The Cost of Dying

by Peter Brandvold

  The little man threw out a stubby little arm to indicate the terrain around them—a vast array of rocky hills threaded with chalky dry arroyos rolling off toward slab-sided bluffs and high mesas partly obscured by the desert’s heat shimmer and scored with deep ravines. Cirio trees peppered the landscape—tall, spindly, ocotillo-like growths that stretched their thorny stubs up to sixty feet above the ground. They were the area’s most noticeable feature.

  The rest of the flora was all small, twisted cactus and brittle tufts of saltbush. The only shade was that offered by the widely spaced hillsides and mesas, unless you counted the fingerlike shadows the cirio trees spread out across the sun-bleached rocks and sand, which was hardly enough to offer temporary relief to an overheated Gambel’s quail.

  The only living things beast-wise that Prophet had seen were a mangy-looking coyote, several rattlesnakes, a roadrunner, and the occasional zopilote—Mexican buzzards—swirling high on desert thermals, ever on the watch for carrion.

  Prophet glanced at his new trail guide skeptically. “I reckon beauty’s in the eyes of the beholder, Baja Jack.”

  “Sí, sí,” Jack said. “It is true. I reckon I’m partial to these sunburned hills because I spent so much time running around in them, chasing my dear old man for the first several years of my life. What a beautiful damn time that was for me. My halcyon days. Hell, I was barely out of rubber pants before Pa started taking me into the desert on gold-digging expeditions. Me and my ma, a beautiful woman.” He flung out a stubby arm, this time pointing east. “See all that white over there?”

  Prophet cast his glance in the direction the little man indicated. A gauzy white, like steam clouds, appeared far off over a stretch of pale, craggy mountains.

  “That’s the Sea of Cortez,” Prophet said.

  “You got it, amigo.” Jack grinned at him knowingly. “You’ve visited Mar de Cortés before—eh, Lou?”

  Prophet grinned back at the man. “You got it, amigo.”

  “Some of the most beautiful women anywhere in Mexico, perhaps in the entire world, reside along those storied waters. Mi madre hailed from there.”

  “I’ll vouch for that,” Prophet said. “Er . . . I mean that the most beautiful women live along the Sea of Cortez. I didn’t know your mother.”

  Jack laughed. “While this is a sacred land—at least to me with all the memories I bring to it—keep your eyes skinned, my friends. It’s a ticklish country when it comes to maintaining a firm grasp of your ghost.” He arched an ominous brow at Lou and Colter riding beside him as they crossed one of the many dry ravines and began climbing the shoulder of yet another rocky butte. “Banditos are as plentiful as sidewinders out here. Especially now that it has gotten around that I am supplying Ciaran Yeats and his men at Baluarte Santiago with their precious elixir.”

  “Are they after the elixir?” Lou asked. “Or the money you’re paid for it?”

  “Both. Many of them are addicted to the stuff. The campesinos around Guerrero Negro grow a lot of it—inferior crap. Tastes like dried lizard dung. It’s popular in this part of the peninsula where life offers so few other pleasures besides the obvious mattress dance now and then. But even the whores out here are fat! After it got around that my spice is favored by the mad old major, who knows the stuff better than almost anyone, they all wanted mine. Barring the weed itself, they’ll settle for what I get paid for it.

  “That’s why I got all these gun-handy gents riding for me and a whole lot more guarding the granja where I grow my superior crops, though so far I’ve managed to keep the farm a secret, thank the bloody saints in heaven. I don’t know what in hell I’m gonna do once the cat get outs of that bag . . . and it will eventually. Oh, it will. Nothing’s a secret for long in Baja!”

  Jack spat and shook his head in disgust. “Damn hard tryin’ to make a living these days, in these more complicated modern times.”

  “I haven’t seen any signs of trouble so far,” Colter said, riding between Prophet and Baja Jack. The old man, Pepe, led the burros just behind Lou, Colter, and Baja Jack. “And you can see for a long ways out here.”

  “It looks like you can see a long way, Red,” Jack warned. “But I guarantee you there’s two or three groups of bean-eatin’ vermin watching us right now, even as we sit here and chin like old-timers on a loafer’s bench on the public square in Bahía de los Ángeles.”

