Cristo!
Claudia returned the Winchester to the gun rack. She ran the chain through the three rifles she kept in the rack, locked the padlock, pocketed the key, and left the office, locking the door behind her and then pocketing that key as well.
She hadn’t eaten all day, but that was about to be remedied. She pulled her hat brim down low, took a quick swing through town, making sure there was no trouble, and then, deeming that all the laws were being obeyed even on the Mexican end of Sonora Gate this weekday night, she headed over to Doña Flores’s place for tacos and menudo. She took her time, eating and reading an old Tucson newspaper some drummer had left behind, and then she had a couple of shots of tequila over at the Sonora Sun.
There were only a few customers in the place—one mestizo goat herder and his little brown and white dog wearing a red bandanna, and three sullen saddle tramps, no doubt riding the grubline. She doubted the pilgrims would be much trouble, as sun-blistered and saddle-sore as they appeared, but she waited until they’d finished their game of red dog and shuffled off to find a pile of straw to bed down in before she headed upstairs to her room.
“Any sign of Sartain?” Delbert O’Brien asked behind her as he swabbed the table vacated by the three pilgrims.
Slowly climbing the stairs, Claudia glanced over her shoulder at the barman. “Was that his name?”
And then she gave a caustic chuff, ignoring the hollow feeling in her belly despite her recent supper, and continued to the saloon’s second story. Normally, Claudia was more careful about opening her door and entering her room. Being a law woman of a border town had earned her a fair share of enemies, any one of whom could lie behind her door in bushwhack. All they really needed was a skeleton key.
But this night, despite her determination to forget Sartain, she was deeply distracted, so when she’d entered her room, she didn’t bother to look around before closing the door and lighting one of the lamps. Just as she touched a match to the lantern’s wick, however, she smelled man sweat and leather and sour alcohol, and she knew instantly that she’d made a grave mistake.
A deep, Spanish-accented voice sounded inordinately loud in the silent room when it said, “Welcome home, Marshal Morales.” Claudia gasped and dropped the lantern’s glass mantle, which shattered on the floor.
As she jerked around, she reached for one of her Schofields, but stayed the movement when she heard two gun hammers click one after the other. Someone whistled softly, almost inaudibly, between his teeth.
The whistler lay sprawled on her bed, on his side, facing her. Grinning at her. Salvador de Castillo’s legs were crossed at his ankles, and his sombrero hung from the front post of Claudia’s bed. In his right hand, he held a Remington revolver, its butt resting on the edge of the bed.
The barrel was aimed at her belly.
A thick shadow moved out from behind a chest of drawers near the closed door. It was a hunched, bizarrely menacing figure. Coyon grinned, and his teeth were a hideous, crooked, tobacco- and food-encrusted mess beneath his long, hooked hawk’s nose. The brim of his ragged sombrero half-hid his eyes, the pupil of his wandering left eye glistening demonically in the lamplight.
Claudia kept her right hand on the handle of her right Schofield, leaving the pistol in its holster. Her chest rose and fell sharply as she snarled, “What in the hell are you two bastards doing in my room?”
“Waiting for the most beautiful law woman in all of America. Possibly in all of Mexico, too.” Salvador closed his fingers together, touched them to his lips, making a kissing sound, and flung his open hand out to indicate Claudia. “Wouldn’t you say, Coyon?”
“Oh, yes,” the hunchback said, his good eye resting hungrily on Claudia’s sharply rising and falling breasts. “I would say so, amigo. Hee-hee-hee!”
“Answer my question, pendejo!”
“Shut up,” Salvador said mildly, his grin in place. “I’ll do the question-asking around here. After all, we got the drop on you, senorita. Tsk-tsk. So careless. That isn’t like you.”
“Diddle yourself, pendejo! Answer my question or I’ll—”
Salvador raised his pistol, aiming the barrel at her right tit, and narrowed one eye. Claudia thought she saw his finger tighten on the trigger. Fear washed through her. She wasn’t accustomed to the feeling, and it caught her by surprise. It also left a bad taste in her mouth. It mixed in as much fury as fear, so that her heart was pounding savagely in her temples.
