Apache-Colton Series

by Janis Reams Hudson

Spence would volunteer, but hell, that would not only leave Tucson down to one doctor, but LaRisa was expecting their first child in a matter of weeks.

  That left Pace to go after Jo, because if he didn’t, Serena would go herself, and Matt wouldn’t stand for that. A lone woman traipsing through lawless, bandit-ridden Mexico…he shuddered at the thought. And shuddered again because Jo was there. Somewhere.

  Matt sighed and closed his eyes. “So what did you say in this telegram?”

  Serena waited until he looked at her. “Everything,” she said.

  The telegram reached Pace the next day shortly after noon.

  He had wrestled all through the previous night with whether or not to stay at Fort Sill with The People, and he had finally decided. He’d come to Naiche’s camp to make his announcement. “I’m going home, sigúúyé, my uncle.”

  Naiche, chief of the Chiricahua Apaches, youngest son of the great leader Cochise, studied the son of his adopted sister, Woman of Magic, closely. “You do not stay with The People?”

  “I only bring trouble to The People.”

  “You are wrong, Fire Seeker. You provide for Thin Old Woman. You speak for us in the white man’s tongue, which we do not understand. You tell us when the white man cheats us. You do much good here.”

  Pace shook his head. “Others do these things better than I do. The interpreter, George Wratten, is a good, honest man. He speaks well for The People and does not waste half his time in the guardhouse.”

  “His temper is not so hot as yours. Perhaps because he does not care as much?”

  Pace shook his head again. “No. He cares, my uncle. He is just wiser than I. You now have the young people, too, to speak for you. I’ve watched Daklulgie since he came home from the Carlisle school. He understands the white man, yet he is Apache. He will make a fine leader some day.”

  “You are sure you want to do this thing? Go home?”

  Pace gave a harsh laugh. “No, I’m not sure, but I’m going.”

  Naiche gave a single nod. “Nzhú. It is good. A man belongs with his family. You have been gone too long from yours.”

  Pace’s sarcastic smile turned sad. “Yes,” he said softly. “Too long.”

  “You will make things good between yourself and Bear Killer?”

  “I will try,” Pace answered. But he feared Matt—Bear Killer to The People—might not be interested. “I will try.”

  “Nzhú. It is good. You will train horses. You have Power over them.”

  “Maybe,” Pace admitted. He and his baby sister Jessie’s husband, Blake, had talked more than once about Pace training the half-Arab stock Blake was breeding. Maybe it was time to pursue that old dream.

  “Fire Seeker! Fire Seeker!” The young boy called Talks Loud raced into camp from the field. “The blue-coat looks for you, Fire Seeker!” He pointed behind him to a private on horseback coming at a brisk trot.

  Well, hell, Pace thought. What now?

  “Telegram for you, Colton.” The young man with peach fuzz on his face handed Pace the envelope without dismounting. “The cap’n ask me to deliver it.”

  “Thanks, Booker.” Pace took the envelope, but he was less than eager to open it. Telegrams usually did not bring good news, but instead of putting it off, he turned his back and flipped to the second page to see who it was from. Everything inside him went still. Matt.

  Sudden visions of his own childhood flashed across Pace’s mind, visions of his golden-haired larger-than-life big brother teaching him to ride, to rope, to shoot. Helping him walk the fine line between Apache and white. Even though Matt was white, it was said of him that his heart was at least half Apache. Pace had always believed that. They may have been only stepbrothers, but no two real brothers could have been closer.

  God, how could things have gone so wrong between them?

  But Pace knew how. He’d done it. He himself had killed their closeness as if he’d severed the bond of brotherhood with his own knife. For Matt to contact him must mean something damn bad had happened. With trepidation, Pace turned back to the beginning of the telegram.

  As he read, his gut clenched and his blood turned cold. Joanna was in trouble. Joanna, Pace’s little shadow, his tomboy sidekick. The little girl who had absorbed everything an uncle could teach a child about taking care of herself, everything he could teach a young girl about survival. Pace had taken the same lessons Matt had taught him and passed them on to Matt’s daughter. Hell, he thought with a pang, he’d even taught her how to jump onto the back of his racing horse. Damn, she’d been something, with that wild red hair flying, skirts flapping up to reveal a pair of Spence’s pants she’d “borrowed.” Joanna, as delicate-looking and pretty as a China doll, yet tough as old boot leather.

