“What do you mean, ‘returned?’”
“Belly-down across their saddles!” The hunchback lowered his head and laughed his wheezing laugh across the table.
Salvador stopped trifling with the girl as he stared blankly across the table at his friend. Then, when he realized what he’d heard, he grinned. The grin grew broader, and he laughed.
He continued laughing at the ceiling until he saw the hunchback pointing at his stone mug, sort of cowering and grinning like a dog asking its abusive master for a bone. Salvador yelled for a mug of pulque to be delivered to his friend, and after the half-breed Pima girl had brought the drink and the hunchback drained half of it in a single draught, Salvador said, “Tell me, where is this Revenger bastard now, Coyon?”
“The Sonora Sun,” Coyon said, raking the sleeve of his leather jacket across his mouth. “He was there with the princess.”
“The Princess” was what everyone called Claudia Morales, town marshal of Sonora Gate, though not to her face unless they wanted a bullet for their wit.
“Hmmmm.”
Salvador nuzzled the blonde’s neck. She stiffened against him, turned her head away from him. He rose from his chair, pulled the girl over his shoulder like a fifty-pound sack of grain, and placed his cold cigar between his teeth. He tossed the hunchback a few coins and said, “Enjoy yourself for the rest of the evening, Coyon. You deserve it.”
The girl didn’t fight too much as Salvador climbed the stairs with her hanging across his shoulder.
* * *
A half-hour later, Salvador rolled off Obregon’s blonde on the lumpy bed in the cantina’s second story. The girl was sweating and breathing hard, her blonde hair in her face.
“You’re a pig!” she said in Spanish.
Salvador chuckled. He reached over to the roughhewn table beside the bed and deposited an American half-eagle on her belly. She looked down at it, lower jaw hanging in shock.
“You still think so?”
The girl picked up the coin and held it up to the last of the twilight angling through a window. “Mierda!”
Salvador chuckled. “There will be another one waiting for you here.”
The girl frowned, curious.
Salvador slid one of his Remington revolvers from its holster hanging from a near bedpost. He opened the loading gate, rolled the cylinder, and shook out a bullet. He flicked the loading gate closed and returned the Remington to its holster.
He rolled over and deposited the brass cartridge between the blonde’s sweat-slick breasts.
“After you have delivered that to Sartain.” Salvador winked. “If you’re quick about it, I might even give you another roll!”
He pressed his fingers to his lips, shoulders jerking as he laughed. “Shhh! We mustn’t tell Mama!”
* * *
Piñon pine and mesquite crackled in the sheet-iron stove beside Sartain and Claudia, who were hunkered over a chess game in the Sonora Sun’s main drinking hall. The natural perfume of the wood helped cover the old whiskey fumes and fresh blood stench that permeated the place in the wake of Don de Castillo’s second assassination attempt.
As though reading Sartain’s mind, Claudia used a gloved finger to nudge her rook ahead two squares and asked, “Why, Mike?”
They were the only two in the Sonora Sun this night. The wind had kept Delbert O’Brien’s usual customers away earlier, and the presence of the man whom Don de Castillo obviously wanted dead was keeping them away currently. No one wanted to catch a deadly case of inadvertent lead poisoning.
O’Brien stood behind the bar, morosely reading a newspaper. The burning wood crackled faintly in the stove and made soft sounds like bits of cloth blowing in a breeze. There were occasional muffled thuds as burned chunks of wood dropped through the grate.
Sartain began to move a pawn, but then left the wooden piece where it was on the board and decided to advance a knight instead. “My only clues are two names. Two names from my past in New Orleans. Phoenix and Jeff Ubek. Old friends.”
He advanced the knight and withdrew his hand.
Claudia looked up at him from beneath the brim of her hat. She had her hand on a rook. “Are you sure they are involved? Maybe the don only used their names to draw you into his trap.”
“Maybe. But how would he know those names? No one who doesn’t know me—doesn’t know Phoenix and Jeff—knows those names or their connection to me.” Sartain sipped from a glass half-filled with Sam Clay bourbon.
Claudia shook her head, puzzled.
