Bullet Creek (9 page)

Real whipped a look at the Bar-V men and shouted, “We see you on our backtrail, we keel them both!”

Real snatched the pistol from the rancher's holster, swung the barrel against the older man's head—a glancing blow across Vannorsdell's right temple, knocking his hat off. The rancher stumbled back, dropped to a knee.

Alejandro laughed and sidled up to Karla, wrapping his left arm around her neck and pulling her back from the ridge's lip.

Watts's rifle boomed.

Alejandro screamed and stumbled forward, throwing Karla forward, as well. The younger de Cava twisted around and landed on his back, groaning and clutching his right shoulder, blood oozing through his fingers.

Cursing, Real jacked a shell into his rifle's chamber and wheeled, crouching and spreading his feet, toward the Bar-V riders. “You killed them both, now, you gringo vermin!”

As Real wheeled back toward Vannorsdell, who was clumsily gaining his feet, Navarro's rifle spoke. A quarter second before he'd squeezed the trigger, his left boot slipped in the caliche, dropping the shot. The slug tore through Real's left calf, punching the hardcase's foot out from beneath him. Groaning loudly, Real dropped to his right shoulder, losing his rifle.

At the same time, Vannorsdell lunged forward, grabbed Karla, turned, and ran back down the gravelly, boulder-strewn shelf toward the rancher's chestnut. As Real leapt for his rifle, Navarro snapped off another shot, missing Real's head by inches, the bullet blowing up dust just over the man's right shoulder.

Ignoring the shot, Real lifted his rifle and aimed at Vannorsdell and Karla, who had dropped below Navarro's line of sight. Navarro was about to snap off another shot at Real, when two slugs, followed a half second later by a third, plunged into the rock column to his right.

Squinting against the dust and flying rock shards, Navarro pulled back behind the column. The gun wolves had opened up on him and Watts and, by the frantic pops and booms of rifles and pistols, on the Bar-V riders, as well.

After another round had ricocheted off the ledge to his right, scattering gravel, Navarro stole another look around the left edge of the column. The Bar-V riders had vacated the butte. Navarro couldn't see them, but the thunder of their horses and the cacophony of their revolvers and repeating rifles told the foreman they were heading toward the butte in a raging fury. The vaqueros were returning fire, shot for shot, the bullets spanging, reports echoing.

Navarro snapped a look behind the column at Watts. “I'm going down—” He stopped, the lines in his forehead planing out. Watts lay in the gap between the column and the broader scarp, folded over his rifle as though only resting. The blood on his head, arms, and rifle barrel glistened in the high, dry sunlight.

“Shit!”

Navarro lurched around the column, dropped to his haunches, then leapt off the shelf. It was a ten-foot drop. He landed behind a cracked black boulder and rolled to his left, transferring the impact to his hips and shoulders. His ankles ached, but he leapt to his feet and ran forward, quartering left, picking out vaqueros and levering one shell after another, the Winchester bucking in his hands.

After ten yards, he stopped, rolled behind another boulder and a twisted cedar, and came up on his right hip, extending his Winchester northward.

Fifty yards down the lower shelf, Vannorsdell and his grandaughter ran a weaving course around boulders and greasewood clumps. Thirty yards behind them, Real had stopped and dropped to his right knee. He raised his Winchester and aimed toward the fleeing pair.

Snapping his Winchester to his cheek, Navarro fired four quick rounds, the bullets blowing up rock shards and gravel around and behind de Cava. It looked like a twister was kicking up dust. Tom squeezed the trigger again. The hammer clicked, empty. Real flung himself forward and rolled behind a stone outcrop, dragging his bloody left calf.

Ducking the bullets de Cava's vaqueros were throwing at him, Navarro flung another westward glance. Running side by side with their heads down, Vannorsdell and Karla disappeared behind a volcanic dike sheathed in greasewood and mesquite, safely removed from the gunfire.

Navarro set his rifle aside and plucked his Colt Navy from its holster, thumbing back the hammer. Realizing that the gunfire had died, and that the vaqueros were yelling in Spanish somewhere off to the east, he stood slowly, glancing around. Seeing no one and hearing only a few scattered shots, he strode quickly down to where Real had taken cover, bolted around the rock with his pistol extended.

Real wasn't there. Just the twin indentations of his butt cheeks and trouser seams and blood-smeared dust near a spindly sage clump.

