Bullet Creek (8 page)

“Where's my granddaugher?” the rancher asked sharply.

The Mexican turned his horse quarter-wise to the house and threw the Arab's lead at Vannorsdell, who swatted at it halfheartedly and missed. The Mex had Indian-dark features and a thin, patchy beard. Sweat streaked his cheeks. “Real de Cava sent me. You want your granddaughter back, ride alone to the top of Hatchet Butte in one hour. Even exchange, you for her. Remember, come alone. Do not wear a gun.”

The vaquero reined his horse around and was about to boot it back toward the gate when Navarro reached up and grabbed the man's left arm. Tom gave the arm a hard pull. With a surprised grunt, the Mex tumbled off the horse's left hip and hit the dust with a thud. He clamored onto his hands and knees and jerked his head up, his nostrils flared, his eyes pinched with outrage.

Reaching for the ivory-gripped Russian revolver strapped butt-forward on his left thigh, he wailed, “Son of a—”

Tom rammed his pistol barrel into the Mex's open mouth, drove the man to the ground. On one knee, Tom thumbed the big Colt's hammer back and stared flintily down into the Mex's startled, frightened eyes. “That wasn't quite enough information, you son of a bitch.”

The Mex stared up at him, the sun glistening off his small black eyes. When he'd let his arms fall to his sides, Navarro removed the pistol from his mouth but held the barrel an inch from his lips.

The Mex turned his gaze to Vannorsdell standing over Tom's right shoulder. “He killed Don de Cava!”

Vannorsdell crouched beside Navarro. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“You know!”

“If I knew I wouldn't be askin' you.”

“We found the old man with half his brains blown out last night after he rode off with you.”

Navarro turned to Vannorsdell, who met his gaze, frowning. Turning back to the Mex, Vannorsdell said, “Francisco's dead?”

The man glared up at him around Navarro's cocked Colt.

“Must've happened after I left him,” the rancher said, returning his gaze to Navarro. “I heard a shot behind me, on the other side of the ridge. I figured it was just one of the hands shooting a coyote.”

No one said anything for several seconds. The Mex lay on the ground, chest and belly rising and falling sharply, shuttling his sun-bright eyes between the two men crouched over him.

“Real thinks you pulled the trigger,” Navarro said.

“Obviously.” Vannorsdell squinted his eyes and pursed his lips as he inclined his gaze to the Mex. “He must've nabbed Karla on her morning ride.”

Bunching his lips with fury, Navarro turned back to the Mex, drew the pistol back toward his own chest, and angled the barrel slightly left. He pulled the trigger.

The pistol popped and bucked, drilling a smoky hole through the man's left arm, halfway between his elbow and his shoulder. Screaming, the Mex grabbed the hole with his right hand and rolled onto his left shoulder, kicking his legs.

“You shot me, you son of a bitch!”

“You can take a message to Real,” Navarro said. “He touches one hair on that girl's head, there's gonna be more dead de Cava riders than rocks between here and the San Pedro.” Navarro ratcheted back his gun hammer again, planted the barrel against the writhing Mexican's forehead. “You got all that?”

“
Sí,
” the man grated out through gritted teeth.

Navarro withdrew the pistol and looked around. Most of the Bar-V riders were out working the herd or cutting alfalfa along the river, but several, including the skinny German cook and the beefy half-breed blacksmith, who'd been assigned to headquarters chores, had gathered around Navarro, Vannorsdell, and the wounded Mex. Danny Torres had run down the Mex's horse. The half-Pima, half-Mexican drover now stood ten yards away, holding the mount's reins and watching the scene with wary curiosity.

Grabbing the Mex's pistol from the man's holster, Navarro stuck the gun behind his own cartridge belt and jerked the Mex to his feet by his collar. The man's sombrero hung from its thong down his chest. “Now get on your goddamn horse and fog it out of here!”

Navarro gave the man a swift kick in the ass, and the Mex stumbled forward, nearly falling. Clutching his bloody arm, he glanced at Tom, fury mixing with the pain in his eyes, then grabbed the reins from Torres and awkwardly mounted his horse. Torres backed to the horse's right hip and slipped the man's Spencer from the saddle boot and looked at Tom, who nodded with approval.

