The Last Hard Men (7 page)

Three

Provo stood in the open door of the laborer’s shack watching the lights of Gila Bend, waiting for Menendez to return. There was always the chance Menendez wouldn’t come back at all, would just light out and keep going. But he didn’t think so. He’d put a bug in Menendez’s ear about that Santa Fe gold cache up on the Mogollon and he had a feeling Menendez would stick to him like a saddlebur until Menendez got near that money.

The two Mexican laborers who occupied the shack had showed up just after dark. Provo had let them come inside and then jumped them. Portugee had wanted to kill them with their own knives but Provo had called him off: leave a trail of corpses and they’d only bring more trouble down on their heads—Pinkertons, the Army. The laborers lay back in a corner, trussed with their own belts and ripped-up shirts, gagged, sweating their terror into the stifling suffocation of the hot overcrowded room.

It was a long wait and Provo got uneasy. But somewhere around midnight Menendez came from town, riding a horse at a skittish walk. There was a heaped bundle tied on behind the saddle. For a moment Provo wasn’t sure—he kept inside the dark doorway with his riot gun ready—but it was Menendez all right.

Menendez drew rein by the door. Up close in the starlight Provo could see he was wearing range clothes, Levi’s and a plaid shirt, and his ankle irons and chains were gone. Menendez’s waistline bulged with four or five gunbelts and holstered handguns.

Provo said, “Can’t you hold that horse still?”

Taco Riva squeezed out through the door past him. “Let me have him.” Taco’s passion was horses. He spoke soothingly and rubbed the horse’s face before he took a gentle grip on the bridle.

Menendez dismounted. “Damn town’s crawling with law.”

“We’ve got to expect that.” Provo helped carry the heavy poncho-wrapped booty inside. “You did fine.”

“Bet your ass I did. I hit the es-smithy first. Got us three hacksaws and all the spare blades I could ef-find. I had to cot my chains off before I could move on—sonoma-bitches was making enough racket to wake the dead, and there’s a focking deputy on every damn corner in town. That there bondle’s clothes, shirts and pants. Took ’em out of the storeroom behind the dry-goods. Got these gons there too—only ones I could ef-find. I din’ dare go near the gonsmith es-shop, there was a deputy right out ef-front.” He chuckled. “This town goeen to be plenty pozzled in the morning.”

There was an hour of cursing and painful hacksawing before they got rid of the leg irons. Some of the clothes didn’t fit too well but they’d do for openers, Provo judged. He buckled on two of the revolvers and slung a third one across his shoulders like a bandoleer. Lee Roy took offense. “What about the rest of us, for Christ’s sake?”

“I’ll pass the ordnance around when I’m good and ready, Lee Roy.”

“Shee-yit.”

Provo said to Menendez, “You scout the livery barn?”

“No good, Zach. Too much law around there. But there’s ten, twelve horses in the ranch stable half a mile north of town, across the tracks. That’s where I es-stole this one.”

“Then that’s where we go now. Lead the way.”

Slow and easy. He let Taco go into the stable alone and saddle up eight horses; Taco was good enough with horses not to raise a ruckus. When he came out of the dark maw of the stable he crouched down by Provo and whispered, “Mos’ly tired old horses, Zach. Tame and slow—but what you expect on a dairy ranch?”

“They’ll do. All set?”

They rode out, swinging wide around Gila Bend; rode south all night, into the Saucedas, and at dawn raised the smoke of a country store’s cookfire. The place squatted in’ a little nest of spring-fed trees in the barren rock mountains. Provo went in at gunpoint, surprised the old store-keeper and his two hired hands, and called the men in. They tied up the locals and ate a huge meal. Provo ate by himself in the kitchen, reading the newspaper Menendez had picked up in Gila Bend last night. His face changed as he read.

They took what they wanted and made off with all the money in the place—ninety dollars—and drove off all the horses and mules, to set the locals afoot and insure it would take two or three days for word to get out that they had passed this way. Provo led them out southward, toward Ajo, and kept to that course until they had gone well beyond sight of the country store. Then he turned east along a hardpan flat where hoofmarks would be hard to track. Sooner or later the pursuit would get to the country store back there; Provo wanted the law left with the impression the fugitives had struck due south for the Mexican border.

They nooned somewhere on the northern quadrant of the Papago Reservation with Tabletop Mountain in sight to the northeast. It was all rock and scrub here, worthless land beaten by the furious sun. Provo’s eyes were gritty from lack of sleep; he’d been up fifty-odd hours. They slept the rest of the day, Provo trading off sentry hours with Menendez. The rest of the crowd seemed too bone-tired to complain about anything.

Toward sundown, he got up and stretched, hearing the ligaments crack, and walked off a piece with Menendez. He showed him the three-column story on the front page. Menendez read it laboriously, his lips moving. Finally he said, “Oh, sure. Sure.”

“Yeah,” Provo said. “Eighty thousand dollars with Sam Burgade guarding it.”

“Ain’t no co-een-cidence, Zach. You know it’s a focking trap.”

“Sure. That’s the way the old bastard’s mind works.”

“They can’t catch us so they want to draw us into Tucson.” Menendez pronounced it the Spanish way,
Tooksohn.
“They’ll be waiting with every gon in town.”

“Be a shame to disappoint old Sam Burgade, wouldn’t it?”

Menendez blinked at him. “You ain’t seriously thinking about goeen in there, Zach.”

“Not into Burgade’s trap, no. But we’re going into Tucson.”

“You got your brains op your ass or what? They’re waiting for us with everything they got.”

“They’re waiting for us to hit that so-called money shipment. Friday morning when Burgade picks it up at the train depot and trucks it over to the bank. What’ll you bet there ain’t no real money at all? Just an empty box for them to lug along to make it look good.”