  From what Pace could make of the choppy wording of the telegram, Joanna had gone to Chihuahua with a friend, but the friend had come home without her, saying Jo had left for home a full week earlier. But Jo never made it home.

  Pace closed his eyes and tilted his face to the sun, searching inside himself for the knowledge, the Power that let him know things he had no real way of knowing. Joanna, Joanna, where are you?

  There was no answer, of course. Only Serena and their mother had ever been able to hear his thoughts and answer without speaking. Even that had been lost to Pace over the years. There was nothing in his mind now but the silence of his own emptiness.

  Yet wouldn’t he know if one of his family was dead? She must be alive. She must be. But the fear that came through the words in the telegram had his own fear rising in his throat. It might be Matt’s name at the bottom of the message, but the words were Serena’s. Pace knew that as surely as if he could feel her hands upon the paper. And if Serena was afraid, the threat to Joanna was more than real.

  “Tio Naiche.” Pace turned to face his adoptive uncle. “I must leave now.”

  To save time, Pace rode from Fort Sill to Vernon, where he caught the train to El Paso, then south to Ojo Caliente. When he unloaded his horse at the small Mexican depot, the buckskin was as restless and eager to run as Pace was.

  Urgency nagged at Pace. The farther south he went, the more stories he picked up about the husband of the woman Joanna and her friend had gone to visit, and he didn’t like what he was hearing. Don Rodrigo Francisco Alfredo Martinez Juerta was stinking rich; Pace had no quarrel with that. But the stories of cruelty and torture made his hackles rise.

  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what the hell had Joanna been thinking to accompany her friend to visit such a man? What the hell had Matt been thinking to allow it? Did Juerta have something to do with Joanna’s disappearance?

  The land stretched out flat before him, similar to West Texas, broken occasionally by rugged gullies. To the west it rose in sharp plateaus, one after the other, with rocky outcroppings and canyons a man could lose himself in for days.

  As much as he wanted to dig his heels into the buckskin’s flanks and gallop all-out until he reached Hacienda Juerta, Pace held the horse back, giving it time to limber up after the train ride. Pace had the feeling he wasn’t going to have time to deal with pulled tendons and sore muscles—his or the horse’s—once he picked up Joanna’s trail.

  Hacienda Juerta

  Chihuahua, Mexico

  The grating noise of a key turning in the iron lock echoed dully in the small cell carved into the rock beneath Hacienda Juerta. With her heart pounding and her mouth as dry as the parched desert beyond the adobe walls of the hacienda, Joanna Colton waited in the dark behind the door.

  The iron-bound solid oak door creaked slowly open. Instinct screamed at her to move, hide. Run!

  But not yet. Not yet. Wait. Wait.

  The door opened a little more, then a little more. The crack of light from the hall beyond cut across the stone floor and struck the filthy straw pallet in the far corner. The dark shape of a man’s head appeared at the edge of the door.

  Now!

  Joanna braced both hands against the three-inch thick door and shoved with all h
er might. The man’s shriek was cut short as his head was caught sharply between the door and the stone wall. The crack was loud. He fell to the floor like a sack of grain.

  The door bounced open, letting in the light, and Joanna stared, sickened. Dear God, had she killed him?

  I don’t care! She didn’t have time to care. Quickly, she forced herself to drag him into the room. Then, with a brief glance to make sure the hall was vacant, she slipped the key from the lock and closed herself back into her cell.

  With a silent prayer for speed and strength, she felt her way along the floor to where she’d left the stub of a candle beside her last remaining match. The granite floor was cold and rough against her hands and knees. She struck the match against the floor and watched gratefully as it sparked, then flared. After lighting the candle, she carried it to the dark form stretched across the floor.