“I’m sorry about Buffalo, Mike,” she said, nudging the rook to protect one of her bishops. “I know you two were together a long ti—”
The marshal of Sonora Gate let her voice trail off as a figure appeared over the batwing doors at the front of the room. It was a short, female-shaped figure silhouetted against the night and a gentle gray rain shower the wind had blown in.
Claudia dropped a hand to a Schofield on her thigh. Sartain had spied the movement on the porch first, and his right hand was already wrapped lightly around the pearl grip of his LeMat. The figure moved forward, parting the heavy batwings, and the girl strode into the room. She had a blanket clutched tightly around her shoulders.
Sartain kept his hand on the LeMat’s grip as the girl strode quickly to his and Claudia’s table on the far side of the ticking stove from the doors. Her bare feet slapped wetly on the wooden floor.
The girl was a curvy blonde with sharp, desperate brown eyes. Her hair was wet and clung to the sides of her face. She slid her oblique gaze from Claudia to the man across from her and said in a soft, reedy voice, “Are you Sartain?”
Her voice was Spanish-accented.
The Cajun slowly dipped his chin, glanced suspiciously toward the batwings once more, wary of another ambush. Then he watched as the girl slid a hand out from inside the blanket she was holding around her and set a .44-caliber bullet on the table in front of Sartain.
The Cajun studied the bullet. When he looked up at the girl and started to ask her who had sent him the message, she’d already wheeled and was padding quickly toward the front of the saloon.
“Hey!” Claudia called.
“Let her go,” Sartain said.
Claudia slid her chair back and rose. “I’ll follow her. We’ll get this settled once and for . . .”
“Claudia, let her go.”
The marshal scowled down at the Cajun. “Why, pendejo?”
Sartain smiled and took another sip from his glass of Sam Clay. “All in good time.”
Claudia gave a caustic chuff and stared toward the batwings, still shuddering in the wake of the girl’s leaving. “Anyway, I know where she works. And I think I know who sent the bullet.”
“This is your town. You gonna make me guess?”
Claudia slacked back into her chair. “I saw a hunchback named Coyon skulking around town earlier. He’s very sneaky; thinks he’s a shadow. Only he’s a hunchbacked shadow. Rather conspicuous. As soft in the head as he is ugly. He is probably the only friend of Don de Castillo’s oldest son, Salvador.”
“Tell me about Salvador.”
“His father disowned him, banished him from Hacienda de la Francesca years ago after Salvador shot his younger brother, Pedro.”
Claudia held up her whiskey glass, took a small sip, and then curled her upper lip as she turned the glass between her index finger and thumb.
She said, “You see, Pedro caught Salvador in a stable at the hacienda. With Pedro’s wife. Rumor has it that Pedro’s wife had a mouthful of you can guess what. Pedro attacked Salvador with a pitchfork and got a bullet in the heart for his trouble. When Pedro’s wife wouldn’t stop screaming, Salvador shot her too, orphaning his brother’s two young children, who are now being raised by the don’s spinster sister, Jacinta. They will likely turn out as wicked as Jacinta and her brother, the don.”
“Now, see? That’s why I never wanted to have kids. One pain in the ass after the other.”
“So Salvador was ba
nished. He is a brigand. He robs stagecoaches and steals gold shipments. Even some of his father’s gold shipments. He enjoys being a thorn in his papa’s side. Occasionally, he works with a gang. Mostly, he works alone. He is also an assassin. Has the run of northern Mexico.”
Sartain picked up the .44 cartridge, held it up and down between his thumb and index finger. “If he hates his old man so much, why do you suppose he’s after me? Habitual loyalty or some such?”
“I doubt it,” Claudia said, shaking her hair back from her brown eyes. “My guess is his father has put a substantial bounty on your head, and—”
“And collecting the money from the father who exiled him would be just another, fairly sharp thorn in the old man’s side.”
“Miguel, sometimes, I swear, you are smarter than you look.”
Sartain snorted. “You’re just tryin’ to flatter me back into your bed.”
“I have to admit,” the marshal of Sonora Gate said, throwing the last of her shot back and then leaning forward across the table. She glanced behind her at O’Brien and then said quietly so she wouldn’t be heard above the rain, “You know how to treat a woman, Miguel Sartain. Around here, a girl has to be careful.”
