The Bells of El Diablo (21 page)

Vienna gasped and jerked her head up from James’s chest, clutching one of the blankets they’d shared against the stormy chill to her naked bosoms. James looked around, listening, hearing only Crosseye grumbling on the other side of James’s own now-vacant sleeping crib to his right. The kid was alone.

James depressed the Griswold’s hammer and lowered the weapon, his ear tips warming with self-consciousness. He glanced at Vienna looking incredulously up at the boy, her hair mussed, shoulders bare, and then he returned his own grumpy gaze to the kid. “What the hell, boy?”

The kid pressed a finger to his lips and turned his head as though listening, wondering if his own scream had been heard in the living area below the hotel. Finally, he turned sideways, canted his head, beckoning to James—an oddly adult gesture in one so young, probably not over ten—then pushed back out the blanket curtain.

“What in tarnation?” came Crosseye’s sleep-gravelly voice from James’s right. The oldster was stomping into his boots. “Jimmy, what’s poppin’ over there, blame it!”

James pushed off his elbows and heels and slipped back into his own sleeping area to see Crosseye poking his shaggy head through the curtain on the opposite side. The old man’s sleep-bleary eyes raked him up and down, puzzled by the younger man’s nakedness.

“You mind if I have a moment?” James snapped.

As if he suddenly understood, Crosseye’s big cheeks above his beard flushed and a grin tugged at his mouth corners as he pulled his head back through the blanket. James dressed quickly, then carried his boots and rifle out to where the kid stood in front of Crosseye, whispering in Spanish and gesturing wildly with his hands, pointing out the small, sashed window in the adobe wall at the far end of the little sleeping area.

The wind continued to blow sand against the hotel’s walls and rattle the thin, cracked windows in their frames.

“What is it, kid?” James said, squatting so his head was level with the shaver’s.

The boy looked out from under a neatly cut shelf of straight blue-black bangs, made a frustrated expression, shaking his head. A thin white scar slanted across
his nose. He began walking toward the stairs that led down to the goat pen, beckoning.

James looked at Crosseye, who returned the favor. “Trap?” the older man said.

James looked at the kid who stood over the open stone stairs, beckoning and prattling on in Spanish. Somewhere in the tangle of incoherent Spanish, the words “Apache Jack” jumped out like a zebra in a herd of whitetail deer.

James glanced at Crosseye and then at Vienna, who stood to his right, buttoning her blouse and staring wide-eyed at the little boy by the stairs. Quickly, James set his rifle against the wall, removed his shell belt and holsters from where he’d hung them on his shoulder, and wrapped the belt and twin .36’s around his waist.

When the others were ready, the three of them leaving their bedrolls in their respective cribs but all donning their hardware, including Vienna, who wore a .36 Remington for the cross draw on her slender hips, they followed the boy down the crumbling stone stairs and into the stock pen below.

The goats brayed and scurried away, hooves thudding softly on the manure-and-straw-strewn floor of the stable. The boy ran toward a small wooden door in the east wall. “Apache Jack,” he whispered, opening the door, peeking cautiously out, then regarding the three gringos behind him, and beckoning. “Apache Jack—
vamos!
”

“
Viene esta manera!
”

The boy beckoned again as he ran across the narrow side street obscured by blowing dirt, sand, and tumbleweeds. James, Crosseye, and Vienna followed, looking both ways up and down the cluttered, abandoned street. James wondered who the kid was watching for.

The old woman from the cantina?

He got an answer to the question a few minutes later when they were angling amongst the scattered hovels toward the town’s far southwestern edge, on the far side of the massive stone wave standing sentinel over the village. The boy stopped running suddenly, looked toward a trail following a near arroyo, then motioned for the others to hurry. A minute later, the kid, James, Crosseye, and Vienna were hunkered down against the bank of the arroyo, staring through the spindly brush at the lip of it toward the trail.

Horseback riders were moving along the trace, entering the town from the desert on James’s left. As they came nearer, all five riders hunkering low over their horses’ necks against the wind, James saw that
they were clad in dove gray uniforms with high black boots with silver spurs, heavy pistols holstered on their hips or thighs. One wore a leather-billed forage cap, long, curly brown hair blowing out around the cap in the wind. The other men’s gray felt sombreros buffeted down their backs by their chin thongs. One rider was holding aloft a wind-torn, powder blue guidon depicting a buffeting golden eagle with spread wings.

