his shot came from a different spot, twenty feet to the left of the first looming curl of smoke.
The Ranger’s second shot flung Sterns backward out of his saddle and sent him rolling limp on the ground.
Truman Filo saw the flash from the Ranger’s shot.
“It has to be that damned lawman!” he shouted to Jete Longley and Ludlow Blake. “Ride him down!”
The three horsemen bolted out across the sandy ground toward the second curl of rifle smoke standing in the grainy darkness. But as their horses pounded forward, Filo drew his horse back from between them, circled wide of the adobe hovel toward Wade Carrico, who had remounted his horse and was pointing it in the direction of Hector’s and Erin’s hoofprints.
“Wade! Wait for me!” he cried out.
Carrico turned in his saddle just in time to see a streak of fire reach out ten yards to the left of the Ranger’s second curl of smoke. The shot hit Filo in his back and sent him tumbling forward, horse and all, end over end in a cloud of dust.
“Damn this!” cried Wade Carrico. He sent his horse pounding out along the set of hoofprints.
Longley and Blake spotted the Ranger’s muzzle flash in time to start firing before he could take a new position on them.
“There he is!” shouted Longley. “Kill him!”
The two rode hard, firing repeatedly. Their pistol shots whistled past Sam’s head as he dropped onto one knee and took aim in the gray-silver dawn.
Two shots exploded from the Winchester and the two riders went down, leaving their saddles as if they’d been snatched up from behind by some large, vengeful hand.
; Sam straightened up from his position on his knee and looked all around. Hearing something close behind him, he swung around, the rifle ready and cocked. Then he let out a tight breath, almost in silent prayer.
“You were supposed to stay,” he said to the coppery, black-point dun.
The horse sawed its head, chuffed and pawed a hoof at the ground.
Sam looked at the big Swiss rifle he’d assembled and left tied down atop his bedroll just in case he needed it.
“Oh, I see,” he said, stepping over the dun. He uncocked the smoking Winchester and shoved it down into the saddle boot. He slid the Swiss rifle from under its tie-downs and swung up into the saddle.
Riding toward the hovel, he circled the dun to the left, getting the house out from between himself and his fleeing target. Seeing a brownish gray rise of dust climbing upward toward the horizon, he stopped the dun and reached his hand far down its left rein. As he gripped the rein short and drew it back tight, he raised his left knee and pressed it down firmly on the horse’s withers.
The dun obeyed his command, sank onto its front knees and rolled easily down onto its side. As the horse lay down, Sam stepped out of his saddle, Swiss rifle in hand, and also lay down. He stretched himself out on the ground, holding the rifle out across the dun’s side.
He put the rifle’s scope to his eye and studied the rising dust in the distance until he saw the outline of the rider move up into the early sunlight. At this distance, even through the scope, the rider looked small—the shot hard to make.
Sam settled himself in. He reached his left hand out, rubbed the dun’s neck and patted it, telling it to keep still. Then he put his hand back to the front of the rifle stock and eased his breathing into the same rhythm as that of the horse.
He pinned the scope to the center of Wade Carrico’s back and let his rifle barrel drift up and down with the steady rise and fall of the dun’s sides.
In the soft, silver glow of dawn, he squeezed the trigger on the barrel’s rise, seeing the circle of the scope climb from the small of Carrico’s back to a point between his shoulder blades just as the rifle bucked against his shoulder.
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