The Guns of Santa Sangre (8 page)

Tucker nodded. “Bodie’s right. Let’s ride.”
 

As Pilar led the way, riding out of earshot on her shaken horse, Tucker shot a fierce glance to his fellow gunfighters. “Let’s just get the silver, boys. Then we’ll fuck her and her sisters.”

“And her mother if’n she has a set of cans like that on her.” Bodie winked.

They half meant it.

Spurring their horses, the four horses and riders surged across the plain.

Tucker knew they were being followed.

He could smell them.

It wasn’t much to go on, just a wisp of dust behind them in the far distance, a faint metallic clink that could have been nothing at all somewhere way off. If they were riders, how many there were he couldn’t tell. Durango was afflicted with sudden arid winds popping up and sweeping down the plains whipping up dust devils so he could not be sure. Except for the gnawing tension in his gut telling him someone was out there and closing in. They’d made no effort to conceal their horse tracks during the morning ride, so their sign was right out there for anybody to see.
 

Maybe they should have been more careful.

They better be mindful from now on.

The cowboy saw Fix catch him looking over his shoulder a few times, and they shared a glance that alerted the thin gunfighter in black there might be something on their ass and to be ready, but as usual they didn’t need words. All the small, spare gunfighter did was slightly caress the pearl pistol handle in his holster with his worn black glove to protect his hand from the scrape of the hammer when he fanned and fired in the quick draw. The four riders continued into the sun-blasted oblivion.
 

The day was getting mean hot, and their destination lay hours ahead. Lizards scampered on rocks. Somewhere far off the razor
scree
of a hawk echoed into infinity. Then just the lulling clop of their hooves, and a waft of wind in his ears.

Bodie was in the rear, the giant Swede off in his own world, leaning back in his brown saddle, tree-stump legs relaxed, reins held loose in his cow-hoof hands, singing a loud song to himself in his gravelly, off-key voice. He grinned, bearing his cracked yellow teeth with sloppy affability, and laughed at some private joke in his granite boulder of a skull. He may be simple, Tucker felt, but he was so damn strong and there was a open-heartedness about him, so he didn’t see the need to tell the big one about the riders who may or may not be shadowing the four. There was nothing to talk about yet, and Bodie would just forget the minute he was distracted by something shiny. Tucker was sometimes surprised the happy idiot remembered his name.

Ahead, the peasant girl led them along the barren trail, her black shiny close-cropped hair wafting in the wind, and her sweet floral scent drifted back to Tucker. For a few pleasant moments he just rode, closed his eyes, and breathed her in. This girl had sand. That she did. Again, he considered what it took for a young girl like her to recruit dangerous men like the three of them. She must have been very scared, but she’d done what she had to do. Where the hell were the men of her village? Goddamn Mexicans. Only one reason a simple girl like this would take the kind of risks she had. Whatever lay in wait for them at the town must be a hell of a lot scarier than they were. Tucker wanted to know the rest of the story and would ask her soon.

A huge cloud passed across the sun, creating a mile-long shadow that moved slowly across the desert like a scythe, the great darkness passing over them. It shadowed their faces beneath their hat brims in a black curtain against the bright daylight, making them squint. They all experienced a sudden chill, and then it was gone, replaced by the heat of the day as the overhead cloud passed the sun. The wall of shade continued on its relentless trek across the landscape like the shadow of the devil catching souls.

An antsy Tucker was getting tired of the ride. He just wanted to get there, to this town wherever it was, face up to whatever he was up against, do his killing and be done with it. The ride felt like an axe hanging over his head, the waiting worse than the battle. He knew he was a man of action because of this impatience and fierce nature. Waiting gave a man too much time to think and it wasn’t good thinking too much.

“Hold up, boys.”

For the third time on the last twenty miles Fix had found sign.

Tucker and Bodie pulled up their horses with Pilar, as the skeletal gunfighter in black bent from his saddle studying the ground. “I savvy fifteen sets of hoof prints,” he said.

“What does this mean?” Pilar questioned, looking back and forth between her companions.

“Maybe somethin’, maybe nothing,” replied Fix. “They come in front from the north back at where we met up, then doubled back, crisscrossing their own tracks. Eight miles back, the tracks entered a shallow creek and didn’t come out the other side, disappeared like, meaning them riders was heading in single-file formation through the water bed to disguise their movements, and when the creek turned into a river, too tough to negotiate with horses, the tracks finally came out.”
 

“We ain’t seen nobody.” Bodie shrugged.

“Doesn’t mean they ain’t out there.”

“Could be we’re being followed,” Tucker said.

“Let’s keep our eyes peeled.”

The peasant girl was worried. “Them, they are after you?”

The gunfighters looked at one another with a shared mutual understanding, but did not respond. It was an answer but no answer.
 

“Which them?” Bodie mumbled.

“Were you followed?” Tucker asked Pilar. “By whatever those varmints are holding your town?”

“I don’t think so, Tuck,” Bodie said. “We’ve been retracing her trail due south and Fix just said those tracks started from the north.”

“We can sit around here scratching our balls talking about this all day. If we meet up with ’em we meet up with ’em. Let’s get a move on.” Tucker said.
 

His gang nodded. Pilar shrugged, and all four kept riding as the sun raised another few notches like the hand of a clock.

Fix, the signcutter of the bunch, noticed the stagecoach trail first.
 

It was two deep ruts in the ground heading east and west that he recognized as the Wells Fargo Durango route. They had happened onto it by accident. The cowboys briefly discussed following it, but Pilar insisted her village lay due south so off they set.
 

A mile away they came upon the stagecoach, or what was left of it.