“Keep your voice down,” Salvador warned. “You want to wake up the whole town?”
“Does O’Brien know you’re here?”
“We came up the back way, senorita,” said Coyon in his soft, phlegmy voice, keeping his own Remington aimed at Claudia. He opened his other hand to reveal a skeleton key. He snickered.
“To answer your question, Marshal,” Salvador said, resting the side of his head on the heel of his free hand, “we were wondering where your friend is. Sartain.” He grinned widely, his dark eyes flashing beneath a cowlick of his dark-brown hair. “Did he get scared and run off after receiving my message? That would be too bad. I was waiting to make his anticipation build, and then when I finally make my move, he is nowhere to be found!”
Claudia laughed, only half-faking the humor. “You think Mike Sartain is afraid of you, you vermin? Hah! That is a good one!”
That turned both men’s seedy grins into indignant scowls. Coyon looked at his friend uncertainly.
Salvador said with soft menace, “You have a sharp tongue. Tell me where Sartain is or I will put your tongue to better use. Your tongue and your entire mouth.”
The seedy smile returned.
“Go to hell!”
“Yes, something like that. Where is Sartain?”
“None of your stinking business, pendejo!”
Claudia wasn’t sure why she didn’t want to tell Salvador where Mike had gone. She doubted Sartain was alive. But something inside her would not give an inch when crowded by the likes of Salvador de Castillo, whom she had banned from Sonora Gate over a year ago.
A man wearing a badge might have had a little room to play with. But a female wearing a badge needed to command respect in all quarters. She could not give an inch, even if it cost her her life.
Or worse.
Salvador blinked slowly. The grin was gone now. “Unbuckle your pistol belt and let it fall to the floor.”
Claudia stared hard at the man. Rage was a living thing inside her. She wanted to pull her pistols and start shooting. Maybe he’d drill her from five feet away, but maybe she wouldn’t die before she drilled him.
Maybe . . .
That wasn’t good enough. She’d do as he said for now and wait for a chance to kill the bastard.
She drew a heavy breath as she moved her hands to the buckle of her cartridge belt. She unbuckled it, untied the thongs from around her thighs, let the rig drop to the floor. She wondered if O’Brien had heard the thud on the wooden floor. She hoped not. She didn’t want him to come to her aid. The apron was no match for de Castillo. No one would die on her account.
At least, not anyone not currently in her room.
“Now take off your shirt,” de Castillo said.
Claudia’s shoulders tensed. Her guts slithered around like snakes in her belly. She told the bastard before her to do something impossible to himself. He laughed at that too loudly. She jerked a look at the door, hoping O’Brien didn’t come. If he thought something was wrong, he’d likely grab the Greener he kept under the bar and run upstairs. Him being a man, he’d feel he had to.
And he’d be killed for his trouble.
“I said,” de Castillo repeated, louder this time, with even more menace, “kindly remove your shirt, Marshal Morales.”
Claudia cleared the knot from her throat. “You’re right. He headed north.”
“Huh?”
“Sartain headed north.” Claudia slapped her thighs. “You’re right. He’d heard your reputation, and he didn’t want to tangle with you, Salva
dor. Congratulations. Now, why don’t you and your dog scurry on back to your cave?”
Coyon curled his upper lip at that.
“Make her do it. Make her take her shirt off!” The hunchback grunted.
“We’re past Sartain now, my lovely marshal.” De Castillo waved the gun in his hand. “Now the subject is your shirt. Remove it, please.”
“No.”
“I am not going to ask you again!”
Coyon laughed, excited. He laughed too loudly and stomped his heavy foot on the floor. Alarm bells tolled in Claudia’s ears. O’Brien had a wife, a daughter. He had a whore working for him. She was probably asleep just down the hall since she hadn’t been feeling well for weeks. Likely pregnant, though O’Brien hadn’t said. The town doctor came and went. Claudia didn’t want anyone else endangered here.
She began unbuttoning her shirt.