  “I guess we’d best shut up, then,” Prophet said, squinting against the glare as he looked around, draping one hand over his Peacemaker’s grips.

  Jack spat again, this time in disgust with himself. “Ah hell, I can’t keep these old lips of mine sewn for long. Not even when my life depends on it. It’s too damn seldom I see anyone new down here, anyone who can hold a conversation, that is.”

  Jack leaned out from his saddle to speak covertly to Prophet. He jerked his head to indicate the Mexican and Anglo pistoleros riding behind the old man on the donkey leading the burros. “Those hombres are right handy with their six-shooters and carbines, but I swear even the americanos are so damn stupid they can’t find their asses with both hands. Not only that, but their vocabularies in both languages amount to little more than yeps, nopes, pulque, and whiskey and whore and puta!”

  Jack slapped Prophet’s shoulder and wheezed out a violent cry of unbridled laughter.

  Prophet laughed, too. Jack was a cutup, he purely was. One of the most colorful characters Lou had ever run into even in Mexico. And he’d run into a few characters down here as elsewhere. He would soon run into at least one more:

  Ciaran Yeats.

  The notion had him more than a little on edge even though Yeats was whom Lou and his redheaded trail partner were looking for. But Yeats was a formidable man surrounded by formidable men. And Prophet and Colter had promised Don de la Paz they’d kill him.

  Lou vaguely wondered if Baja Jack sensed Prophet’s unease when the little man asked, “Forgive me, Lou, but I interrupted you back at the camp. You were about to tell me who you’d drifted down here to find. You remember—when I was distracted by my burros . . . ? I gather it is a badman wanted up north, since you are a bounty hunter.”

  Jack turned another knowing grin on Prophet.

  Lou stared at him in surprise.

  “Oh hell, of course I know who you are!” Jack laughed. “Why, hell, you’re right famous up north of the border and even down here in Old Mexico!”

  “Damn,” Prophet said, casting an uneasy glance toward Colter. “I didn’t know I was that famous. I thought down here at least I could ride with a little amon . . . amonym . . . somethin’ or other.”

  “Anonymity,” Colter helped out.

  “Amonyitymite, thank you.”

  “Glad to help.”

  “Yessir,” Jack said. “Tales of your exploits . . . yours an’ that purty blond girl . . .”

  “The Vengeance Queen,” Prophet said.

  “That’s the one! Tales of you two’s exploits have even reached my old, hair-tufted ears. What I wanna know is how much is true an’ how much is gildin’ the lily.”

  “You’ll never find out from my lyin’ mouth,” Prophet said with a grin, hoping that Baja Jack had lost his train of thought.

  But he hadn’t, galldangit.

  “So who you down here lookin’ to haul back across the border tied belly down across his hoss?” Jack gave him a boyish smile of delight in secret things. “You can tell me. I wouldn’t tell a soul. Hell, who in the hell would I have to tell it to, anyways?”

  He snarled over his shoulder at his hammerheaded pack of marijuana guards.

  “Oh, that.” Prophet’s ears warmed though he didn’t think anything could make them much warmer than they already were in this unrelenting heat and sunlight. “Uh, well . . . the kid an’ I are lookin’ for—”

  “Ciaran Yeats,” Colter said.

  The name was a sucker punch to Prophet’s solar plexus. He whipped his head to scowl in astonishment at the kid riding between him and Jack. Jack cast the redhead that
very same look while one blazing eye crossed nearly to his nose. The other eye was a shimmering coal directed right at him.

  Colter looked at Prophet and grinned from ear to ear. He turned to Jack with the same grin.

  Jack slapped his thigh so hard he startled his horse, and peeled out another roar of croaking laughter. “Hahhhh! Hahh-hahh-HAHHHHH!” He slapped his leg again. “You had me goin’, Red, you purely did! Ciaran Yeats! My fat hairy ass, you’re down here after Ciaran Yeats! Hahhh! Yeats has a whole army gunnin’ for him, and they’re all mean as rabid wolves, since they’re all addicted to the elixir, same as Yeats himself. They wouldn’t let nothin’ happen to the mad old major. Nothin’. Hahhh!”

  Again, Jack slapped his thigh. “You had me goin’ there for a minute, Red. You purely did! Damn near gave me a heart stroke!”