“You think the gentlemen of Sonora Gate will think less of you for needing a good ash-hauling now and then?”
“No, that’s not it,” Claudia said. “Around here, men fall too easily in love with me. They follow me around like puppies. It gets embarrassing!”
The brown-eyed beauty gained her feet. “Come on. It’s a short life and a rainy night. Let’s go up and enjoy ourselves on the new mattress O’Brien was kind enough to provide.” She turned to the barman, who was drawing himself a beer. “O’Brien, fetch us a couple of burritos from Doña Flores’s place. The Cajun will make it worth your while!”
She turned to Sartain, threw her head back, laughed lustily from her throat, and then hooked the Cajun’s arm and led him toward the stairs.
Chapter Thirteen
Sartain kissed Claudia’s lips, then rolled off of her and dropped his feet to the floor.
He rose and walked over to the dresser and poured another drink from the bottle of Sam Clay. He could hear the softly drumming rain beyond the curtained windows flanking the bed. The quiet night, the slow lovemaking with the beguiling Claudia Morales, and the trouble that had brought him here had put the Cajun in a pensive mood.
He donned his hat, pulled on his longhandles, and grabbed his hide makings sack from his shirt pocket. He slacked into a ladderback chair by the window. He opened the window to let more of the quiet sounds of the rain in on the breeze that smelled of pine and cactus blossoms, then took a sip from his glass and placed it back on the windowsill.
Slowly, thoughtfully, he began building a smoke with the chopped tobacco and papers from the makings sack.
Claudia lay in the middle of the bed, eyes closed, smiling dreamily. Her hair was lovely, arrayed across the pillow. Finally, she rolled over like a cat, yawned, drew her knees up slightly, and looked at Sartain, her eyes soft and pleasant in the dull light of the single burning lamp.
Lightning flashed distantly through the window. Seconds later, thunder rumbled quietly. It sounded like the coupling of faraway train cars.
Sartain rolled the cigarette closed.
“Tell me about her, Mike,” Claudia said, one hand beneath her pillow, continuing to smile at him in a relaxed, dreamy, fulfilled way.
“Phoenix?”
“Sí.”
Sartain pulled a stove match out of the makings sack, struck it on the windowsill, and touched the flame to the cigarette. When he had the quirley drawing, he plucked a tobacco crumb from his tongue, drew deep on the cigarette, and blew the smoke against the window and his bourbon glass.
“We grew up together in New Orleans. Street urchins. My ma died a whore’s death, same as Phoenix’s. Phoenix was taken in by her aunt, but her aunt was a whore too, so she was on the loose most of the time. Pretty girl. Hazel-eyed mulatto with wavy sorrel hair she wore to her waist. Skin the color of almonds dipped in honey. A headstrong girl, Phoenix. When she was six, she was going on sixteen. She had a deep, raspy laugh, and she loved to fish but she didn’t eat fish. She preferred beef.”
“I didn’t know you grew up that way, Mike—on the streets,” Claudia said, blinking slowly. She reached for his glass, took a sip of the Sam Clay, and returned the glass to the window ledge. “But, then, I guess I really don’t know anything about you except that you are fast with a gun, enjoy solving other people’s problems, and are an oh-soo-wonderful lover.”
She smiled, shifted her legs on the bed.
“I was raised in the French Quarter. Went to work when I was barely out of diapers, swampin’ saloons and livery barns, sellin’ newspapers, runnin’ errands for businessmen, doin’ odd jobs along the riverfront. Spoke Creole fluently.”
“And Phoenix? How did she live?”
“By sellin’ fish to the restaurants until she got old enough to work the line. She was only thirteen when she was recruited by the grandest parlor house in the Quarter. She married one of her customers, an older gent named Hoyt Abercrombie. Owned a shipping business. He died of a heart stroke, and not long after Phoenix had buried him, she found out the man was not only broke but in debt up to the bald crown of his skull.”
