The Cost of Dying

by Peter Brandvold

  Probably even a prison, the bounty hunter assumed, given the nature of men from all ages of history . . .

  Prophet’s party faced the old fort’s west side but they were far enough forward that Lou could see the long, wide, stone-paved ramp that rose at a slant from the ground level to the edge of a moat that ringed the bulwark.

  Over the moat, there’d likely been a stout drawbridge that could be raised and lowered against possible attackers by a rudimentary system of winches and pulleys. The bridge would have been pulled up to fill the large, rectangular, deeply recessed front doorway abutted by two guard turrets outfitted with loopholes for cannons.

  After all these years, however—centuries, rather—even the stoutest wooden door would have long since moldered to dust and splinters. What Prophet could see stretching between the moat and the bulwark’s front entrance now was likely a recently constructed wooden bridge, but he couldn’t tell for sure from this distance, squinting as he was against the sunlight reflecting off the Sea of Cortez.

  Baluarte Santiago faced the deep blue, rolling waters of the Mar de Cortés, which stretched away to a far, pale horizon on Prophet’s left. At this time of the day, the sea’s deep, roiling waters were cobalt blue overlaid with the golden chain mail of reflected sunlight.

  Baja Jack turned to smile at Lou and Colter sitting on their horses to his left. “Big old place, ain’t it? Ain’t nothin’ purty to look at, but I reckon it did its job back in the olden days.”

  Jack pointed his stubby left arm toward the Sea of Cortez’s sun-gilded waters stitched with the cream of rolling whitecaps. “Them stout walls protected the fort from the old buccaneer raiders from the sea—pirates, don’t ya know!”

  He laughed at the romance of those adventurous olden times, though Prophet would have bet that the men and maybe some women who’d resided inside the old bulwark hadn’t thought the times all that romantic and adventurous.

  Harrowing and dangerous maybe. But not romantic.

  Jack swung his stubby arm to indicate the stark desert mountains to the right of the old fort. “The walls on that side protected the fort from the Indios that haunted all them rocks inland, including the family of my dearly departed madre. The Indios didn’t take kindly to the Spanish invaders, especially when the Spanish forced the Indios into slave labor growing their food and building that fort and stampeding Catholicism down their throats for their trouble!”

  Jack laughed again and shook his head.

  He arched a brow in devilish delight at Lou and Colter, and said, “When the slaves died while building the fort, the Spanish added their bones to the mortar. You can see ’em when you get up close. In some places you can see where they added whole skulls and arm bones an’ hip bones an’ the like, not even botherin’ to grind ’em up. Oh, them was grisly times!” Jack howled.

  Prophet silently wondered how less grisly the times were at Baluarte Santiago now, with Ciaran Yeats having taken up residence . . .

  He kept his gaze on the massive bulwark spread across the otherwise stark crest of the next ridge and felt a chill rise from the small of his back and spread out across his shoulder blades. He and Colter were about to meet Ciaran Yeats. They had to find a way to kill the man and rescue Alejandra de la Paz.

  Back at Hacienda de la Paz, when he was under the spell of both the old don and the beguilingly lovely Señorita Marisol, the job hadn’t seemed nearly as hard as it did now. Back there, it had seemed romantic and adventurous.

  Now it rose before him, harrowing and dangerous.

  Now he sort of wished he were lying with the dusky-skinned, chocolate-eyed señoritas of Sayulita . . .

  “Come on, gents,” said Baja Jack, dropping his boot back into its stirrup custom-built for a child-sized leg, and nudging his horse on down the trail. “It ain’t gettin’ any earlier in the day, and my throat sure ain’t gettin’ any wetter just sittin’ here!”

  He laughed.

  Prophet looked at Colter, sitting to his right. The redhead was staring across the canyon and up the next ridge at Baluarte Santiago, the lair of Ciaran Yeats. He was surprised to see apprehension furling the young man’s brows. He hadn’t thought Colter Farrow was afraid of anything, much less his own demise. Lou had figured he was like Louisa in that way.

  But, no—the kid appeared to be having second thoughts. Or if not second thoughts, at least he wasn’t as much in a hurry for romance and adventure as he’d been that morning when he’d laughed in the face of all that could go wrong at the end of the trail.