Chapter Seventeen
“Mother Mary from Nazareth—look at those,” said Salvador in a voice thick with awe as Claudia lifted her chemise over her head and tossed it to the floor with her guns.
Her hair spilled down her shoulders. The air through the open windows had cooled, and Claudia felt its effect. Salvador’s eyes were where she’d expected they’d be. So were Coyon’s. Claudia gazed at Salvador’s cocked gun, her heart thudding as she wondered how she could get her hands on it.
Just then, Salvador tapped his thumb on the cocked hammer of his walnut-butted Remington. Whistling softly, he dropped his legs to the floor, keeping his eyes on the law woman’s chest rising and falling behind the thin screen of her hair.
“Coyon, have you ever seen such a beautiful woman?”
Coyon seemed to have lost his voice. He only made a wet, guttural sound deep in his chest. His gun was slowly wilting, the barrel slanting toward the floor.
Claudia returned her eyes to Salvador’s gun, which he kept cocked and leveled at her belly as he rose from the bed and walked to her. He pressed the cold, round maw of the Remington against Claudia’s belly. He closed his left hand to her right breast. It was cold and prickly with calluses.
“Pig!” Claudia snarled and spat in his face.
Her saliva dripped down his cheek. Salvador didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he dipped a finger in it, touched the finger to his tongue. Then he wrapped that hand around the back of her neck and violently snapped her head toward his, closing his mouth over hers.
His mustaches raked her lips as he stuck his tongue in her mouth. It felt wet and leathery and tasted sharply of bacanora.
Claudia struggled against him, unable to breathe. She closed her left hand over his pistol and tried to snatch it from his grip while angling the barrel away from her.
Nothing doing. Her strength was no match for his. The ploy enraged him. Pulling the gun away from her, he stepped back and smacked her hard across the face with the back of his hand.
The blow turned her sideways. Claudia had to clutch at the edge of the dresser to keep from falling. The next thing she knew, he was grunting savagely as he grabbed her by one arm, twisted her around, causing the room to spin around her, and threw her onto the bed.
She bounced once and then he was on top of her, the gun he’d held on her now in its holster, and they were bouncing together. She tried to fight him, kick him, but her brains were scrambled from the vicious backhand. Behind him, standing at the end of the bed, Coyon was snickering behind his hand.
Salvador climbed up Claudia’s body, got her arms under his knees. Pain racked her.
She gritted her teeth and was about to call him a pig again, but she’d just started to scream the word when someone pounded on the door.
“What the hell’s going on in there?”
It was the saloon owner, O’Brien.
Claudia’s heart turned a somersault. She lifted her head and shouted, “Delbert, go away!”
The doorknob twisted. The door started to open. Coyon stood in front of it, pressing his back against it, laughing. Atop Claudia, Salvador slid his right Colt from its holster and thumbed the hammer back. He jerked his head sharply to one side and Coyon scrambled away from the door.
“No!” Claudia screamed.
Salvador twisted around to aim his Colt straight out from his shoulder at the door.
Pop! Pop! Pop!
The bullets chewed ragged holes in a nearly straight line across the door’s top panel. From the hall came a loud groan, then there was the thump of someone hitting the floor.
“Bastard!” Claudia screamed, lifting her head and shoulders from the bed and glaring her mindless rage at the grim-faced, mustached man straddling her, keeping her arms pinned to her sides.
Then the hand holding the gun flew down toward her head. As the back of his hand hammered her right cheekbone, she knew a brief, sharp pain and the brightness of fireworks behind her retinas before everything went black. When she woke, he was stretched out on top of her, lapping her with his rough, wet tongue.
She looked around. They’d tied her wrists and ankles to bedposts with strips torn from a sheet. Coyon was no longer in the room.
There was only Salvador, and he was sprawled naked on top of her. His clothes and boots and hat and gun belt lay on the floor to her left. He was a heavy, hot, hairy weight on top of her.
