Lawman from Nogales (9781101544747) (27 page)

 

When Hector had arrived at the abandoned adobe that once was his home, the first thing he'd done was water the horse and himself. Then he'd forced himself forward, led the tired animal inside the hovel and into the back room that served as a stall. He'd lifted the money sacks from the horse's back and dragged them to what used to be his and his wife's bedroom.

There he'd laid the sacks of money on the dirt floor and gathered loose straw and a ragged blanket that had been thrashed about and shredded by playing coyote pups. When he'd finished making a pallet of money, straw and blanket, he'd crawled atop it and lain on his back, hoping his pain would subside with sleep. But it did not.

It was dark when the pain forced him awake. As he sat up stiffly on the pallet, he saw red eyes flash in the darkness across the dark empty room.

“Get out you . . . son of
a bitch
,” he growled in pain, grabbing a handful of straw—the nearest thing he could find to throw at the prowler. He heard paws race away through the empty house and out the rear door.

Hector dragged himself up to the open window, where he stood in the pale moonlight for a moment, as if to deliver himself from the greater darkness and remind himself he was still alive. Noting a lump in his trouser pocket, he reached in and found the folded-over, nearly empty leather bag of cocaine powder that Sidel Tereze—or one of the other doves, he thought hazily—had left on the small table in Three-Hand Defoe's living quarters.

No,
his
living quarters, he corrected himself. Or, it had been his living quarters, before the Gun Killers arrived, wanting what he had so foolishly thought belonged to him.

He turned the leather bag in his hand and shook his head slowly. Would things have been different had he kept his head clear and his wits about him? He had to think about that for a moment. He could not blame the tequila and ground cocaine powder for the loss of his wife and son. He had lost them well before he'd started drinking and using the powder.

He unwrapped the leather bag as he thought about it. He shook out a small mound of the powder onto his palm and looked at it, seeing it silvery blue in the slanted moonlight. Pain throbbed behind his swollen eyes, inside his raw, puffy lips.

After a moment, he let out a breath, closed the leather bag one-handed, folded it over and shoved it back down into his trouser pocket.

Here goes
, he told himself. Lifting his palm to his mouth, he took the mound of powder onto his tongue and swallowed it. He licked his bruised and battered lips, and in seconds noted the pain had left them.

 

Outside, across the roll of the desert floor, Sam had been lying at rest, his head on his forearm. But he perked up when he saw the faint glow of a candle move through the hovel and stop inside the window.

Didn't the Mexican realize that a light, even one this faint, could be seen a long way across these rolling flatlands?

Yes
, Sam decided,
of course he realized it. That's why he lit it.

Raising the scope back to his eye, Sam studied the window, seeing the shadowy silhouette of the Mexican move about inside.

Getting around pretty good,
Sam noted,
for a man as battered as he'd appeared to be earlier.

 

In the distance, along the rolling trail, Erin saw the dim candlelight as soon as it reached out from the window into the dark night.

Was it Hector? she wondered, riding with the big Starr out across her lap in quick reach. The wolves had taught her a terrible lesson about traveling in the dark in this wild, brutal land.

Yes, it must be
, she thought. It was about where he'd said his house would be, two miles west of Rosas Salvajes. Anyway, that's where she was headed, she told herself. She looked back along the trail behind her. Then, in spite of the darkness, she booted the horse forward, up into a gallop on the sandy trail.

Nearly an hour had passed by the time she reached the house. She had already slowed the horse back to a walk as she turned onto the narrow path leading to the front door. But before she made it all the way to the house, Hector called out to her from within the darkness.

“Is that you, Irish
señorita
?” he asked, his voice sounding stronger.

“Yes, Hect—Pancho,” she said, catching herself. “It's me, Erin Donovan. I'm alone. Don't shoot.”

After a second, Hector stepped out of the darkness, holding a broken ax handle in his hand.

“Don't worry. I have no gun,” he said. He eyed a rifle butt sticking up from a saddle boot. It was a rifle Paco Stern had given her in case they ran into more
rurales
on the trail.

Erin stopped her horse and slipped down its side. She made no offer of the rifle to him.

“You sound a lot better than you did earlier,” she said, leading the horse toward the house twenty yards away. “Where's the money?”

“It is safe inside,” Hector said, walking along beside her. He seemed tense but well, walking straight, with almost a little bounce in his step.

“What has gotten into you, Pancho?” she asked.

“Cocaína!”
Hector replied readily, his swollen lips even allowing him to speak better in spite of their rawness.

“Careful with that stuff,” Erin warned him.

“
Sí
, I will be careful,” Hector said.

Erin followed him into the house, leading her horse to the room where Hector had stalled his.

“I knew you would come here for the money,” Hector said as she closed the door and turned to face him.

“And you were right.” Erin smiled. “Now may I see it?”

“
Sí
, this way,” Hector said. He walked into the bedroom and gestured toward the pallet on the floor.

“Oh, so this is how it is,” Erin said knowingly, eyeing the makeshift bed in the light of a short candle.

“No, no,” Hector said quickly. “I am showing you the money. It is there, in the pallet.”

“Oh, I see,” Erin said, relieved. She shook her head, embarrassed. “You must excuse me, Pancho. I'm not used to men being such gentlemen as you.”

Hector understood, but he only nodded, walked over to the window and picked up the short candle from the sill. “Now that you are here, if you will permit me, I will put out the light, lest we draw trouble for ourselves.”