  Colter must have sensed Prophet’s stare. He jerked his head toward the bounty hunter. He frowned, suddenly peevish. He brushed his rein ends against his coyote dun’s left hip. “You heard the man, Lou,” he grumbled, setting out down the ridge and into the dust kicked up by Baja Jack’s mount. “Our throats ain’t gettin’ any wetter, sittin’ here.”

  Prophet hoped that it wasn’t a dark omen that a diamondback rattler, with a body nearly as thick as his wrist, seemed to take umbrage at Mean and Ugly and came slithering out from a patch of shade along the trail. Its diamond-shaped head was up and its eyes were flat and rife with unthinking, savage purpose. It shot as though fired out of a snake-firing cannon toward Mean’s right front hock.

  Old Pepe, riding on his broad-barreled donkey directly behind Prophet, saw the snake at the same time Lou did, and yelled, “Hy-yiy-yiy-yiy-yiyy!”

  Mean swerved away from the snake, and sunfished a good four feet in the air. Prophet’s heart leaped into his throat. Holding Mean’s reins with one hand, he swiped his .45 from its holster, cocked it, and, seeing the snake coiled up on the right side of the trail, button tail raised, ready to strike again, Lou took quick aim.

  His Peacemaker bucked six times, roaring. By the time the sixth bullet had plowed through the snake, there wasn’t much meat left, the other five big rounds having hit pay dirt, as well.

  What was left of the snake, which wasn’t much—it looked like a chunk of raw beef chopped up for the stewpot—lay writhing in the sand and rocks along the trail.

  Prophet got Mean settled down, leaning forward and patting the horse with his left hand. Mean regarded the snake askance, withers quivering, the big heart still pumping quickly. Horses hated sidewinders as much as wildcats. Lou didn’t blame them a bit.

  There was a silence for a time as Prophet’s gun smoke thinned and the echoes of his blasts rolled away to silence. Then the others, including Baja Jack and Colter, gathered in a ragged circle around Lou to stare down at the dead viper.

  Jack and his men, including old Pepe, looked from Lou to the snake and then back at Lou, their lower jaws hanging. Lou’s eyes were probably still a little glassy. Baja Jack grinned. He slapped his thigh and started laughing as though at the funniest joke he’d ever heard, and not three seconds later the others were joining in.

  Their hysterical guffaws vaulted toward the heavens, echoing.

  Prophet looked at them and then at Colter. The redhead looked back at him, and then he started laughing, too. Prophet didn’t know what in the hell they were laughing about—hadn’t they ever seen a dead snake before?—but in no time he was laughing, too.

  As though at the funniest joke he’d ever heard.

  Chapter 33

  Prophet followed Baja Jack and Colter down the ridge toward the canyon choked with wiry brush, cactus, and boulders.

  The trail switchbacked gradually. At the bottom of the canyon, it snaked off to the right before crossing the canyon at the only place the debris would allow. At the other side of the canyon, the trail meandered back along the base of the ridge before climbing the ridge at a steep, forty-five-degree angle.

  Mean and the other horses were blowing hard in the hot sun, their coats lathered, by the time they trudged to the top of the ridge upon which the impressive masonry project of Baluarte Santiago sat like the mountain’s capstone. The regal old ruin sat facing the sea, its back to the savage-teeming wilds of Baja, silently sending out its challenges in both directions.
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  As Lou looked at it now, head tipped back to peer up at the grand old battlement, it looked as abandoned as it likely had been before Ciaran Yeats had moved in. The fort shone with the cracks, dimples, gouges, and discolorations of time. Having weathered the ages not without cost, the guardian of San Luis Point was silhouetted darkly and formidably against the glowing orange sun plunging toward the far western crags.

  Now Prophet saw several men with rifles standing atop the stout, high walls. They were dwarfed by the sprawling masonry structure looming behind them, inside the walls.

  One of the pickets stood near the wall’s right-front corner, near the snub-peaked defensive turret. The other stood to the left of the large open doorway. Both men were facing the newcomers. The one on the right stood resting a rifle on his shoulder, a cigarro dangling from between his lips as he stood studying the newcomers, head tipped curiously to one side.

