High and Wild (3 page)

Haskell knelt in front of the hearth, which was nearly as large as some peasant hovels. Here, too, a hog was spitted, being tended by a round-bellied, round-faced middle-aged woman in a tattered, green-embroidered apron. She glanced at Haskell and his companion, curiously wrinkled the skin above the bridge of her nose, and then merely pointed at where they could add wood to the fire.

Haskell and Sonoma did so and laid the rest of the wood to the right of the dancing flames. Haskell then glanced at the broad stone stairs at the far left end of the room. The staircase to the balcony was Haskell's and Sonoma's only access to the second story.

Somehow, they had to get to those stairs.

The firewood might just be the pass they required. If they climbed the stairs carrying wood, anyone who gave them any thought would likely only assume they were supplying fuel to the upper-story fireplaces, despite it being a relatively mild autumn desert night and the fact that the well-stoked downstairs fire probably provided more than ample heat for the entire building at this time of year.

Haskell scooped up his second bundle and turned to Sonoma kneeling beside him. But then he heard Villarreal shout in Spanish, “Now for the grand finale, my patient audience!”

Haskell turned toward the bar. Villarreal looked up at the two burly, bearded
rurales
manning the winch on the balcony above him, one on each side. El Capitán nodded and winked.

“Nooo!” screamed Pancho Calaveras, adding a pool of liquid to the other two pools that had formed around the boots of his companions. “Forgive me, and spare my wretched soul,
por favo
r
!”

That last came out strangled as the two burly
rurales
on the balcony over the bar began cranking the winch in unison, grinning delightedly. The boots of the three
banditos
rose off the bar, and the owlhoots immediately started kicking wildly. Their screams came out as choking grunts and strangled gurgles, their cheeks immediately puffing up and turning red.

Their hands were tied behind their backs, so all they could do was grunt and perform their grisly death dances about a foot above the bar. Those dances were so violent that Calaveras kicked off one of his boots, which bounced off the bar with a loud ring of its spur and bounded into the crowd. A bare-breasted
puta
caught it and held it high above her head like a trophy, while the crowd erupted in ribald laughter and loud applause.

Haskell had gotten so caught up in the spectacle that he'd failed to keep an eye on Villarreal. Now, as he looked at the captain, Villarreal was bent forward at the waist, talking to another
rurale
standing on the floor in front of the bar. Haskell was tall enough that he could see over most of the heads in the room. The
rurale
was speaking to the man before him but pointing angrily and narrowing his eyes in their direction.

There was too much other noise for Haskell to hear what the man was saying. He didn't have to. As the man Villarreal had been speaking to swung around, drew a revolver, and started pushing through the crowd, the Pinkerton turned to Sonoma.

She, too, had gotten caught up in the hanging and was smiling and shouting and waving her arms above her head as she watched the three
banditos
slowly strangle above the bar.

Haskell elbowed the girl.

And then he clawed both pistols from behind the waistband of his canvas trousers and shouted, “We got trouble,
chiquita
! As soon as I start shooting, run to the stairs!”

Haskell bolted forward, both pistols raised. The man running toward him stopped suddenly, screamed, and raised his own revolver, but not before both of Haskell's pistols roared above the din.

One of the Pinkerton's bullets punched through the nearest
rurale
's forehead, and his second shot caused Captain Villarreal, still standing on the bar, to acquire a shocked expression and to look down at his chest, from which a small fountain of dark red blood spurted.

3

H
askell shouted, “Run,
chiquita
!”
as everyone in the room screamed and dived for cover.

As Sonoma gave a wild Yaqui bellow that sounded like the warning of a stalking wildcat and leaped over tables toward the stairs, Haskell extended both his pistols toward the two
rurales
on the balcony on either side of the executioner's winch.

They'd grabbed Springfield rifles and were cocking the weapons as they aimed them over the top of the balcony rail. Haskell shot the one on the left first, then quickly took care of the one on the right.

The one on the right screamed and fired his rifle into the ceiling above the drinking hall before he went stumbling backward, covering his bloody face with one hand.

The other
rurale
lurched a step backward, dropping his rifle, and clutched his chest before stumbling forward and plummeting down over the balcony rail. He landed atop the bar with a loud, cracking
bang
beside his fallen rifle.

Haskell let out a savage whoop and jumped onto the table in front of him. He hopscotched tables over the cowering men and whores, paused halfway across the room to trigger shots at the
rurales
poking their heads in the front door, and then resumed running toward the bar on which Captain Villarreal was still standing in shock beside the men he'd hanged.

Haskell leaped onto the bar between the captain and the three hanged men. Villarreal was still clutching his hands over the frothy blood bubbling out of his chest, just left of his heart. As he stared in gray-faced, hang-jawed shock at the big, shaggy-headed “
peón
” standing before him, his eyes appeared about to bulge out of his head.