James had seen the guidon before, as well as such uniforms as the riders were wearing. Mexican
rurales
. Rural Mexican policemen. Being foreigners here, and on Mexican soil for admittedly nefarious reasons, he and the others had swung clear of them. The boy seemed to think it important to swing clear, as well, as he waited until the riders had passed his and his three charges’ position before clambering up out of the arroyo and dashing across the trail and into open desert.

“Where in the hell we goin’?” Crosseye groused, breathing hard. “If I woulda known we was walkin’ this far, I’d have ridden my hoss!”

“Looks like we’re there,” James said, following the boy from about ten yards back and seeing a blocky sandstone church rise before him.

A ruined stone wall surrounded the church and the long, L-shaped adobe brick building behind it. The boy led his party across another shallow arroyo and then across a cart trail that angled toward the church from Cordura, and around the church’s front corner toward the shabby addition flanking it. Beyond the addition were stock pens, a garden with irrigated ditches, and a sprawling cemetery.

The trio of Confederates followed the boy to a stout
door beneath a brush arbor. Wind-whipped paper lanterns hung beneath the arbor, and a clay water pot called an
ojo
in these parts lay shattered on the cracked flagstones near the door. The boy rapped the heel of a hand on the door and shouted something. After a few seconds, the door opened, and a young woman in a nun’s habit poked her head out. While the boy spoke to the young, fair-skinned nun in Spanish, she regarded the three dusty visitors warily, curiously, before nodding once curtly and pulling her head back inside.

The boy beckoned as he moved through the door, remembering to doff his straw sombrero and hold it against his chest. James and Crosseye removed their hats, and Vienna tossed her sombrero back off her head, letting it hang from her neck by its chin thong.

Inside a dark entrance hall lit by one small window near the door, the nun glanced at each of her visitors in turn while the boy stood respectfully to one side, head tilted back, a small rooster tail swaying at the crown of his head as he looked around at the nun and his three incredulous charges peppered liberally with dust and grit from the windstorm. From deep in the bowels of the building, a scream sounded.

A man’s scream, at once raspy and guttural and filled with primal fear. The agonized lament lifted gooseflesh between James’s shoulder blades, but neither the nun nor Pablo reacted.

“Pablo says you’ve come to see Apache Jack,” the nun said in a heavy Irish brogue. “Is this true?”

Vienna spat sand from her lips, brushed it from her eyebrows. “He’s here?”

“What is your business with Jack?”

The scream came again, garbled by distance, as though the screamer was a long ways away, in another part of the building. It was answered by an angry shout, as though the screamer was being admonished.

“His brother sent us,” Vienna said.

“And who is Jack’s brother?”

“Jefferson Davis.”

The nun absorbed the response without expression aside from the merest hint of a flush rising in her pale cheeks as she stared directly at Vienna. Then she ran her still-skeptical eyes across James and Crosseye standing near the boy before she swung around, the black skirt of her habit giving a sibilant rustle.

“Follow me.”

The nun led the party through the entrance hall. She turned right and followed a long, dingy corridor paneled in pine, her sandals slapping on the grime-encrusted flagstones. The hem of her skirt lifted wisps of dust in her wake.

The screams continued, as did the shouting, though more distantly now. Doors lay along each side of the hall. Most were open. Near some of these doors, or between them, ghostly figures stood ensconced in pale light and shadow. Some of the figures were men, some women, all dressed in the plain cotton garb and shabby ponchos of the Mexican peon, though some appeared to be American. They were of all ages. Some were missing limbs or were otherwise disfigured—there was a hunchback and someone suffering the ravages of leprosy. But in most that James passed, he saw in their eyes the dark shimmering light or hollow, vaguely terrified casts of insanity.

What haunted James even more than the twisted figures around him was the possibility that he’d come all this way only to visit a madman with a crazy, made-up story of the devil’s gold. As he walked, following the nun and the boy, James glanced at Crosseye and Vienna in turn, and he almost chuckled at the dark humor of the possibility of their journey ending here, in a Mexican madhouse.