Before the Mex's horse had galloped ten yards from the front gate, Vannorsdell jerked his eyes at the men gathered around him in the sifting dust. “What are you waiting for? Saddle your horses.” He singled out the middle-aged man who'd been sharpening the sickle rake with a mill file. “Oscar, take a fast horse and summon the others.”

“What should I tell 'em, boss?”

Vannorsdell glanced sharply at Navarro, then wheeled toward the house. “Tell 'em we got gun trouble.”

Forty-five minutes later, Navarro, Lee Luther, and a rider named Dave Watts, who'd been a sharpshooter for Longstreet during the Fight for Southern Independence, trotted their sweating horses along a dry wash east of the Bar-V headquarters. They ducked through a wind-carved tunnel in a sandstone scarp and came out the other side, blinking against the harsh light.

Navarro reined his horse left, pushed through greasewood and willows, and halted the claybank between the wash and a sheer sandstone wall rising toward the brassy noon sky.

Dave Watts and Lee Luther halted their horses off Navarro's right stirrup. “What now?” Lee Luther asked quietly.

Navarro swung down from his saddle. “Now you stay here with the horses while me and Dave do a little mountain climbing.”

The kid's eyebrows beetled with disappointment. “You mean, you just brought me along to hold the horses?”

“That's right.” Navarro shucked his Winchester, jacked a shell into the breech, and off-cocked the hammer. “Count yourself lucky.”

Watts had dismounted his blue roan mare and stood staring up the scaly, weather-pummeled, sun-blasted ridge. He was a slight, muscular man with thin, dark hair and a handlebar mustache. Many thought he resembled the famous tracker Tom Horn, who had helped ship most of the Chiricahuas off to Florida. While Watts was a good horseman who worked well with cattle, he had a lazy streak and couldn't be trusted around liquor. He could, however, shoot a june bug off a mill pond from a hundred yards.

“Mountain climbing? You didn't say nothin' about mountain climbing,” Watts complained.

“Didn't I?” Navarro said, moving past Watts to the base of the ridge. “I must've forgot.”

As Navarro slung his rifle over his shoulder and started climbing the ridge, using his feet as well as his hands, muscling himself up, Watts cursed and followed suit. The ridge wasn't as sheer as it looked from below, a fact that Navarro hoped was lost on Real de Cava's men gathered at the ridge crest. With luck, de Cava wouldn't expect anyone to climb Hatchet Butte from this side and direct all his attention to the north and west. To encourage him to do so, all the other Bar-V riders had been ordered to gather atop a low, unnamed ridge just north of Hatchet.

De Cava had told Vannorsdell to come alone, but the rancher and Navarro had decided that having the other men gathered nearby was a necessary ploy, while the rancher himself rode up to meet de Cava atop Hatchet Butte. Otherwise, the de Cava gang would most likely shoot the rancher on sight. They'd have no reason not to kill Karla, then, too.

It wasn't the most difficult of climbs, but Navarro had skinned his hands and knees plenty, and he'd lost his hat, by the time he'd rounded a bulge in the crumbling rock wall. He was ten yards from the crest when a hiss rose on his left. He turned his gaze to a shadowed nook. It took his eyes several seconds to adjust to the dim light.

The diamondback rattler, big around as a man's forearm, was coiled above a rocky scab—probably its nest. Its flat copper eyes riveted on Navarro, the rattle blurred with movement, neck tensed and ready to strike.

Knowing he had no options, Navarro dug his right hand into the wall and lashed at the striking snake with his left. The snake's head with bared razor fangs had traveled only a few inches from its coiled body when Navarro's left hand closed around its neck, squeezing.

Tom jerked the snake from the wall. The snake coiled furiously, its body a live whip in Navarro's left fist, as he thrashed it twice against the cliff face, then opened his hand. The snake fell, writhing. It landed in the scrub about twenty yards to the left of Lee Luther, who'd watched its descent wide-eyed, his lower jaw hanging.

When Lee Luther looked back up the wall at Navarro, Tom waved a hand, telling the boy to stay away from the snake, and glanced at Dave Watts, about ten feet straight beneath him.

The sharp shooter was grinning beneath the brim of his sweat-stained Stetson, showing all his teeth as he wagged his head.