  “Holy cow—don’t recollect ever seein’ such a pretty sight,” Colter said.

  Lou turned toward the redhead, who’d swung his horse to study the ocean lapping against a white sand beach to the east. Near shore the water was more aquamarine colored than the cobalt farther out, the low waves rolling onto the shore, laced in the white of a sparkling froth. Seagulls wheeled, shrieking.

  Between the ocean and the bluff the fortification stood on, a village sprawled amongst the rocks and clean white sand—a humble but relatively prosperous-looking village of stone and adobe huts and mud jacales and establos roofed with grass or red tiles. Palm trees and organ-pipe cactus jutted among the pale structures, which appeared to stretch for at least a mile in both directions along the meandering shoreline.

  Here and there stout, dark-skinned, colorfully clad women, some wearing straw sombreros, toiled in the surf, cleaning fish that had likely been hauled in from the wooden, single-masted boats that pitched at anchor out where the aquamarine water turned to cobalt. Nearly at day’s end now, the boats were darkening, their masts gilded with the angling rays of the sun.

  A gun barked behind Prophet and Colter.

  Both men wheeled, closing their hands over their own holstered sidearms, to stare toward the bulwark. Baja Jack and Jack’s men were all staring in that direction, as well, most also with their hands on their guns. Several of the horses sidestepped, jittery. One of the burros brayed, weary from the long ride and wary now, as well.

  The gun barked again. Again. Again.

  A man screamed.

  Another laughed loudly.

  Prophet turned to Baja Jack. “What the hell’s that all about?”

  Jack grinned edgily and lifted his shoulders in a tight shrug. “Who knows? It is Baluarte Santiago.”

  The laughter rose again, even more loudly than before.

  It was followed by another thundering report of what sounded like a .45 revolver.

  A girl screamed shrilly.

  “Jesus Christ!” Prophet said, scowling at the broad, vaguely rectangular opening in the wall at the far end of the stone ramp.

  Lou poked his spurs into Mean’s flanks. The horse leaped onto the ramp and moved up the incline at nearly a full gallop, its shod hooves clacking on the stones.

  “Lou!” Jack cried. “Wait, pendejo!”

  The little man’s admonition was nearly drowned by yet another rocketing pistol report as well as by Mean’s clacking hooves. The horse thundered across the wooden bridge that spanned the wide, dry moat ringing the bastion and hurled itself and rider through the broad open gate in the thick masonry wall.

  More clacking and thunder rose behind Lou. He glanced briefly behind him to see Colter and Northwest hot on Mean’s hocks.

  “Hey, hey, hey!” yelled one of the guards on the wall above Prophet.

  A rifle belched. A bullet plumed dirt in the bastion’s graveled earthen yard several feet ahead of Prophet.

  Lou drew back tightly on the dun’s reins and stared to his left. A man lay belly down in the gravel roughly fifty yards away from him. A girl lay in the yard between the prone man and the hulking, multistoried, castlelike structure of Baluarte Santiago rising straight out away from Prophet.

  Two men stood on a balcony of that great, sprawling structure. One of the men was leaning forward, crossing his arms on the balcony rail. The other—a big, red-haired, red-bearded man in jodhpurs and a red sash pulled taut over his bulging belly—was holding two big silver-chased Russian revolvers.

  The fat, red-haired man was aiming one of the Russians over the balcony rail toward the girl. The gun bucked, flames lapping from its barrel. The bullet tore into the ground near the girl, who screamed and glanced back in horror over her exposed brown shoulder at the shooter.

  “Get up, you disgusting puta,” bellowed the Russian-wielding fat man on the balcony. “Run for your life. Go ahead—make a play for it, or I’ll shoot you right where you lay! Drill ya a third eye in the back of your traitorous head!”

  The dark-haired man beside him, dressed all in black, threw his head back and roared.

  The girl on the ground pleaded for her life in anguished Spanish. A young girl. Prophet didn’t think she was much over thirteen. She wore a short red dress with green and gold embroidering, and that was all. One of the dress’s thin straps hung down her thin, brown arm.

  “Hold on!” Prophet shouted then booted Mean and Ugly into a gallop once more.

  “Dangit, Lou!” Colter protested behind him.