Well, it was fitting, wasn’t it? The world on the eastern side of the Mississippi was mad, so it only stood to figure that the one west of it would be, too. The whole damn world, in fact. There was no escaping it.

Near the end of the long hall, the nun stopped before a door that stood partway open. Voices emanated from inside as did the clink of a glass. The nun glanced at James.

A crispness entered her voice. “Wait here.”

She pushed through the door and immediately cut into loud, fluent Spanish. From the hall behind her, James saw a thick figure nearly lurch out of his boots and swing wide of the woman, who turned to continue directing her tirade his way, as he made his way to the door, sort of hop-skipping, limping. James saw that one of the big man’s bare feet was much larger than the other, and that the ankle bulged hideously. The man, clad in white pajama bottoms and a long, dark brown serape tied at the waist with a rope, bounded past James and the others and went skip-hopping down the hall in the direction from which James’s party had come.

The nun had turned her attention to a man lying in a bed on the small room’s right side. Her voice was gentler but still admonishing. The man lay with his
back against two pillows propped against the far wall, to the right of a window of animal hide scraped thin as waxed paper; it rippled in the wind, tossing dull javelins of gray light around the otherwise dark room.

This hombre’s bald head was bullet-shaped, with tufts of wiry gray hair sticking out on the sides, with more wiry tufts protruding from over his eyes and from out of his overlarge ears. His face was long, angular, and craggy—at least what James could see of it below the white bandage that had been wrapped around the top half of it, covering his eyes. Over his eyes, the bandage was liberally spotted crimson.

In one big, gnarled hand he held a clear bottle. In the other, he held a loosely rolled corn-husk cigarette. The smoke curled up from the lit end of the quirley, unspooling in the air above his head. He was holding his own with the nun in Spanish before suddenly turning his head toward the door and saying in English weighted in the lush, rolling accents of the American South: “Visitors? I have visitors? Who is it—that bastard Salsidio again? What’d he come for now? My
balls
?”

He dropped the cigarette on the heavy quilt covering him, reached under the bedcovers, and hauled out an enormous Colt Patterson revolver. His thumb ratcheted the hammer back, but he did not get the big popper leveled at the newcomers before the sister shoved it down with one hand while retrieving his cigarette with the other.

“It is not Salsidio, Jack. These people said your brother sent them! Pablo brought them!”

“Pablo?”

“
Sí
,” the boy said, adding a few sentences in Spanish.

Apache Jack jerked his chin up and called, “Who’s there? Name yourselves.”

Vienna moved into the room and said her name.

Apache Jack’s lips spread with a faint smile. “A girl…” He held up his right hand, curling his thumb and index finger until the tips of each were half an inch apart. The nun slipped the cigarette between them, and Jack drew the quirley to his lips. “Who you got with you, girl?”

“James Dunn,” James said, moving into the room as the nun stepped back away from the bed, making room for the visitors. “And this here’s Crosseye Reeves.”

“I like the sound of your voice, son. Southerners. But I’ve been expecting a man named Ichabod McAllister.”

“My uncle,” Vienna said, adding, “He’s dead. I’ve come in his stead.”

“How’d he die?”

“He was killed by a man named Stenck.”

“Stenck?” Apache Jack said, his tongue flicking along his leathery lower lip. “Stenck’s the other man I been expecting. My brother told me to expect them both at the head of a good-sized party of seasoned shooters.”

“They were indeed due to come together with a company of men,” Vienna said, “but my uncle Ichabod grew suspicious of Captain Stenck’s motives. There was no better validation of his suspicions than Stenck’s bloody murder of my uncle’s entire family as well as a maid.”

Apache Jack was nodding slowly as he puffed the cigarette lodged in one corner of his mouth, as though
he was surprised by none of what he was hearing. As though he’d almost expected such a grim turn of events.

“What about you?” Jack asked.

“I was my uncle’s secretary. I witnessed the murders but made away with the map. I’ve spent the last year hiding from Stenck and his men, biding my time, waiting for an opportunity to come here in my uncle’s place and locate you and secure the gold for the Confederacy.”