Jack Higgins - Dillinger

by Dillinger [lit]

  Dillinger poured coffee into a cup, gave it to Rose, and glanced across to Nachita. The old man smiled faintly. "We followed the right pony, but the wrong man was riding him. A game Ortiz is playing. He knows that I am leading you. That eventually we must meet. He wishes it to be on his terms in a place of his own choosing. And now six of my brothers are dead."

  Dillinger said quietly to Rose, "We think of our side, their side. I thought we just won. But for Nachita it means the opposite when Apaches die."

  Rose squeezed Dillinger's hand, but Rivera didn't want to hear any of this. He stood over the squatting Nachita, his voice raised, saying, "Where has Ortiz taken my daughter?"

  Nachita shrugged. "Perhaps he will cross the desert to the mountain we call the Spine of the Devil. Near its peak there are the ruins of an ancient city. Men lived there long before my people came from the cold country in the north. In the old days it was an Apache stronghold."

  Villa nodded. "I have heard of this place. Pueblo-or Aztec. They call it the City of the Dead."

  "But to get there Ortiz must stay on the old pack trail across the Sierras," Nachita said. "The well at Agua Verde is the only water before the desert. If he camps on the trail tonight, he should reach there by noon tomorrow."

  "Then what are we sitting here for?" Rivera demanded.

  Chavasse helped himself to more coffee. "It would take us two days to catch up with him now."

  "Not if we go over the mountains." Nachita pointed to the great peak that towered above them. "Agua Verde is on the other side. Per­haps twenty miles."

  Dillinger looked up at Nachita, shading his eyes. "Can it be done?"

  "As a young man, I rode with Geronimo over the same trail to escape from the horse-soldiers who chased us across the Rio Grande."

  "A long time ago."

  "It was a great ride." Nachita turned and looked up at the mountain again. "There is a place near the peak where we could spend the night. It is even possible that we could reach Agua Verde before Ortiz."

  Dillinger looked at Villa. "What do you think?"

  Villa nodded. "The well at Agua Verde is inside the chapel. By the time Ortiz and his men arrive they will need water badly."

  "Perhaps even enough to bargain for my child," Rivera said.

  "If we are going, we must go now," Nachita said. "We have perhaps four hours left until sunset."

  Dillinger nodded. "There's no way I can get the Chevrolet over there."

  "I show you." Nachita took a stick and drew in the sand. "Ortiz comes from the west. We go straight over and cut across his path in front of him, if we are lucky. You, my friend, take your automobile out into the desert to the north, skirting the base of the mountain. The long way round. A hundred miles at least, but in the cool of the night." He shrugged. "And your automobile can travel faster than the wind, is it not so?"

  "And what if it breaks down out there in the desert?" Rose said. "The sun in the heat of the day can fry a man's brains. Or a woman's."

  "A horse could break a leg going over the mountain," Nachita said. "Or a man. This way, we have two chances of reaching Aqua Verde before Ortiz."

  "That settles it," Dillinger said. "Anyone want to chaperone Rose and me?"

  "I will come, senor," Villa said. "I know this country, you don't."

  Dillinger said to the girl, "Rose? You want to take Villa's horse and go with the others?"

  She glanced at her uncle. "I will come with you."

  "Okay, let's get moving."

  He and Villa put the top up on the convertible. Dillinger got behind the wheel and pressed the starter as Villa scrambled into the rear seat. "Lead my horse," he shouted to Chavasse.

  Dillinger waved. "See you at Agua Verde," he called, and drove down into the vast desert.

  Nachita led them up the slope of the moun­tain without hesitation, zigzagging between the mesquite and cacti. After an hour they went over a ridge and faced a shelving bank of shale and thin soil held together by a few shrubs.

  Rivera, who had been bringing up the rear, now joined them, his face lined with fatigue. "Why have we stopped?"

  Nachita had ridden to a point where the ledge turned the corner of the bluff, and now he came back and dismounted. "From here it will be necessary to blindfold the horses. Use strips from your blankets."

  Nachita went first, and the rest followed at spaced intervals. When the ledge turned the corner, Chevasse sucked in his breath. At this point the trail narrowed to a width of perhaps five or six feet. On his right hand there was nothing, only clear air to the valley floor below.

  The ledge lifted steeply, following the curve of the wall, and he climbed after Nachita, hold­ing his horse as close to the wall as possible.

  And then the ledge narrowed until there hardly seemed room for man and animal to­gether. Chevasse pushed forward frantically and came out on a small plateau. He led his mount up and over the edge of a gentle slope thinly scattered with pine trees to where Nachita waited.

  Rivera came over the edge after them, and the Frenchman leaned against his mount, wip­ing sweat from his face. "Something to remem­ber till my dying day." He turned to Nachita. "Can we rest here?"

  The old man shook his head. "From now on it is easy, and we can ride. There is a good campsite in the forest on the far side of the summit."