Navarro looked around. The deep impressions of undershot boots wended through the scrub brush and boulders, heading east, where the other vaqueros had apparently retreated. He glanced behind him and toward the ridge, where Watts had pinked Alejandro. The kid was gone.

Below the ridge, the gunfire had fallen silent. Men shouted. A horse whinnied.

Navarro walked slowly along the scarp, peering around boulders. Moving around a gnarled cedar growing up from a deep depression, he stopped. Alejandro lay on his side behind the tree, his right shoulder gushing blood. His chest rose and fell as he breathed, teeth stretched back from his teeth.

“Tom!” someone yelled from below.

“It's all clear!” Navarro shouted.

He took one more step when something moved in the corner of his right eye. He swung right, bringing up his Colt. Ten yards away, a hatless, bearded hombre, blood smeared on his forehead, extended an ivory-gripped Schofield over a flat rock. Chisos Gomez's drink-bleary eyes narrowed as he sighted down the barrel. The gun exploded, black smoke puffing, the heavy ball pounding into a boulder near Tom's left thigh. Navarro squeezed his own Colt's trigger.

The bullet thumped through the pistolero's forehead, punching him straight back against the towering sandstone wall.

“I think,” Navarro added to his last sentence.

It was a haggard, ill-tempered group that rode into the headquarters of Rancho de Cava two hours after the shootout, the tan dust sifting over the buffalo grass and peppering the cool, shallow waters of Bullet Creek.

The women of Rancho de Cava—Lupita, Isabelle, and Isabelle's mother, Henriqua—had heard the horses and stood now before the sprawling house, shading their eyes with their hands.

Henriqua, longtime maid of hacienda de Cava, stood small and gray and sullen in her black uniform, her silver-streaked hair pulled severely back from her pinched face and secured in a bun behind her head. She stood behind Isabelle, her work-gnarled hands resting protectively on the girl's shoulders, giving her dark eyes to the men crossing the yard toward the stables.

Beside her stood Lupita—tall, beautiful, and severe in her dark mourning dress and mantilla, her black hair brushed to a high shine and falling down her shoulders. Even the somber, shapeless mourning dress, which she'd inherited from her mother, who had died twelve years ago from consumption, could not camouflage the exquisite, high-breasted, broad-hipped figure underneath.

“Real!” Lupita called, an angry, anxious edge in her voice as she noted the absence of her younger brother, Alejandro, as well as several other men who'd ridden out last night with the group. Several who kicked up dust on their way to the stables—hatless, sweaty, dusty—sat hunched in their saddles, blood glistening from bullet wounds, a few using silk neckerchiefs as arm slings or bandages.

Real glanced at his sister, cursed, and swung his horse up to the house, stopping the steeldust a few feet from the women. He'd wrapped his neckerchief around his wounded left calf. “They bushwacked us,” he snapped at his sister, anticipating her deprecation.

“Where is Alejandro?”

“I thought he was behind us. We weren't far from home when I realized he'd dropped back.” Both statements were lies. In fact, he'd been so disoriented from the bullet in his calf and the corn whiskey and mescal that he and his men had found in a line shack last night, on their way to the Bar-V, that he'd simply forgotten about his younger sibling.

Lupita figured as much. The smell of rancid alcohol sweat hung about her brother, two years her junior, like a haze.

“Coward!” she yelled, stepping forward in her black canvas shoes, holding her shawl closed across her heaving bosom.

Staring up at Real, who sat slumped in his saddle, mustachioed lips stretched back from his teeth, she yelled, “You are a drunken coward. You cannot bring to justice the man who butchered your own padre! And you leave your brother with the enemy!”

“Shut up, hag! If I did not have this bullet in my leg, I would dismount and slap you silly!” Having kicked out his bad foot, he grimaced against the pain that lanced upward into his thigh. Behind Lupita, Henriqua pulled her daughter two steps back toward the courtyard wall, covering the girl's ears with her hands.

“I will send riders back for Alejandro, puta!” Real shouted, leaning out from his saddle, forked veins swelling above his nose. “And after the dust has settled, I will avenge my father if that means killing old Vannorsdell and that hombre grande Navarro with my bare hands!”

“Navarro?” Lupita laughed. “Is that who sent you running home like ass-whipped schoolboys? He is an old man.”

