Bullet Creek (24 page)

Sanchez said nothing, only raised a stiff hand as he and Navarro passed through the gate. When they'd ridden twenty yards along the soggy trail, one of the guards yelled in broken English, “Navarro, I piss on the Bar-V!”

Tom glanced over his shoulder. One of the guards stood on the very top of the wall. With his free hand he directed a stream of piss toward Navarro. Tom waved and turned his head forward, a wry expression on his unshaven cheeks.

“That's quite the crew you have there.”

Sitting stiffly in his saddle, facing down the trail, Sanchez grunted disgustedly.

As they rode along the soft, damp trail, their horses' hooves making sucking sounds as they cantered, Navarro glanced at Sanchez periodically. The old segundo seemed sullen and distracted, frowning over his pinto's ears. Tom noted the inordinate bulge in the man's saddlebags and decided to mention it.

“I am not going back to Rancho de Cava,” Sanchez announced, sitting straight-backed in his bouncing saddle and holding his reins high against his chest.

“Where are you going?”

“I don't know, but the rancho is no longer my home with the don dead.” He spat off his horse's left wither. “I thought I could help turn it back around. I see now there is no chance.” He glanced at Navarro, the growing light revealing a wry twinkle in his old eyes. “I have become a useless old vaquero, weary of living but afraid of dying.”

Navarro reached over and pulled back on the bridle bit of Sanchez's big pinto. At the same time, he halted his clay, and the two riders faced each other over their horses' ears.

Navarro said, “What've you found out?”

“I am about to show you.” Sanchez reined his horse left and gigged it forward along the trail. Navarro stared after him, then touched his heels to the claybank's ribs.

Sanchez leading the way, the segundo and Navarro headed west on a seldom-used horse trail. They stopped twice at water puddled in rock tanks along the trace. Navarro pressed Sanchez to tell him where they were going, but both times the segundo merely shook his head and said, “It is best if you see for yourself.”

It wasn't long before they were south of the barranca that the Apaches called the Shadows and that Navarro called the tail end of nowhere. The Bar-V riders tried to keep the cattle from drifting down here because it was almost impossible to get them out of the deep arroyos, box canyons, and boulder snags.

Sanchez led the way down a steep game trail into a deep, narrow brush- and boulder-choked defile, just wide enough for the horses to pass. Looking around, Tom saw shod horse prints and apples that weren't more than a few days old. At the bottom, Sanchez dismounted and led his horse into a cave yawning in the canyon's south wall.

Navarro dismounted and followed him.

The cavern was about fifty feet wide, maybe ten feet high. Several picks and shovels leaned against the cave walls. They weren't the old implements found in long-abandoned mines—rusty and splintered and falling apart—but fairly new equipment. There was a big fire ring in the cave's front center, the ashes still mounded and a few freshly chopped branches lying beside it. Broken rocks lay strewn about the floor, streaked with glittering metal.

“What the hell?”

Navarro peered into the cave's shadows. Sanchez had disappeared, leaving his horse ground-tied about twenty paces beyond the entrance. Navarro dropped his own reins. Running his fingers along the left wall when the light grew dim, he carefully planted his feet one in front of the other to avoid tripping over the rocks that had been chiseled out of the walls. The cool air was rife with the musty pungence of bat guano.

A few feet ahead, a match flared, its glow showing the segundo's dark face and low-crowned sombrero and part of the rough rock wall. Sanchez turned to Tom. “Thirty feet back, this cave opens into a room as big as Don Francisco's office at Rancho de Cava.”

“Manure and shod horse tracks,” Navarro said. “Many men have gathered here frequently and stayed for long periods.”

“Real and his pistoleros.” Sanchez's match burned out.

“They hide out here to let their trail cool after their raids on the smuggling trains,” Navarro mused aloud.

“Let's go back outside.”

Leaving the horses in the cavern, Navarro and Sanchez walked back out to the narrow trace in the deep defile, already shaded by the steep, boulder- and brush-strewn walls. A cool breeze whistled through the cleft, rattling the galetta grass.