Navarro grabbed a knob above with his left hand, dug his boots into the wall, and climbed the last few yards, then pulled himself onto a narrow ledge running along the ridgetop. He turned, pulled Watts up beside him, touched a finger to his lips, and sidled along the ledge, running his hands along the rock wall behind him.

He peered around the left edge of the scarp. Below, on another, broader, flatter level of the butte's crest, about twelve sombrero-clad vaqueros stood staring north and west, as Navarro had hoped. Behind them, Karla knelt in the scarp's shade, her ankles and wrists tied. She didn't appear to be too banged up, and her clothes weren't torn. De Cava's border roughs had restrained themselves.

From behind the rocks, a man cursed and yelled, “That grande hombre shot me, the son of a whore!”

Lifting his gaze northward, Navarro saw the fifteen or so Bar-V riders, mounted and lined up along the hogback a quarter mile away. They did nothing overtly threatening, just sat their mounts, holding their rifles skyward, staring toward the de Cava men, many of whom were taunting the whites with Spanish curses and broken-English tirades against their mothers.

One vaquero, staggering drunk, dropped his trousers and mooned the Bar-V boys. Tom was glad his men weren't provoked. From the smell of mescal wafting from below, most of de Cava's men were soused and, if riled, probably not above drilling a bullet through Karla's head.

Turned away from the Bar-V men, facing eastward, Real, Alejandro de Cava, and several other border roughs seemed to be watching someone approach beneath the line of Navarro's vision. Then the ragged leather hat, the wrinkled red forehead, and pinched, angry eyes of Paul Vannorsdell rose above the ridgeline. Vannorsdell's horse stopped where Navarro could see only its head above the ridge, and the rancher 's head and chest. The chestnut rippled its withers and nickered, nervous.

“What the hell have you done with my granddaughter, Real?” Vannorsdell demanded.

Real looked down at him. He and his brother were half turned away from Navarro so Tom couldn't see their faces. “Told you to come alone, you murdering old bastard.”

“I didn't kill your father.”

“No? Then who did? You rode up the ridge with him. You were the last one to see him alive. We find him dead, his brains blown out.”

“You want the ranch,” Alejandro said, holding a rifle down low across his thighs.

“I'd have to have some pretty big cajones to kill your father on his own land. And I'd have to be a pretty miserable friend.”

Alejandro turned to his older brother, who was two or three inches shorter than him, but broader through the hips and shoulders. “Shoot him, Real. You do it or I will.”

“No, no,” Real said. He glanced at the low northern butte, where the Bar-V riders sat stiffly, watching. “We will take this old man back to Rancho de Cava. There, we will try him . . . and hang him.” He looked at his brother. “Get the girl.”

“With pleasure.” Alejandro turned and, his bell-bottomed black pants swishing about his boots, stalked over to Karla. He grabbed his bowie knife from its sheath, cut her ankles loose, then pulled her to her feet and half dragged, half led her over to the edge of the ridge.

Her arms were still tied behind her back. By the heavy way she moved, Navarro could tell her feet were asleep. Alejandro positioned her between himself and Real.

“Turn her loose,” Vannorsdell said.

Real raised his Winchester, aimed it at the rancher. “Not until you've climbed down from that saddle, and your men have vamoosed.”

The vaqueros, sobered now, were lined out defensively along the ridge's northern lip. They held pistols or repeaters as they shuttled their gazes back and forth between the two brothers and Vannorsdell, and the Bar-V men sitting the butte on the other side of the willows and gravelly wash below. The wounded rider, still out of Navarro's sight, had fallen silent.

Over Navarro's head, wrens and swallows screeched. Seeing that none of the men were looking his way, the foreman stepped smoothly out from behind the scarp, crossing the six-foot gap in the wall and hunkering down behind a tall limestone column jutting directly over the de Cavas, Karla, and Vannorsdell.

He peered around the left side of the column, then turned to regard Watts. The sharpshooter had dropped to a knee where Navarro had just been and, holding his rifle barrel up in his right hand, stole a look around the scarp.

Navarro whistled softly. Watts looked at him. Navarro raised his hand high, to indicate height, then ran his index finger across his throat.

Watts nodded.

Navarro stretched another look around the column. Vannorsdell had dismounted. Scowling, he turned to the Bar-V riders gathered on the northern butte. “Fog it home, boys!”