  Nachita mounted, and they rode after him. The desert was purple and gray, turning black at the edges, and in the desolate light of eve­ning the peaks were touched with fire.

  It was cooler at this height, the air pleasant with the scent of pines, and the climb already seemed remote and impossible.

  The ultimate ridge lifted to meet the dark arch of the sky where already a single star shone. They went over and a little way down the other side to a clearing in the pine trees. Nachita held up his hand, and they dismounted.

  Chavasse felt weariness strike through him. It had been a long day. He carried the saddle­bags across to where Nachita was already build­ing a small fire of twigs and pine cones in a deep hollow between three boulders.

  Everyone looked worn down to the bone. Rivera gazed into the fire vacantly, lines of fatigue etched into his face.

  For the first few miles out into the desert, the going wasn't too bad, a flat, sun-baked plain over which the Chevrolet moved fast. At one stage Dillinger pushed the car up to sixty, and Villa tapped his shoulder, laughing like a kid.

  "This is better than riding, amigo," he shouted.

  Dillinger had to slow down as they came to a flat brown plain that was fissured and broken.

  It was like driving your way through a maze, turning from one ancient dried-out water course into another, traveling at no more than ten or fifteen miles an hour. They ran into one dead end after another, frequently having to turn back and try again, and progress was painfully slow and darkness was falling before they fi­nally emerged onto salt flats.

  The heat and the dust were unbelievable. They stopped beside a clump of organ cactus, and Villa gathered a few dry sticks for a small fire to make coffee while Dillinger topped up the Chevy's tank with gas from the cans in the trunk. Then, checking the radiator, he groaned.

  "We must have been boiling away more wa­ter than I thought." He got out the jerry can. "I was saving this in case the canteen ran dry and we had to drink this." He poured what was left in the jerry can into the radiator carefully, not wanting to spill a drop.

  He and Villa sat with Rose on the running board and drank coffee as darkness descended. Dillinger said, "Good to give the old car a chance to rest."

  "Just like horses, eh?" Villa said.

  Dillinger patted the side of the Chevrolet. "If she lets us down, I wouldn't give much for our chances when the sun comes up tomorrow."

  "Death, my friend, comes to all of us. The dice was thrown a long time ago. The result is already known, but then, you know this, I think, Mr. Dillinger."

  Dillinger looked at him calmly. "Rose knows, but how did you find out?"

  "I saw your picture in the pa
per in Durango a couple of months back. I recognized you on the train, in spite of your new mustache. When we spoke, privately. When you let me go."

  "You told nobody?"

  "I owed you, my friend, and besides, we are, after all, in the same line of business. Life is a pretty wild poker game."

  Villa tilted his hat and closed his eyes, turn­ing his back so that Dillinger and Rose could lie side by side through the dark night.

  It was in the middle of the night that Dillinger awoke because he felt a hand on his shoulder. He was about to leap up, ready to draw or fight, when he realized it was Rose's hand.

  "You are a restless sleeper," she whispered. "I only wanted to say I love you."

  Dillinger turned over on his back. The sky was full of unexpected stars.

  They got a good early start, the Chevy mak­ing time, when there was a sudden loud bang as the left front tire burst. The Chevrolet slued wildly, and Dillinger fought with the wheel as the car spun around and finally came to a stop.

  They sat for a moment in silence. Dillinger said, "Anybody hurt?"

  Villa said, "I think I just spat out my heart, a saying we have, but never mind."

  "I'm okay," said Rose.

  "Let's inspect the damage."

  The tire was in shreds, but worst was the fact that the rear axle was jammed across a sizable rock.

  "Jesus!" Villa said. "The horse is dead."

  "Not so fast," Dillinger said, getting down on his hands and knees and inspecting the situa­tion. He glanced up. "It seems to me that if we raise her on the rock with the jack and give her a good push, she should roll clear soon enough."

  It was a solution so ludicrously simple that Rose laughed out loud in relief.

  Dillinger got the jack from the trunk and positioned it under the part of the axle that was free. Villa started to pump. Gradually the Chevrolet lifted.

  "Okay," Dillinger said. "Let's try."

  It took both of them and Rose all their strength. For a moment, it looked as if the plan wasn't going to work, and then the jack tilted forward and the Chevrolet ran free.

  Dillinger had a spare, and the tire change took only minutes.

  "Okay, let's push on."

  Villa said, "One thing, my friend. I know Rivera of old. Even if we succeed in this matter, he will send me back to prison to face a firing squad."

  "And me?" Dillinger said.

  "My observation tells me that it would be unwise to turn your back on him."

  They got back into the car. Dillinger said, "So why don't you make a break for it while the going's good?"

  "Because there is the child to consider. Be­cause I am a man, and Rivera is not," Villa said simply. "The same for you, I think."

  Dillinger smiled. Knowing Rose was listen­ing to their exchange, he said, "It's what we think of ourselves that's important."

  He pressed the starter and drove away, sing­ing another of the Hit Parade tunes that re­minded him of home, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?"