“Old, yes, but he still has a few tricks up his sleeve. Do not worry. I have a few of my own. Now suppose instead of insulting me, you go down to the bunkhouse and help dress the wounds of my men?”

Real began to rein away, stopped, and shuttled his glance toward the low, grassy hill rising north of the hacienda. Along the base of the hill, old pecan and peach trees reached up from the untrimmed yellow grass.

In the trees, a man appeared—a short, lean, gray-haired man in a silver-trimmed, low-crowned black sombrero. Guadalupe Sanchez walked along through the trees, trailing his sleek pinto mustang by its reins, the segundo canting his head low as if closely studying the ground.

“What the hell is he doing now?” Real asked, sneering. “Picking peaches?”

“He built your father's coffin and helped us prepare the body,” Lupita said coldly. “So far, that is more than you have done!”

Real spat in the dirt near his sister's feet, then cursed and spurred his tired horse across the yard. Before the open stable doors, where the other riders and the stable boys were unsaddling the sweat-glistening mounts, Real swung down and hopped on his good foot to a stock tank.

He sat gingerly down on the tank and ordered a twelve-year-old stable boy—the bastard son of one of the ranch's field workers—to saddle a fresh horse. The boy, holding a saddle by its horn in one hand, a 'dobe-decorated bridle in the other, slid his eyes from Real's bloody calf to his face, frowning curiously.

Real berated the boy to do as he was told or take twenty lashes to his backside.

As the boy hustled back into the stable, Real tightened the neckerchief he'd wrapped around the wound, then rolled a cigarette. He glanced up to see the segundo, Sanchez, riding his mustang southwest along the base of the hill and disappear into the willows along Bullet Creek.

“Crazy old bastard,” Real growled, licking the brown paper quirley closed and striking a lucifer to life on the stock tank.

When the boy had saddled and led a mouse-colored mustang down the stable's long, sloping ramp, Real stepped gingerly into the saddle. He clucked and reined the horse around, spurring it with his right heel, and in ten minutes he was galloping down through the southeast stables and implement barns and the remains of the land grant's original stone dwellings, long since destroyed by Apaches.

He rode hard for another ten minutes, traversing the irrigated hay fields along the river, over a pine-studded rise and into a shallow valley, where three peons in white pajamas swung long-handled sickles in waist-high manzanita grass. The field was bordered by pines and joshua trees, and the hills rose up beyond the river, smoky green with mesquite and greasewood.

He approached a girl in a doeskin skirt, mocassins, and a blouse of canvas sacking cut low to reveal her hard, suntanned chest and shallow cleavage. La Reina Fimbres was leading a donkey pulling a cart piled high with mesquite and ironwood sticks.

“Real!” the girl exclaimed as the vaquero approached at a full gallop, the mustang kicking up grass tufts and dirt.

He checked the horse down. She stared up at him, feet spread shoulder width apart, full lips pursed, wide-set eyes narrowed. A deerhide thong secured her long, sunburned dark hair behind her neck.

She said, “We heard you rode after . . .”

He extended his open right hand to her. “Climb up.”

She hesitated, casting anxious glances toward the fields where the peons toiled. “I have to take these sticks to the barn for Papa. Then—” She gave a low shriek of surprise as he leaned down, grabbed her hand, and swung her lithe, muscular body up behind his saddle. He put the steel to the mustang, and he and the girl rode up and over a low rise and into the yard of a thatch-roofed, sun-bleached adobe around which red horn-toed chickens pecked at melon rinds.

Two mongrel pups, tied in the shade of a narrow stable of unpainted pine slats, ceased their frolicking to regard the horse and two riders with raised ears and cocked heads. Scattering chickens, Real booted the mustang up to the adobe's covered porch, lifted his right boot over the horse's neck, dismounted, then reached up and brusquely pulled the girl down, as well.

“What happened to your leg?” she asked, as he hopped up onto the porch and ducked under the door as he entered the cabin.

“A Tucson whore bit me,” Real growled, stopping just inside the cluttered adobe, which smelled strongly of chili peppers, garlic, and mesquite smoke, looking around. His gaze lingered on a mat on the floor to his left, where a shirtless, long-boned young man snored softly on his back, a straw sombrero tipped over his eyes. “What the hell is he doing here?”