Facing Navarro, Sanchez said, “I think Real came upon the gold quite by accident, when he and his gun wolves were hiding out here. It is my suspicion that Real had the don murdered because the patron would not have allowed mining for gold on the Bar-V range. Not, at least, without the involvement of Paul Vannorsdell and yourself.”

“And Real wanted it all—whatever 's here—for himself.”

Sanchez stared back at him, his brown eyes in the angular, taut-skinned face both sad and angry. His lips were pursed, and he drew air sharply through his nose.

Navarro said, “How much do Lupita and Alejandro know about all this?”

“I could not say,” the segundo said with a sigh, throwing his hands out. “My guess is nothing, and that is why Real framed your boss for the murder. Because his sister and brother would have not gone along with it. And it gave him a good excuse—”

A pistol popped. Sanchez grunted and stumbled forward, his jaw dropping suddenly, eyes snapping wide.

Navarro turned as the segundo fell into him, opened his arms to catch him. He saw over the peak of the segundo's sombrero a Mexican crouched about twenty feet back along the canyon, cocking the hammer of his extended six-shooter, a savage snarl on his patch-bearded face.

“They're down here!” the man yelled.

As he extended the pistol, Navarro brought his own Colt up and fired. At the same time, the pistolero drilled another round into Sanchez's back. The segundo shuddered with the slug's impact into his right shoulder. Tom's shot cored the pistolero's chest, knocking him back as the man fired another round onto the trail, blowing up shale.

Shouts rose on the gorge's rim.

Navarro lowered his gaze to the segundo. Two blood splotches grew on the back of Sanchez's vest, one near the center, the other over the right shoulder blade. Navarro eased the man onto his back, then gently down to the ground. Both rounds had gone all the way through; his shirt was a bloody mess.

“Guadalupe,” Tom muttered. “Goddamn it.” He removed the sombrero that tipped off as the man's eyes rolled back in his head, and tossed it aside.

Sanchez was dying, but he found enough strength to reach up and grab Navarro's shirt with his bony right fist. “Tom . . .”

“Easy, amigo.”

“In my pocket.” Sanchez brushed his hand against his right vest pocket. “I wrote out . . . everything.”

Tom glanced back along the canyon's sharply pitching trail. On the rim, the shouts grew louder. Stones loosed from the top tumbled onto the trail. Raising his pistol toward the noise, Tom looked down again at Sanchez. With his left hand, he removed the folded paper from the segundo's vest pocket.

“From what I overheard and saw for myself,” Sanchez said, his voice weakening, his chest rising and falling sharply. “Real, the girl, the boy . . . the gold . . .”

Tom spotted movement to his right, swung his head toward two more gunmen descending the steep trail single file, rifles in their hands, crouching behind boulders. Navarro whipped his Colt up at the same moment they saw him, and fired twice.

One shot caught the first man in the head, laying him out flat between two split rocks and a cedar. The second man scrambled back up the trail to the rim, shouting epithets in Spanish.

Sanchez raised a hand and extended a finger weakly, indicating the opposite end of the canyon. “That way. Go!”

Tom bunched his lips and fired another enraged shot toward the rim, holding the de Cava riders at bay. “Those sonso'bitches. I'll—”

“Kill Real.” Sanchez exhaled this last on his last breath. His chest fell still and his chin dipped toward his right shoulder. His hands fell to either side of his slender, slack form and turned palm up.

Navarro jerked his head up toward the trail, saw the boots of another man working his way down. He snapped off two quick shots, watched the man's feet disappear back up toward the rim.

“Sons'obitches!” Tom shouted, his guts on fire. He triggered another enraged shot.

Someone loosed two shots from the rim, the bullets plunking into the trail ten feet in front of Tom. Navarro stood, stuffed the paper into his back jeans pocket, and dragged Sanchez into the cave. More shots sounded from above, the blasts echoing around the gorge, causing dirt to sift from the cave ceiling.

Navarro crouched over the segundo's slack body, placed a hand on the man's belly, looked sadly, angrily down at the wizened face with its half-closed eyes and parted lips beneath the thick, gray mustache.

“Hasta luego, amigo. You deserved better.”