  “Well, hell,” she whispered. It was Don Rodrigo Francisco Alfredo Martinez Juerta himself, and the bastard was still alive. Quickly, before he could rouse, she took his gunbelt. A shudder of revulsion ripped through her at having to touch anything about him. When she spotted the open fly of his pants, she jerked her hands back in instinctive fear.

  There was no doubt in her mind that he’d come to her cell to rape her. Afterward, maybe that night, maybe the next, he would have slit her throat. She had no doubt of that, either.

  The need to hurry, to escape, galvanized her. Swallowing her gorge, she tied his hands and feet with the only thing available, strips torn from her thin mattress. A wad of the fabric, held in place by another strip, served as a gag.

  Thank God she had been dressed for hiking when he’d thrown her in this cell. She could wish for her split riding skirt, but the sturdy green serge skirt and white shirtwaist she wore would have to do. At least she wasn’t wearing a corset, and she did have on sturdy boots. She would manage.

  If she’d needed Juerta’s clothes for her escape, she wasn’t sure she could have brought herself to touch the bastard again. Besides, stripping him and changing clothes would take too much time. She couldn’t afford to be slowed down.

  Juerta would never forgive her for this. If he caught her, the very least he would do would be to kill her. Joanna had no doubt that her death would be as slow and painful as he could devise. She knew what the monster was capable of.

  His cruelty should have come as no surprise. After all, it had been his Spanish ancestors who’d taught the Apaches firsthand about torture.

  Yes, if he caught her, he would kill her, but she had nothing to lose. He had already promised her a slow death.

  A small scurrying from the corner where her pallet lay drew her attention. “Harold.”

  The little gray mouse scampered across what was left of the mattress and perched on Joanna’s knee.

  “Sorry, no treat for you tonight.” With one forefinger she stroked the top of his head. “They didn’t feed me today. You’ll have to go out to the stables and snitch some grain, little fellow.”

  Harold twitched his whiskers and squeaked a protest.

  Joanna smiled. “Go, now. I have to get out of here while I can. Give my best to your family, little man.”

  The mouse peered at her steadily with sharp, intelligent eyes, and Jo could have sworn he was wishing her luck. The backs of her eyes stung.

  Good grief. An unconscious man who wanted to kill her lay sprawled on the floor, she was about to take off across the hostile interior of the state of Chihuahua on her own, Juerta was bound to follow and try to kill her, and she was choking up over saying good-bye to a mouse.

  With a final squeak and twitch of his whiskers, Harold scampered down off her knee and disappeared through the narrow crack in the corner.

  “So long, friend,” Joanna whispered. Then she shook herself. By her reckoning, it should be nearly midnight. If she was very, very quiet, and very, very lucky, her absence might not be noticed until morning. By then, she swore grimly, she would be as far away as she could possibly get from the vile, brutal clutches of Don Rodrigo Francisco Alfredo Martinez Juerta.

  Chapter Three

  On a ridge overlooking a broad, flat plain, Pace hid his horse in the rocks, pulled out his binoculars, and stretched out along the edge to study the group of buildings on the southern horizon. They gleamed white in the early morning sun, distance making them appear small. Hacienda Juerta. It was there that his search would begin in earnest.

  With an effort, he blanked from his mind all the horrifying possibilities of what could have happened to Joanna. The stories he’d heard on his trip south made his hackles rise. Stories of rape and torture and murder at the hands of Don Rodrigo Juerta and his private army. He’d apparently more than earned the nickname El Carnicero—The Butcher. What the hell had Joanna been doing visiting such a man? he asked himself again. What the hell had Matt been thinking to let her?

  But then, Pace remembered his fiery-headed stepneice well. He still bore the scars where she’d jabbed him in the butt with a fork when she was just a kid. No one told Joanna Colton what to do.

  As the sun inched upward, the shadows across the landscape began to shrink. Hell, Pace thought, a man could hide an army in broken, rugged land like that which stretched between the ridge where he lay and the hacienda in the distance. Gullies and outcroppings, canyons and dry washes, fingers of lava here and there. A dangerous, inhospitable land, but Pace saw the beauty, too. And he saw something else. Movement.