The shattered wheel was the first thing they encountered, but the wreckage was not far off. The wagon had been completed destroyed. The carriage lay in an upside-down heaping pile of broken wooden boards and twisted metal chassis frame. The splintered doors, roof rack and spilled luggage were scattered debris all over the sun-baked rocks. The crushed skeletons of a team of dead horses were like one unrecognizable thing in a mountain of grinning skulls, spines, leg bones, hooves, horseshoes and caved-in rib cages jutting this way and that in a knotted confusion of harness and bridle, bleached clean in the merciless sun.

The horses they rode didn’t like this, not one bit, and strained contrarily against their reins, protesting noisily and rearing so the men had to wrest them under control with a chorus of “woahs” and “easy”. It was a bad place.

“Holy shit,” muttered Bodie.
 

Tucker wondered what could have done this.
 

Pilar gazed on in knowing horror as the gunfighters took a few moments to ride around the wreckage, taking it all in.

“The stage must have been moving at a clip when it went off the road. What the hell was it doing driving this kind of terrain at that kind of speed? Must have been running from something,” Tucker observed.

“It didn’t just go off the road, boys. It got attacked,” Fix added.

“The bandits around here don’t mess around,” Bodie said, just to say something.

“If it was bandits, why didn’t they rob it?” Fix nudged his jaw down at an open suitcase spilling clothes, a lady’s purse and wad of cash on the ground. Sitting in his saddle, he drew out his carbine and held it by the stock, leaning down to pick up the valise using the long barrel. Confiscating the cash, he flung the empty purse and suitcase back into the dust. “Looks like this ride was already worth our time. We’ll divvy this up later.”

“How long you figure this wreck been here?”

“Judging by those bleached bones, a month, mebbe longer.”

“You boys notice something strange?” Tucker mentioned, bothered, as he studied the rubble. “Where’s the bodies?”

On the ground lay a shattered silver pocket watch on a broken length of small chain. Tucker picked it up and saw the words “John Whistler” engraved inside the bent lid. The name rang a bell and he remembered it belonged to a bounty hunter he had met up with years ago. For sure they would never meet again. The cracked glass cover of the time face showed the hour and minute hands frozen at 8:28, immortalizing the exact moment their owner departed the earth.

A ratty piece of paper fluttering in the dry arid wind caught his eye, and as it was picked up in the breeze he snatched it out of the air. The gunfighter perused it momentarily and squinted with agitation, and when he saw the others looking at him, he quietly passed the wanted poster with their faces on it around to the other two men to whom it pertained. When it got to Fix, the thin gunsel crumpled it in his fist and pocketed the wadded ball of paper before the girl got a look.

“Interestin’,” he said.

“This watch belonged to John Whistler,” Tucker observed. “That stage was heading in our direction and he was on it.”

“Them wanted posters must’ve belonged to him,” Bodie said, stating the obvious with a sense of discovery. “Two and two put together equals he was after the reward.”
 

Tucker tossed away the broken pocket watch. It clattered on the rocks and lay still. “Reckon we should probably thank whoever took him out. Whistler was a real bad ass and could have given us big problems.”

“I think we should say a few words over the dearly departed.” Fix spat a blob of tobacco juice with precision accuracy, splattering the watch. “Fuck y’all. Amen.”

“I know what did this,” said Pilar. That was all she said.

“Let me guess,” said Tucker. “Those we’re goin’ up against.”

Her eyes told it all.

They rode on and left the decimated stagecoach in their dust.

Canyon cleaved up several hundred yards ahead, squeezing the trail into an ass crack of a ravine. The dull, tedious minutes passed as the three riders followed the horse of the determined peasant girl. One stallion exhaled with a wet
flubber
. The rattle of the packs on the saddles squeaked with leather over the clop of hooves as the men ascended the rise and came to a depression in the mesa baking like an oven under the nasty sun. The glare was so bright it hurt their eyes, and their vision swam as they squinted and visored their foreheads with their hands to shield their gaze from the sand that reflected like glass.

Ahead, a black smudge was in the watery waves of heat.
 

There were blurry dots in the sky in the molten, undulating thermals rising off the desert.
 

The closer they rode, they discerned those hovering spots were black birds. Vultures circling. Many.

Over the next hill, buzzards gathered.

An outpost.

The riders reined their horses.

Vultures continued their overhead circumference.

Over the ridge, the remains of a stagecoach station lay in smoldered ruins. The charred walls looked painted dull red, but on closer inspection the red was not paint.

“This is a bad place,” whispered the girl. “
Muy mal
.”

The gunfighters dismounted their horses and drew their irons.
 

“Easy, boys. This place ain’t right,” Tucker said.

Fix sniffed. “You boys smell that?”

“Like an open grave.” Bodie winced.

The three cowboys carefully approached the gutted ruins of the stage junction a hundred yards before them. The lonely building sat quietly in an open clearing with nothing for miles but a few yucca plants and the worn rutted trail running past it. Tucker led, eyes glued to the area, gesturing with his fingers for the others to come forward when he saw the coast was clear. The building was a one-story brick construction with a wooden porch and a paddock.
 

There had been a great disturbance. Saddles and tack lay scattered on the ground, thrown to and fro as if in a savage rage. One of the saddles was raked with four ragged claw marks that had cut deep into the leather, shredding and nearly shearing it in half. The outpost had clearly been torched from the inside, and Bodie kicked away a broken melted kerosene lamp that may have been the cause. There was no sign of life, no movement at all. Just the three figures of the heavily armed gunfighters coming at it on three sides, pistols at the ready, their gunbarrels following their noses. The silence was oppressive, the opposite of sound, a vacuum that felt like it sucked them all in. The men moved steadily forward in a low crouch and passed the corral when they were assailed by a sudden overpowering stench.