“Sure. So why you talking about Tucson?”

“Because come Friday morning, every gun in town will be lined up at the depot and along Congress Street and at the bank. They’ll have every inch of that street covered. You know what that’s got to mean. It means they’ve got to pull deputies and bank guards off every other cash vault in town. Off the express office, off the mercantile savings-and-loan, off the hotel cash tills and the company payroll offices. Friday’s payday, right?”

Menendez smiled slowly. “If you don’t beat all, Zach.”

It was then Tuesday evening. They spent the next forty-eight hours moving into position and equipping themselves according to Provo’s plan. Thursday afternoon they made camp in Rose Canyon, in the Santa Catalinas fifteen miles northeast of Tucson. A crystal creek trickled down from canyons higher up, crowding the defile with greenery; it was cool among the trees. Provo sent young Mike Shelby into Tucson to reconnoiter—Shelby was the one least likely to be recognized, he looked like any honest dumb young cowboy, and Provo could trust him to come back. Provo had spent an hour in Tucson last night, after dark, riding the back streets of the mercantile and warehouse sections, scouting targets. He had kept his coat collar up and his hatbrim down and nobody had paid him any attention. He had even drifted along the street within a block of Sam Burgade’s house, scouting the place out. He’d had plenty of time in Yuma to read every newspaper scrap about Burgade over the past twenty-eight years, and he’d picked the brains of every new prisoner. He knew a lot about the man, considering he hadn’t seen him in twenty-eight years. He knew where Burgade lived and what his daily habits were. He knew Burgade’s daughter lived in and kept house for the old man. He even knew that on Friday mornings Susan stayed home from her part-time job to do her thorough weekly housecleaning and laundry.

They had outfitted themselves in various village stores, going in in pairs, not attracting attention, buying what they needed with the cash they’d pilfered from the country store back in the Saucedas. Menendez wore an old straw hat that had turned an uneven brown—he’d stolen it off the hat rack in a café in Marana yesterday noon. Provo wore black stovepipe boots up to his knees, an old-fashioned brown linen duster that came down as far as the boot tops, and a peaked five-gallon hat. It was a sinister costume and he’d picked it for effect. Portugee and Lee Roy had lifted what explosives they needed from a mining construction shack up near Oracle in the Catalinas, and Menendez had augmented the arsenal with rifles and revolvers from the back room of a Marana gun shop. The theft would have been discovered by now but nobody had any reason to connect it with the fugitive convicts.

Shelby arrived at sunset, dismounted, and turned his horse over to Taco Riva. He reported:

“You were right, Zach, our best bet’s got to be the smelter mill. It’s away over west of town, a mill west of the area they’ll guard when the train comes in, and it looks like they’re gonna pull the guards off it for the train depot. They got a big old safe in the back room behind the paymaster’s office and I guess they must keep a pretty good wad inside—they pay off every first and third Friday of the month and tomorrow’s the third Friday in July. Four-, five-hundred man payroll—got to be at least twenty thousand dollars in there. Be easy to move in and out if we come down through the canyon back of the smelter. Right up to the back door of the paymaster’s office. Won’t be but half a dozen men in sight of us and none of them armed.”

Provo stood back against a tree, thumbs hooked in the front pockets of his trousers. His face was hard, ungiving, a blue-steel hatchet. “Then there it is, you gents. Twenty thousand to split—more than two thousand apiece. A man can go a long way on two thousand dollars. What do you say?”

Lee Roy said, “You asking us or telling us?”

“I’m asking you now, Lee Roy. I can’t force you all to help me rob the paymaster.”

“Then how come you din’ ask us before?”

“I had to keep us together. It was no time to take a vote.”

George Weed said, “Hell, quit jawing. We’re all with you, Zach. And if Lee Roy don’t like it he’ll get all eight of us on his neck.”

Lee Roy said sarcastically, “I’m real timid, George. I’ll shake like a leaf if you threaten at me again.”

“Gentle down,” Provo murmured. “I’m going to pass the guns around later tonight and I don’t want you people using them on each other.”

Lee Roy’s feral face became crafty. Provo knew what he was thinking. Well, that was all right. He wasn’t going to give Lee Roy any guns, but Lee Roy didn’t have to know that until the last minute. In the meantime the anticipation would keep him quiet.

“It’s going to take timing and brains,” Provo told them. “First off, we’ve got to time it to go with the train schedule. This so-called money train pulls in tomorrow morning at nine. Well hit the smelter paymaster not later than ten minutes after nine. Now, at nine o’clock exactly, Mike Shelby’s going to be on the Casa Grande road north-west of Tucson and Quesada’s going to be on the Benson road east of town. At four or five minutes after nine you two will cut the telephone and telegraph wires at both ends of town. That’s what we stole these two-dollar watches for. Now, once you’ve cut the wires you’ll ease around wide and make your way right back here where we stand now. This is where we’ll meet afterwards. Right here at noon sharp. Then we divvy up the money and go our separate ways. Meantime, while these two are cutting the wires, the rest of——”

Quesada said, “How do you cut through them wires, Zach? Them poles hard to climb.”

“No trouble. They only run seventeen poles to the mile, Joaquim. The rest’s held up by cactus and mesquite. You’ll find a low spot easy enough. Use your hacksaw.”

Quesada gritted his neat white teeth. The back of his neck was red. He sat down, grunting with burly effort, losing interest in the rest.

Provo said, “Will Gant rides down below the smelter to cut the telephone line between the smelter and town. That leaves six of us. We go into the paymaster’s office and tie everybody up, with gags. Lee Roy blows the safe open with the blasting gear. We clean it out and get to our horses fast. When we light out, we head down the road and pick up Will Gant and cut straight across the north side of Tucson.”