  Ignoring his trail partner, Prophet and the line-back dun dashed toward the Mexican girl in the skimpy red dress.

  “Hold your fire, you son of a buck!” Prophet bellowed, checking Mean down abruptly then leaping out of his saddle.

  He took two running strides and then dropped to a knee beside the sobbing girl, stretching one arm around her slender shoulders while placing his right hand over his still-holstered Peacemaker’s grips.

  A Gatling gun rattled above and behind him. Reacting more than thinking, Lou ripped the Peacemaker from its holster, wheeled, and saw a man crouched over a mosquito-shaped brass gun on the wall near the open gate. The man had centered the machine gun’s maw on Prophet’s chest, the gun’s swivel squawking. He’d just started to turn the Gatling’s crank when Prophet drew a bead on him and fired.

  The man jerked backward, firing the Gatling gun into the dirt several feet to Prophet’s left, the hiccupping reports echoing shrilly. The gunner slumped forward, cursing in Spanish, then slid forward down the brass canister and over the wall. He screamed as he stretched out in the air, spreading his arms and legs like wings before hitting the ground at the base of the wall with a loud grunt and a crunching thud.

  Prophet spied movement in the corner of his right eye. He turned his head quickly to see another man run toward him, extending a rifle.

  Prophet punched a bullet through the red necktie adorning the man’s chest, between the flaps of a hand-tooled deerskin vest.

  The man dropped to his knees in the gravel before falling and rolling. He lay on his back writhing briefly and groaning through gritted teeth before he fell silent and still in death. His bloody necktie lay slack against his chest.

  Around Prophet rose the metallic rasps of rifles being cocked. Men were cursing in both English and Spanish. A cold stone dropped in Lou’s belly when he realized that he was nearly surrounded by heavily armed men and they were all moving toward him fast.

  “Lou!” Colter grunted out somewhere behind him.

  He knew what the kid was thinking. Now he’d done it. This time, he’d really done it. Scratch, get a fresh shovel ready . . .

  Then a man’s voice shouted commandingly, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire, lads! Everyone, hold your fire and just take it easy one bloody minute!”

  Prophet stretched his gaze toward the two men standing on the second-floor balcony. The balcony hadn’t been part of the original fortification. It had been improvised with steel frames and wooden planks. The fat, red-haired, red-bearded man stared over the long barrel of his Russian revolver at Prophet. He was drawing a
bead on Lou’s forehead. Lou could feel that bead tickling him just above the bridge of his nose.

  The sweat on his back turned cold.

  The black-haired man standing beside the red-haired man also held two pistols, normal-sized. He held them down low by his legs clad in black whipcord, outside of the black fustian he wore. He stood scowling over the balcony rail at the disruptor.

  Lou lowered his gaze from the massive main building of the bulwark of Santiago, to the men surrounding him. They were dirty and bearded and they were Mexicans and Yanquis and several other races. They smelled bad and they looked even worse, with angry eyes cast with a feral sort of amusement. They edged closer and closer around Lou and Colter Farrow, who had swung down from his horse and now stood holding his reins, looking around as Prophet was.

  “Big man,” yelled the fat redheaded gent, who was also bespectacled, Prophet now saw, the lenses of the man’s small, round glasses glinting in the afternoon’s softening light, “who in the bloody hell are you and just who in the bloody hell do you think you are, ridin’ in here, all blood ’n’ thunder, like some bloody knight in shinin’ armor gallopin’ in to save that there damsel in distress? Gallopin’ in on the ugliest horse I believe I’ve ever laid my eyes on, I might add . . .”

  Mild laughter issued from the men around Prophet in response to the slight against Mean and Ugly.

  He’d spoken with an Irish accent.

  That had to be Yeats himself.

  Hoof thuds sounded from the direction of the bulwark’s open gate.

  “More comin’, Major!” a man shouted from the wall. “It’s Jack an’ his asses!” he added with a chuckle.

  Lou and everyone else swung their gazes toward where Baja Jack was leading Pepe and the burros and his dozen guards over the wooden bridge, through the main gate, and into the bulwark’s yard. Jack held his trigueño to a slow, leisurely pace while holding both his hands in the air, palms out in supplication.