  “Yeah,” Prophet said, glaring at Colter. “Me, too.”

  Colter looked at him and shrugged with his customary, Louisa-like insouciance.

  One of those two—this kid or the Vengeance Queen—would be the death of him yet.

  “Yep,” Jack said, still chuckling and wagging his head. “You really had me goin’, Red.”

  * * *

  They stopped for water at a springs where Prophet never would have thought there could be a springs. Jack wasn’t whistling “Dixie.” He really did know this country.

  To reach the springs, the party had to leave the faint trail they were following, an old trading trail threading the peninsula from the Sea of Cortez to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west, and travel a good mile down into a boulder-strewn canyon to reach the water. The springs bubbled up out of rocks littering the side of a tall, slanting mesa. There were rocks all over this hidden place—so many that Prophet doubted that few other than some natives of the area, Baja Jack, and his “dear old pa” had ever known about it.

  That natives had known about it there was no doubt, for there were colorful rock paintings all over—bright depictions of oddly shaped men hunting oddly shaped animals, some of which looked like deer but with very large, curled horns. Some of those men and animals drank at pools—likely the springs itself.

  The paintings gave Prophet, always superstitious, an odd, haunted feeling.

  Since the party was on the east side of the mesa, and the sun was angling on toward three in the afternoon, the party was in cool, refreshing shade. While the men let their horses drink from a natural trough that ran down through the sand and rocks, forming an old creek bed carved through ancient lava, and sipped the cool water themselves, Prophet wandered off to tend to nature.

  He stopped to unbutton his pants but stayed the motion when he heard something to his right. He lowered his right shoulder, sliding the Richards down off that arm and dropping it smoothly into his hands. As he did, he turned to his right.

  A man had been moving stealthily toward him, shoulder brushing a wall of rock, a bowie knife in one hand, a bone-gripped revolver in the other. He wore a big straw sombrero and ragged cotton tunic. Black mustaches hung down both sides of his mouth.

  His eyes widening, he lunged toward Prophet, who’d brought the Richards around and now tripped the right trigger. The shotgun roared, the double-ought buck turning the assailant’s belly into a bloody mess as it threw the man straight backward and down a gravelly hill.

  Another man lunged toward Prophet, this one to the left of the first man. He’d been brushing his shoulder against another wall of rock. The Richards thundered once more and sent the second assailant the way of the first with an ear-rattling, agonized shriek.

  “Trouble, amigos!” Prophet bellowed though he realized the others in his party might have figured that out now after having heard the cannonlike roar of the twelve-gauge.

  His instincts told him to wheel a one-eighty and he was glad he did.

  Another bandito was rushing toward him between two boulders, extending a Colt straight out from his right shoulder. Prophet threw himself forward as the man triggered the Colt. Lou hit the ground on his belly. Since the Richards was empty, he flipped it around, grabbing the barrel, and made a slashing motion from left to right, clubbing this third assailant’s legs out from beneath him.

  As he heard yells and shooting from the direction of the others in his party, and the whoops and yells of who he assumed were more banditos storming down out of the rocks surrounding the springs, he rose to his knees. The third assailant had fallen hard on his face but he was pushing up onto his hands and knees, stretching his lips back from his teeth.

  His sombrero hung down his back. His chin was bloody from where it had smashed against the rocky ground. As he lifted his oval-shaped, bearded face toward Prophet, clawing around for the old-model Remington revolver he’d dropped when he’d fallen, Lou slammed the butt of the Richards against the man’s lower left cheek. The man’s lower jaw made an ominous cracking sound and fell to one side.

  The man gave a garbled wail.

  Prophet silenced the wail with another savage assault with the Richards’s stock, bashing in the Mexican’s left temple. The man’s head dropped to the ground, and he lay rigid, quivering as he died.

  Lou wheeled to see another figure barreling toward him, this one aiming two .45s straight at him and grinning the devil’s own grin of bloody murder.

  Chapter 28

  Prophet threw himself back behind a boulder as his fourth assailant’s .45s roared. The bullet curled the air a cat’s whisker off the end of Prophet’s nose and then slammed into the boulder just as Prophet pulled his face back behind it.