  Sixteen

  Dillinger waited for Villa beside the Chevrolet, the Thompson ready in his hand. There was the sound of falling stones, and the Mexican came down the slope through the brush above him, his clatter waking Rose in the back seat.

  "Nobody there," Villa said. "We've beaten all of them to this place, amigo."

  "Great," Diliinger said. "So what if Ortiz and his band arrive first? Long odds for the two of us."

  "Three of us," Rose said.

  "True, but the only well is inside the chapel," Villa said. "He will need water before trying the desert. If we are inside and he is out..." He shrugged.

  "Okay. What about the car?"

  Villa glanced at the steep walls of the arroyo on either side. "We leave her here and go the rest of the way on foot."

  "The hell you say. Look, Villa," Dillinger said, "those Apaches find this heap, they'll burn it or kick it to death. I want this car. I love it."

  Rose had wandered around a bend. "Hey, car-lover," she called out. "Come and see."

  Villa followed Dillinger past the curve to where there was a huge recess between the stones, a shallow natural cave. "Drive your true love in here," Rose said. "If you throw a few branches over it, they'll never see it unless they smell the gasoline first."

  It was, both Villa and Dillinger agreed, a perfect hiding place. Dillinger impulsively kissed Rose on the cheek. "Leave it to a woman."

  Dillinger drove the car in as far as he safely could, and then the three of them, like kids, threw brush and branches on it till it nearly disappeared from view.

  "Let's go," Dillinger said.

  "Our leader leads," Rose said to Villa.

  "I mean it," Dillinger said. "We don't want to get caught here, the three of us against a mob of them."

  And so, over the barren mountainside, through brush and shale, they finally came over the rim of an escarpment. With a rush of feeling, Dillinger saw the chapel.

  It stood foursquare to the winds, firmly rooted into the ground at the very edge of a small plateau perhaps twenty-five yards wide and bordered by a few scattered pines and a tan­gled thicket of greasewood and mesquite.

  The chapel itself was built of granite with a roof of overlapping stone slabs about twenty feet above the ground. The door was of heavy oak bound with iron, and there were two nar­row arched windows on either side and a row of similar windows under the eaves.

  Villa opened the door and stepped inside, and Dillinger followed him. There was a small altar with a wooden cross, a lantern hanging from a chain, and two benches against the rear wall. It was very quiet, the pale dawn light slanting down from the upper windows. Villa took off his hat and crossed himself as he went toward the altar.

  The well was sunk into the center of the floor and was constructed of some strange, trans­lucent stone shot with green fire that tinted the water, giving the place its name.

  Dillinger turned slowly, examining everything. There was a stout locking bar on a swing pin behind the door, and the lower windows had wooden shutters that fastened on the inside.

  "Anyone would think the place had been built to stand a siege," Dillinger remarked.

  "In the old days it was a refuge for the mule-drivers on many occasions," Villa said. "It is a mystery why the water should come up here and nowhere else. That is why they built the chapel in the first place, more than two hun­dred years ago."

  Through the windows on the other side the view was magnificent. The chapel stood on the extreme edge of the shelf looking out across the desert to the Devil's Spine, and there was a drop of almost a thousand feet to the valley floor.

  "I feel as if I could almost reach out and touch it," Dillinger said, nodding across at the mountain.

  Villa grinned. "You would need a long arm, amigo. It is at least fifteen miles away. The desert air plays strange tricks."

  They slept the sleep of the dead. When Dillinger finally awoke, he saw Rose still sleep­ing, and he imagined what it might be like waking up in a real house in Indiana late on a Sunday morning and seeing Rose in the bed beside him.

  There was the slightest breath of wind, a dying fall. But in the sound he detect a footfall. And then another. He reached for his Thompson, got up noiselessly, and then kicked open the chapel door. Nachita was standing in the open doorway, rifle crooked in his arm.

  Nachita and Chavasse led their horses in through the door. When all the animals were hobbled together at one end of the building, the old Apache cut a switch of brush from the thicket and walked backward to the chapel, smoothing all tracks from the sand.

  He barred the door and turned to face them. "When they come, no one must make a move till they have dismounted. Then, with all of you taking aim, I will call out in the Apache language. I will go out and bargain with Ortiz while he and his men are in your gun sights."

  "That's crazy," Rivera said, shaking both fists. "We should kill as many as possible with the first volley. Then bargain with Ortiz."

  "And kill the child?" said Nach
ita in anger.

  "I didn't say shoot at the child," Rivera shouted.

  "It could be hit by accident. Or any one of them we missed could throw the child off the mountain," Nachita said. "I am here to set free a child who is paying for your sins. I am not here to idly kill my fellow Apaches who are following a leader who is as mad as you are."

  Rivera looked ten years older than when Dillinger had first met him. A muscle twitched in his right cheek. He gripped his rifle tightly. Dillinger was ready to let loose the second that Rivera made a wrong move.