She looked at her right wrist—tied securely to the corresponding bedpost. She looked at her other wrist—tied to the opposite bedpost. She arched her back, funneled all of her strength into those two wrists, and, with a great, agonized, enraged wail, jerked her arms hard, trying to free herself.
To no avail.
All she did was cause the dull pain in her head to grow sharp and throb in both temples and ears. Salvador lifted his mustached lips from her right breast. He smiled wetly, his brown eyes rheumy from drink and lust.
“Are you hungry, Marshal Morales?” he asked her. “I’ve sent Coyon out for some of Doña Flores’s burritos. I thought we would have us a good time in private and then, when Coyon returns, fill our empty bellies. Our passion will probably make us very hungry, no?”
Again, Claudia spat in his face.
Salvador didn’t mind this time either.
He merely smiled in his seedy, dreamy way, and then he walked two fingers down her chest, through the valley between her breasts, and across her rising and falling belly.
He poked the tip of one finger into her belly button, chuckling as he gazed into her eyes.
Claudia arched her back and mewled like a leg-trapped mountain lion.
* * *
Sartain drew sharply back on Boss’s reins.
A half-moon was on the rise, limning this narrow, winding secondary street of Sonora Gate in sparkling pearl.
Sartain was about halfway through town, having come in from the west end, the Mexican side. Now, as he sat out front of a small adobe hut whose sashed windows were wanly lit and from whose stone chimney gray smoke curled skyward, he slid his right hand to the LeMat holstered on his thigh.
The door of the little café had just opened and a stooped figure was ambling out, spurs chinging loudly on the boardwalk fronting the place. The man closed the door and stepped into the street, breathing hard, as though he’d run a great distance.
He seemed to be limping, hunched low and to one side—an odd-looking figure in a frayed straw sombrero and striped serape. Two pistols on his hips flashed in the moonlight. He hadn’t seen Sartain sitting there in the shadows fronting the café, whose wooden shingle announced simply DOÑA FLORES, and he nearly smacked into Boss’s head. The horse whickered and tossed his head to one side while the odd-looking, thickly built, hunched figure stepped back with a startled grunt.
He lifted his head toward Sartain and lowered one hand from the bundle he was carrying against his chest to the handles of one of his pistols. Sartain already had the LeMat out. Aiming the big gun across his saddle pommel, he clicked the heavy hammer back.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
The thick little man’s eyes flashed in the moonligh
t as he shunted them toward the big popper aimed at his head. One eye seemed to wander, showing a lot of white. He took another, incredulous step back, muttered something in Spanish, and wrapped both hands around the bundle, which smelled like seasoned meat and beans.
The wafting aroma was making Sartain’s stomach bellow.
The strange little man brushed a wrist across his mouth, adjusted the sombrero on his head, swung around, and began walking down the street in the same direction Sartain was headed. He walked with a pronounced limp, dragging one boot and causing dust to plume in the moonlight.
When he was about twenty yards away, he glanced back at Sartain like a dog who’d been hazed out of a chicken coop and quickened his shuffling, ambling step.
Claudia had told Sartain about a hunchback.
What was his name?
Coyon?
Amidst his trials and tribulations and hard-won victory out at Hacienda de la Francesca, Sartain had forgotten about the don’s son, Salvador, who fancied himself a killer. But now the younger de Castillo’s name bounced around in the Cajun’s head as, his suspicions tolling like bells in his ears, he watched the hunchback dwindle into the distance, becoming a murky shadow as the man entered the intersection of this secondary street and the main one, which ran from north to south through the heart of Sonora Gate.
What was he doing over there?
And did his heading in that direction mean that his amigo, Salvador, was there, too?
Why would Salvador be over there? Sartain remembered Claudia telling him that she’d banned the younger de Castillo from town.
When the shadowy, pearlescent night had swallowed the hunchback, Sartain touched his moccasined heels to Boss’s flanks. The horse was tired. Sartain had traced a slow, circuitous route back to town, not wanting the don’s riders to follow him here and make trouble for Claudia. When he was sure none were on his backtrail, and after he’d rested up and tended his wounded arm, he’d headed on in.
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