“Who . . .” he rasped, barely audible above the incredulous mutters rising from the cowering crowd, “are . . . you?”

Haskell grinned and lifted his
sombrero
straight up off his head before stuffing it back down on his dark brown curls. “Pinkerton Detective Bear Haskell, at your service, Captain Villarreal.” He swung around to send another slug hurtling through the front door, where several cowering, shifting
rurales
were trying to draw a bead on him. “Love to stay an' chat, but since you're about dead anyway, and I got the president's niece to rescue, I reckon I'll be sayin' howdy-do!”

Haskell shoved his pistols behind his waistband and leaped up onto the body of the first
bandito
on his left hanging about two feet above the bar. Climbing up the dying bandit, he paused to wink at Pancho Calaveras on his right, whose face was paper-white and turning blue, tongue swelling as it jutted out one corner of the killer's mouth, and continued shimmying on up the rope.

He reached the balcony rail and hoisted himself over, landing flat-footed. Sonoma was already there, aiming a Colt Dragoon she'd taken off a dead
rurale
over the balcony rail and yelling, “Just had to take the hard way up, didn't you,
amigo
? Or don't you Texans believe in taking the stairs?”

She triggered two shots at two
rurales
in the drinking hall who had been trying to make their way through the panicking crowd toward the stairs, and then she flung another through one of the long, rectangular front windows, evoking an anguished scream from outside.

“Wanted to pay my respects to Villarreal!”

Haskell shot a
rurale
who'd just dived into the hotel through the first window to the right of the door.

“And yeah, I'm a bit of a show off!” he added.

“I have to admit, you make me horny as hell! But where's the girl we're after, lover?”

“Follow me,
chiquita
!”

The roar had resumed from below as Haskell swung around and ran down the mouth of an intersecting hall that was decorated with broken statues and candle lanterns flickering and smoking in wall brackets. There were doors in both walls—some closed, some open, some nonexistent or cracked or bullet-pocked.

Vaguely, as he and Sonoma ran, Haskell reflected that the Palais Royal had likely fallen considerably in the years since Villarreal's gang of outlaw
rurales
had taken over La Ciudad.

Guns cracked and popped in the saloon behind him. That was to be expected now that nearly every
rurale
in the village was storming into the hotel. But Haskell hadn't expected to hear shots in front of him, sounding as though they were originating from behind one of the hall's closed doors. The muffled pops seemed to be originating from the last one on the right at the hall's end—the very door Haskell was heading for.

Behind that same door, a girl screamed.

Haskell threw his weight, backed with his running momentum, against the door. The stout walnut panel ruptured. Cracks showed the form of a cross. As Haskell backed up and threw himself against it once more, the door broke all the way through. The Pinkerton went storming into the room, stumbling and piling up on a thick, red rug.

He rolled and came up on his heels, aiming both pistols straight out in front of him.

A man was crouched against the wall to his right. A tall
rurale
—hatless, bearded, middle-aged, his eyes scrunched with pain. He held his left hand to the handle of a knife protruding from his neck. With his right hand, he aimed a .44 Colt at a blond-haired girl poking her head out from behind heavy wine-red drapes covering the large, high-ceilinged room's far window.

“
Puta
!
” the wounded
rurale
bellowed. Showing his teeth, he fired at the girl, his bullet plunking into the
adobe
wall only inches from her head, which she quickly pulled back behind the drapes with a shrill scream.

Haskell yelled, “Get down, girl!” and swung his pistols at the
rurale
piled up at the base of the wall.

As the
rurale
swung his own revolver toward Haskell, the Pinkerton put two bullets through the man's brisket, punching him to the floor, where he lay jerking as he died. The booms of a rifle sounded behind Haskell. He cast a glance over his left shoulder.

Sonoma was down on one knee, firing around the doorframe toward the front of the hall, where men were yelling and more pistols were popping and rifles were cracking.

“Better hurry, lover, we got company!” the Yaqui cried, and she triggered another round.

Haskell ran over to where he could see a pair of bare feet between the bottom of the drapes and the carpeted floor. To the left of the girl was a large, rumpled bed under a red velvet canopy. He pulled the drapes aside to reveal a slender blond girl dressed in nothing but a sheer cream-colored chemise, one strap hanging down her arm and revealing half of one small, pale breast. She knelt sideways to the wall, cowering under her arms.

“Miss Johnson?” Haskell said above the crackling of gunfire in the hall.

She jerked her head up, blue eyes sharp with hope. “Mr. Haskell?”

“Call me Bear—everyone does. You got the message, I take it, Miss Johnson?”

“Yes, the old man told me. You're here to rescue me from these”—she slid her gaze toward the
rurale
lying against the wall on the room's far side—“savages?”

Haskell had sent a message to the girl via an old peasant man who worked odd jobs around the village and at the hotel, letting the girl know when he'd be coming for her and to be as ready as she could be under the circumstances.