  He held the glasses still and let his eyes go unfocused. There. About a half-mile away along the bottom of a long dry wash that twisted back on itself a dozen times as it snaked across the plain, a shadow moved. Too big for a jackrabbit or even a coyote, too small for a deer.

  Pace lowered the glasses to fix the position against the rest of the land. It was then he saw the plume of dust. Riders, coming fast from the hacienda. He raised the binoculars again. About two dozen, he estimated, and from what he could see, they were armed to the teeth. The morning sun glanced off dozens of cartridges in the bandeleros crossed over each chest.

  The riders raced along the rim of the table of land where the hacienda stood. Pace’s gut told him that when they came abreast of the big loop in the gully, where the shadow moved, they would slide their horses down the gravelly hill on their hocks. He knew the look of predators when he saw them.

  The question was, what, or who, were they after?

  Below, the shadowy figure climbed out of the gully.

  “Son of a bitch.” Joanna! Her hair was woven into a single, thick braid that hung straight down her back, but there was no disguising the color. No one else on earth had hair that particular, fiery shade of red.

  She must have heard something, for she whirled and looked back across the gully. Then she spun west, grabbed her skirts, and ran.

  The riders were coming fast, still on the ridge, but almost even with her. Pace swore again. On foot, she wouldn’t even make the dubious shelter of the rocks. The bastards had spotted her. They were shouting now and firing their guns in the air as they took the rocky slope at a suicidal speed.

  “Run,” Pace urged. “Goddammit, Jo, run!”

  She did. With her heart nearly pounding its way out of her chest, Joanna Colton ran for her very life. Rocks and cactus tore at her clothes and the skin beneath. She ignored it. If she could only make it to those rocks…

  Her breath came in harsh, burning gasps. Her legs felt like lead. It had been much later in the night than she’d calculated when she’d made her escape, closer to dawn than midnight. Not enough time to get away. Not nearly enough time. She wasn’t going to make it. Dear God, she wasn’t going to make it. The rocks were too far, the horses too fast. If only she’d been able to steal a horse!

  But some of Juerta’s men had been playing cards next to the corral. Sneaking off with a horse had been out of the question. She’d thought—prayed—that even on foot she would have a long enough head start to make it into the foothills where she wouldn’t be spotted.

  Sweat s
oaked her clothes and streamed into her eyes, threatening to blind her.

  The bastards would have to cross the gully. That would slow them down for a minute. Oh, Jesus. Oh, God. She wasn’t going to make it!

  Unable to stop herself, she glanced over her shoulder to see how close they were. Her terrified gaze never got that far. Off to her right, from out of the north, a lone rider on a big buckskin galloped toward her. For a moment she stumbled. Her heart squeezed tight. If she didn’t know better she would have sworn by the way he sat in the saddle, the way his long black hair flew out from beneath the low-crowned hat, that the rider was Pace. It couldn’t be.

  I don’t care who you are, mister, just help me, please!

  He raced at a right angle to Juerta and his men, who had yet to reach the gully. Closer and closer he came until finally it seemed that the others noticed him, for their firing momentarily stopped.

  Then it came, the sound that had once brought terror to the hearts of whites and Mexicans alike, the sound that meant bloodshed and death, the sound that had finally been quieted by the U.S. Government these past nine years. A wild, hackle-raising Apache war cry.

  Pace! It was Pace! Oh, God, oh, God. How? Why? What was he doing here?

  God above, he wasn’t slowing! He was racing straight for her, his revolver and rifle holstered, ignoring the men now firing at him as they neared the gully.

  The eerie cry came again, and as he neared, Pace used his teeth to tug off his left glove, then stretched out his arm toward her.

  Joanna’s breath caught. They’d done this hundreds of times when she’d been a child. It had been great fun to her to reach for her stepuncle’s outstretched arm and let him swing her up behind him into the saddle. He couldn’t mean to…She was grown now, not a child. He would never be able to lift her as he once had!

  As he rode down on her with his arm outstretched, Juerta and the first of his men disappeared down into the gully.

  Joanna swallowed heavily. The ground shook beneath her feet with the vibration of the buckskin’s hoofbeats. Dust churned and filled the air. Closer. Closer!