Sartain took another deep drag from the quirley, the sights, smells, sounds of the Quarter in those years swirling through his brain. The vision of Phoenix dressed like a queen and being escorted by rich men to opera houses and cabarets when he, Sartain, was still sweeping the streets and cleaning spittoons at thirteen, fourteen years old, just before the war broke out and he lied about his age and joined the Confederacy.
“You loved her,” Claudia said.
Sartain looked at her. “Yeah, I loved her. She loved me. But we were poor. Poor and tough. The streets of New Orleans brought us up hard. And practical. We talked of running away together when we were only ten years old, but two years later, she was being courted by the wealthiest pimp in town. And then she went to work at the House on Royal Street, and the war broke out, and I headed east to fight in it.”
“Heartbroken.”
“How’s that?”
“She broke your heart, didn’t she?”
Staring at the end of his quirley, Sartain thought about that. He nodded slowly. “Yeah, I guess she did.”
“Do you still love her?”
“I’ll probably always love her. Don’t we always love our childhood sweethearts?”
Claudia sipped his bourbon again. “When was the last time you saw her?”
“Last time I was in the Quarter. Three, four years ago now. She and a saloon owner named Jeff Ubek—he and I fought in the war—owned a cabaret together. Phoenix was singing and dancing, but she’d had enough of the line.” Sartain sipped from the glass, replaced it on the window ledge, parted the curtains, and stared out into the misty night. “I think she was happy. About as happy as a person can be, growin’ up like she did, goin’ through everything she went through.”
“And why didn’t you marry her, Mike? When you saw her again?” Claudia stared at him as though peering right through him. “You wanted to, no?”
Sartain was a little taken aback by the directness of her words. And by the astuteness of her assumption.
Yes, he had wanted to marry Phoenix.
But he hadn’t even brought it up to her, although she and Jeff Ubek were no more than business partners.
“Way too much water under the bridge,” Sartain said lazily, sitting back in his chair and tilting his head from side to side, stretching his neck. “Way too much water under the bridge.”
Claudia dropped her long, bare legs to the floor, rose, and knelt between the Cajun’s knees. She draped her arms over his thighs and frowned curiously, tenderly up at him. “Is she here, Mike? Could she be with”—she made a bitter face, as though the man’s name were a curse word she didn’t like to use—“Don de Castillo at Hacienda de l
a Francesca? I’ve heard he travels to New Orleans once or twice a year to gamble and visit the baglios. Maybe . . .”
She let her voice trail off.
Sartain had considered all possibilities, though none had made any sense to him.
He leaned forward and slid Claudia’s hair back from her cheeks, exhaling smoke around the quirley between his lips. “Don’t know that, darlin’. Don’t know what Jeff’s part in it is, either, though his name’s been bandied about as well. I do know this, though.”
“What’s that, Mike?”
“I’m gonna find out.”
“Mike, you aren’t—”
“Gonna pay a visit to Don de Castillo?” Sartain grinned. “Promised him, didn’t I?”
“You dumb Cajun! Do you know how many men he has? Pistoleros?”
“Sure I do.” Sartain took the last drag from his cigarette and flipped the stub through the window and out into the rainy night. “Eleven less than he did a week ago.”
Claudia drew a deep breath and released it. “Please don’t let your Cajun courage be the death of you, my friend.”
* * *
The next day around twilight, Sartain scrambled up the side of a sandstone ridge.
He was breathing hard and sweating, for he’d walked nearly a mile from where he’d tied his horse near a run-out spring amongst thick galleta grass, which Boss could fill his bottomless belly with.
The Cajun got down on hands and knees and crabbed to the top of the ridge, doffing his hat and setting it down beside him. He peered over the ridge crest to the south, where the casa of Hacienda de la Francesca lay in a broad valley quickly pooling with purple shadows.
From here, Sartain could make out the sprawling structure’s red tile roofs and pale adobe walls amongst the trees and shrubs of its courtyards and patios. Lambent light emanated from parts of it, as though to hold back the coming darkness of this high mountain valley. Between the high, rounded peaks rimming the valley, the smoke of cook fires hung in a thin, gauzy web. Sartain figured he was a half-mile away from the main house, but he could catch intermittent whiffs of roasting meat and beans on the occasional fleeting breezes, and they made his stomach rumble.
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