 

From his spot in the dirt, Sam watched Hector appear in the window and blow out the candle. But before the young Mexican extinguished the flame, Sam caught sight of the woman's shadowy silhouette in the room behind him. She held a big revolver out at arm's length, aimed toward the back of Hector's head.

Chapter 28

Staring out the window, Hector had been speaking and did not hear the sound of the big Starr revolver cock six feet from his head. Or, if he had heard it, he simply had not recognized the sound, Erin told herself, the gun leveled and ready to fire.

“You trusted me to bring your part of the money to you,” Hector said to her as he stared out into the purple, Mexican night. “It was a trust I could not betray, short of death.”

“Yes, and you trusted me to get you out of Rosas Salvajes alive,” Erin said, sighting down the long gun barrel. “So our trust of each other was well founded. Now we are evened up.”

“
Sí
, now we are even,” said Hector, feeling the cocaine boiling in his system, making him feel strong, bold, invincible, his pain gone for the time being. “Now you can take your part and go,” he said. “I will hide my part until I have ridden back to town to claim what is mine.”

“You're going back to Rosa Salvajes?” questioned Erin. “To run the cantina?”

“Yes, until I find someone else to take it over,” said Hector. “It belongs to me now. I will not give it up.”

Gripping the gun tightly, Erin shook her head.

“You are a bold, brave and honorable man, Pancho,” she said with regret in her voice. A tear formed in her eye. She sighed. “If only you weren't so crazy, you wonderful squirrel.”

She clenched her teeth and pulled the trigger.

“
Crazy?
Am I so crazy,” he said, staring straight ahead into the night with no idea what had just happened behind him, “to want what every man wants for himself, a place on this earth that he can call his own? A home, a good woman, a family? A way to work and feed and shelter his family, to be able to hold his head up as a man and stand before the world unashamed?”

Erin stared at the big revolver wide-eyed, stunned that it had misfired. She shook it and looked at it again, as if shaking it might be all it needed. She started to cock the gun, raise it and try again, but Hector turned around facing her in the darkness before she could do so. He continued talking with no letup, feeling the affects of the cocaine forcing him to say things he might otherwise never say.

“No,” she said, “that's not
crazy
at all.”

“When I have taken back what is mine,” Hector continued as if she weren't even there, “I will find myself a woman, and I will treat her like a queen. We will have a son. He will not replace the son Ana took from me, but that is all right—”

“You had a son, Pancho?” Erin asked. She held the gun back behind her, trying to get her thumb over the big hammer to recock it. But she couldn't.

“
Sí
, I had a son,” said Hector. He shrugged. “He was not the blood of my blood, but that did not matter. Even though he was the son of another man, I loved him as my own, and I treated him no different than I would have had he been—”

“Oh?” She cut him off again. “You mean your wife had been widowed?”

“No,” said Hector. “She had a child out of the church. He was born shortly after we were married. The
Padre
at San Carlos blessed us on our wedding day and said that in God's eyes, it was meant for us to marry, and to give the boy a name. I would be his father. Everything should have been fine. But I am a poor man, and I could not meet even our most basic needs. That is why she left me. That is why she took my son, and went to join the boy's real father.” His voice cracked with emotion.

“I'm—I'm sorry, Pancho,” Erin said in earnest. She quit trying to cock the Starr. Instead, she stepped over and sat down on the edge of the bed made of money. She laid the Starr beside her and flipped back the ragged blanket.

“Come sit down, rest a minute,” she said. She patted the money sacks beneath the straw. She felt an urge to reach inside the sacks and make sure all the money was there. But she didn't. She knew she could trust the squirr—
Pancho,
she corrected herself.

Hector seated himself beside her on the edge of the pallet.

“I'll tell you a secret, Pancho,” she said. “I am carrying a child.”

Hector just looked at her.

“It's true,” she said. “And I have no father for my child, no home here, no name, nothing. . . .”

 

Across from the adobe hovel, the Ranger had jumped up from the ground at the sight the silhouette of the woman holding a gun in the window. But as one tense second overlapped onto the next and no sound of gunshot resounded, and no blast of fire exploded inside the room, he eased back down and waited. He didn't want to barge into the adobe. He didn't want to do anything that might alert Teto and the remaining Gun Killers when they rode back looking for the money. And he was certain they
would
be coming back for the money. He gazed off to the east, where the first silver light of morning wreathed the jagged horizon.

He hoped it wouldn't be much longer.

 

Teto knew he was being followed. Wade Carrico was a smart Texas outlaw—too smart to let him or anyone else ride away in the night when a large cache of money was at stake.
Not without following them
, Teto told himself. Carrico was only doing what he himself would do under these same circumstances. But still, the fact remained, Teto had put him in charge and told him to keep the men moving north until he caught up with them. Carrico had disobeyed him. He couldn't let that go unmentioned.

Teto had followed the woman close enough that, at times, he feared she would hear his horse's hooves. But when she had turned onto a winding trail where a light shone in the distance, he'd let his horse fall back a little, knowing there was no way he would lose her now. The light was a signal from someone, he was sure of it. Who? He wasn't certain. A beautiful woman like Erin, it could be anyone.

I have questions for you, my Irish princess
, he thought, speaking to her in his mind. He might have let things go, had she not run away. But now that she had left him in the middle of the night, he wanted to know why Luis would have thought such a thing—that the baby she carried belonged to him. How could Luis have thought such a thing had he not been sleeping with her?