“You got it, sweetheart.” Haskell reached down and gently but quickly pulled the president's niece to her feet. “We'd best pull our picket pins.”

“I tried to get ready, to dress, but Villarreal has been keeping a guard on me.” She glanced toward the dead
rurale
as Haskell led her by both hands around the bed. “He tried to savage me,” she said, with a sob, “but I'd squirreled away a stiletto I'd taken off Villarreal and stuck it in his goddamn neck when he tried to stick his thing in me!”

She broke loose from Haskell and ran over and buried one of her bare feet in the dead
rurale
's belly.

“You goatish bastard!” the girl screamed. “I happen to be the niece of the president of the United States of America!” Her voice broke, and she sucked a ragged breath. “I am Madeleine Johnson, and I will not be treated like one of your two-
peso
putas
!”

“Haskell!” Sonoma screamed from the door as several bullets chewed into the frame before her, spraying slivers at her. “Grab that bitch, and let's break a leg, my sweet!”

Haskell grabbed the dead
rurale
's Colt Dragoon, unbuckled the man's cartridge belt, and slung it over his own shoulder. Then he grabbed Miss Johnson's hand and led her quickly over to the door, where Sonoma triggered several more shots toward the front of the hall.

He pushed the pretty, scantily clad, bare-legged blonde back against the wall, wedged two of his three pistols behind his rope belt, and quickly reloaded his own LeMat from the dead
rurale
's shell belt. When the LeMat was full, he reloaded the Dragoon. Just as he'd flicked the Dragoon's loading gate closed and spun the wheel, Sonoma's Springfield clicked, empty.

She jerked back against Haskell, saying, “That's it. I'm out.”

Haskell pulled Sonoma back behind him, edged a look around the doorframe, and triggered two shots, pinking the hand of one of the two
rurales
running toward him and blowing out the right eye of the other.

“You two run down the hall to the left!” Haskell yelled, stepping into the hall and aiming both freshly reloaded pistols to the right, toward the balcony. “Now! Run like hell! I'll cover you!”

“Where the hell are we going?” Sonoma shouted, pulling Miss Johnson out of the room and running fast down the hall behind the Pinkerton, with Miss Johnson cupping her free hand to her right ear and screaming at the rocketing gun blasts. “I thought you said there was no way out of the upper stories except for the main stairs!”

“I lied about that!” the Pinkerton shouted, triggering lead toward the balcony, holding the
rurales
at bay. From the glimpses he'd caught, he figured there were at least twelve gathered on the balcony, trying like hell to avenge their leader. “At the end of the hall, swing left and wait for me!”

Haskell fired another round, which plunked into the balcony rail. A
rurale
snaked a rifle around the left front corner of the balcony wall, and Haskell drew a neat round hole in the man's left temple with a .44 slug hurled from his new Dragoon, which he'd quickly taken a shine to.

Running backward, he continued firing. At the end of the hall, he turned and ran down the hall on his right, a narrower hall than the others. Sonoma and Miss Johnson stood halfway down the hall, standing about five feet apart. The girl eyed the ruggedly beautiful, high-busted Yaqui woman skeptically.

Haskell jogged past them, stopped, flipped a rug back, and grunted and yelled as he hoisted a trapdoor out of the floor.

Cobwebs and flying grit showered him as the door swung up and back to slam against the floor. Dust wafted on a wind of pent-up, moldy-smelling air.

He coughed and brushed his forearm across his eyes. “Let's go!” he yelled in a pinched voice, choking on the dust.

“Where?” Sonoma yelled back, leading the president's niece toward the door in the floor.

“Escape route in case of Apache attack! The old Mexican told me about it when I was scouting the place!”

Through the five-by-five hole in the floor, rickety wooden steps dropped away into stygian darkness.

“Careful, it's gonna be dark!”

Haskell gave Sonoma a hand down first and then helped the barefoot and bare-legged Miss Johnson. He wasn't sure what he was consigning them to. Possibly their graves. The old man had told them he wasn't sure the other end hadn't been sealed.

If so, it would be Haskell's grave, too, for there was only one back door.

As Miss Johnson descended the steps dropping away beneath the Pinkerton, running footsteps and labored breaths rose from the other end of the hall. Haskell raised his LeMat. He'd been saving the twenty-gauge shotgun shell beneath the main barrel for a special occasion.

A
rurale
ran around the corner of the intersecting hall forty yards away and sprinted toward Haskell, two more close on the first one's heels. Haskell flipped the lever that engaged the LeMat's shotgun barrel. He aimed carefully and squeezed the trigger. The LeMat bucked and kicked in his fist.

He swung the trapdoor down on top of him, clipping off the
rurale
's bitter, agonized scream as the buckshot tore through his chest, and then he scurried down, down, after the women, into the tomblike, musty darkness, wondering if he'd ever see daylight again.