Real's voice sailed down from the ridge. “Navarro! Come on out of there, amigo. We must talk.”

“I'm done talkin'!”

Navarro slipped the segundo's Russian .44 from his holster, wedged it behind his own cartridge belt.

“All right, so you found the mine,” Real called. “Let us talk it over, uh? There are solutions to every problem.”

“Like having your father killed?”

Real laughed as Navarro walked over to Sanchez's horse, slipped the old Spencer from the boot, then grabbed his own mount's reins, turned the horse around, and led him to the cave's mouth.

Three shots sounded, blowing up gravel ten feet before the cave's entrance. Because of the brush and rocks around the entrance, Real's men wouldn't be able to see the cave from where they were; they were no doubt hoping for a lucky ricochet.

Navarro clucked to the horse, led it out of the cave and onto the path tracing the bottom of the narrow canyon, heading toward the chasm's opposite end, as Sanchez had directed. Another shot barked and spanged off the wall beside the cave. Navarro heard the rock shards spraying the brush.

“Come on, boy, keep movin',” Navarro urged the horse as the walls closed in around them and the horse fidgeted and pulled back on the reins.

Navarro walked quickly. If they caught up to him in the canyon, he could hold them off only as long as his ammo held out—an hour at the most.

The terrain grew rocky, and in one place the canyon narrowed so much that the uneven walls nearly stripped the saddle from the clay's back. Navarro cooed to the horse and applied firm, steady pressure to the reins, easing him through.

He was climbing a shelf and pulling the horse along behind him when gunfire sounded, several echoing cracks growing closer. Real had discovered that Navarro had left the cave.

“Come on, boy. Let's make some time,” Navarro urged.

Another gunshot rocked Navarro's eardrums. The horse reared, screaming and jerking the reins from Navarro's hand. Tom turned, ducking under the horse's flailing front hooves. Another shot. The horse's head snapped sideways, spraying blood from the wound below its right ear.

Navarro stumbled back and watched the horse twist around, bounce off the narrow walls, and fall. It rolled back down the trail, splashing the ground with blood. Behind the dead claybank, the de Cava men were running along the trail, zigzagging behind clefts in both sides of the wall. Tom drew his pistol and fired two shots, holding them at bay, then looked at the horse. It had fallen on the saddle boot.

Navarro climbed to his feet and sidled down the slope to see if he could wrestle the long gun from the boot. Two shots stopped him and turned him around, heading him on up the trail, cursing and snapping shots off behind him.

Minutes later, the canyon floor rose sharply. A crenelated wall faced him. The wall was a hundred feet high straight across the canyon. He was boxed in.

Behind, Real's men fired their pistols and rifles and shouted back and forth. Tom heard their pounding boots. He glanced behind him, saw the men approaching about forty yards back along the corridor—flashes of bright serapes and sombreros and gun barrels between the canyon's bulging walls.

Sanchez had said there was a way out. . . .

Navarro looked again. To his right, in the gray-blue shadows of the bulging wall, a black line appeared. Navarro made for the gap as two pistols barked behind him, the slugs careening over his left shoulder and thudding into the rock wall ahead.

Navarro's heart thudded with relief as he saw that the black line was really a gap in the canyon wall. He shouldered through the gap and followed the meandering passageway to another wall, less steep than the other, with corrugations providing hand- and footholds. It must have been the chute for an ancient waterfall that had once tumbled into the canyon. Earthquakes had probably shifted the passageway. Three-quarters of the way to the crest, it canted sharply, tunneling into the limestone and creating a chimney of sorts. The chimney was straight up and down for about twenty feet, only about four feet wide.

Shouted Spanish rose only a few feet behind him. Navarro leapt onto the wall and scrambled up the cleft, loosing rocks and shale behind him. He hoisted himself up by the wall's clefts and bulges, crawling through the right-angling chimney, pushing off both walls with his hands and feet, then stretching his arms over the rim and muscling his legs up and over.

He'd just pulled his head and shoulders away from the hole when several shots sounded from below, the slugs slicing up through the chute and continuing straight up toward the sky. A couple tore rocks away from the lip of the chimney's rim, showering Tom with grit.