  Lou flipped himself around and into a better position to confront his attacker. He shucked his Peacemaker from its holster, clicking back the hammer.

  His fourth assailant, a short old man with a red face and a white beard parted in the middle, continued hammering the rock with his .45s and then lunged into Prophet’s field of vision, barking Spanish epithets and narrowing his brown eyes as he aimed down his Colt’s barrels at Lou.

  He didn’t get off another shot as, hunkered on his heels, Prophet triggered two shots and then a third, sending the old peon in a ratty red serape flying back against another boulder. He shot himself in the knee, gave another shrill, howling wail as he stared at his ruined leg, then dropped to both his knees before falling sideways onto a shoulder where he expired with a heavy sigh.

  The thunder of another near gun assaulted Prophet’s ears, momentarily disorienting him.

  Where in the hell had that one come from?

  Then a shadow—a slender gray flicker of movement within the shadows here on this side of the mesa—slid across the ground to his left. He wheeled as another blast assaulted his ears. That bullet, too, came very close to punching his ticket and would have done so if he hadn’t turned at that very instant.

  He looked up to see a big, broad-shouldered man in dirty cream pantalones, high-topped deerskin moccasins, and a beaded deerskin serape standing on the boulder above him and extending an ivory-gripped Schofield at Prophet’s head. Lou swung his Peacemaker up and fired twice, fouling the big man’s aim as the bullet smashed into the man’s left shoulder.

  The man screamed as he fired a bullet into the ground just left of Prophet’s left boot.

  Lou fired another round, aiming for this would-be killer’s heart. The man had jerked sideways just in time to avoid a deadly bout of indigestion, instead taking the bullet in his upper-right chest. He screamed angrily, his broad, ugly, mustached face crumpling and reddening. He dropped the Schofield then stepped off the edge of the rock.

  Prophet’s heart hiccupped when he saw the big man hurling toward him, swinging his arms out and looking every bit like black, winged death.

  Lou clicked back the Peacemaker’s hammer but did not get off another shot before the big Mex smashed into him like a half ton of dry goods thrown from a freight wagon, slamming Lou backward off his heels and driving him to the ground while closing his big hands around Lou’s neck.

  Lou tried to smash the Peacemaker against his attacker’s b
ig, granitelike head matted with black hair peppered with lice and other vermin. But then he realized his right hand was empty. He’d lost the revolver when the man had smashed into him from above.

  His knuckles merely glanced off the big man’s left temple as the big man himself rose onto his knees and, snarling like an enraged puma, dug his thumbs into Prophet’s throat, intent on busting his windpipe and smashing his Adam’s apple back against his spine, a task which it felt to Lou he was accomplishing, despite the blood the man was losing.

  In desperation, Prophet slashed up with his arms, ramming the man’s hands free of his neck. He smashed his right fist against the big man’s left jaw and then they were snarling and rolling together—over and over to the left . . . over and over to the right . . . exchanging grips on each other’s necks and growling like two raging wolves in a struggle to end all struggles.

  They broke their grips on each other’s necks to exchange punches—savage, smashing blows. Prophet could feel the man’s assault all the way down to his toes.

  Then they went rolling and rolling again to the right . . . rolling and rolling again to the left, smashing each other with their fists, digging at each other’s eyes, trying to get the other’s neck in a death grip.

  The Mexican brute grabbed Prophet’s head up off the ground in both his massive hands and smashed Lou’s head back against the ground so hard that for a second or two the bounty hunter lost consciousness. When he was aware again of who and where he was and of what was happening, the big Mexican was again trying to strangle him.

  Prophet felt his eyes bulge. His head swelled from lack of oxygen. He’d grabbed the man’s big arms, even bigger than his own, but the Mexican brute had the high ground and a better angle. Prophet was addled from the savage blows to his head. He couldn’t get his opponent to release his choking, death-dealing grip.

  The big Mex grinned maniacally down at Prophet, his green-brown eyes glinting devilishly. His broad, Indian-dark face was so badly pocked and pitted, it looked like he’d been mistaken for a coyote and taken two loads of buckshot point-blank. He smelled like something dead that had seasoned too long in the hot sun. Vaguely, Prophet wondered what was going to kill him first—the man’s thumbs grinding into his throat, or his smell.