Slocum and the Socorro Saloon Sirens (2 page)

“What happened to him?” he asked the woman.

“They—They tortured him,” she said. “There are cuts all over his chest.”

“They?”

“It's a long story,” she said. “I helped my father escape, but . . .”

“But what?” Slocum asked.

“If they find him, they'll kill him.”

“What's your name?” Slocum asked. He realized that the woman was on the verge of hysteria. She looked ready to fall into a swoon.

She stared at him, as if she hadn't expected the question.

“I'm Penelope Swain,” she said. “My pa's name is Jethro. Jethro Swain. Oh, mister, will you help us?”

“Where were you going?” he asked.

“I don't know. We just had to get away from that awful place. Maybe to Fort Craig?”

“That's a long walk from here.”

“I'd like to take him to his brother's, but that's a far piece, too.”

“If you'll show me the way, I'll take you and your father to his brother's. What's his name?”

“Obadiah Swain. My Uncle Obie. That's what we call him.”

“Does your uncle know about your father?”

“No, not yet. I think they tortured my pa to find out where he lives, where he has his cache of silver.”

“So, this is about money?”

“Silver, yes.”

“This man, your father, needs a doctor.”

“I'm a nurse. I can tend to him if we can get him to a safe place.”

“I can carry your father double on my horse. You can ride the other bareback.”

She looked over at the two horses.

“That horse looks blind,” she said. “And it's crippled, isn't it?”

“Yes, the horse is blind and lame.” He did not tell her that he was going to put the horse down. For now, Moses would serve to carry her on its back, while he carried her father on Ferro. “Before we go, Penelope—”

“Call me Penny,” she interrupted him. “And what's your name?”

“John Slocum,” he answered. “Before we go, Penny, you'd better tell me what I'm up against. Who tortured your father and who wants to get your uncle's silver?”

“I don't know who carried my pa off in the middle of the night, nor who tortured him. But I do know where they were holding him.”

“That might help. Where?”

“Socorro,” she said. “The Socorro Saloon.”

“Socorro? That mean's ‘help' in Spanish. I've never been there.”

“Yes, the word means ‘help,' or ‘aid,' but that saloon is an evil place. My pa isn't the only one they kidnapped and tortured. And I know some of the men were killed, murdered by those vultures.”

“Vultures don't murder anything,” he said.

“These vultures at the Socorro Saloon do.”

Slocum drew a breath. He gave Jethro another taste of water and handed his canteen to Penny.

“See if you can get on that old horse,” he said. “I'll take care of your pa.”

Slocum lifted Jethro up and felt a wetness at the back of his shirt.

When he looked down at his hand, it was covered with fresh blood.

“Where are we going?” Slocum asked Penny once they were mounted.

She pointed across the river to a distant point that was meaningless to Slocum.

“How did you and your father get across the river?” he asked.

“I'll show you,” she said.

The Rio Grande del Norte was a formidable river, wide and deep. As they left the road and angled toward it, he could hear the soft moan of its waters, and when he saw it up close, sunlight glinted off the brown and faint green of its glassy surface. Penny pointed to two rocks a short distance upriver, small boulders that marked a place where the river slowed at a bend and there were sandy islands breaking up the flow. On the other side, there were two more small boulders.

“That's the ford,” Penny said.

“How deep is the deepest part?” he asked.

“Pa and I waded it,” she said. “In the deep part it came up to our waists. The bottom is solid there.”

“Let me know if I get off track,” he said, and pulled on the halter rope to shorten it. As Ferro stepped into the stream, Moses followed, his blind eyes oblivious to the danger, but his nostrils turned rubbery as he sniffed the river waters and followed Slocum. The water came up to Ferro's chest in the deepest part. Slocum lifted his stovepipe boots out of the stirrups to keep them dry.

They reached the other side in less than ten minutes. They came out right next to the two stones that marked the ford.

“You went across perfect,” Penny said. “Now don't follow that trail. It leads to Socorro, and we don't want to go there.”

“As you say,” he said. “I wonder if your father's kidnappers are still looking for him?”

“I don't know,” she said. “But they might be. Just ride off to the right about a half mile and then go straight toward the mountains.”

There was a thin blue break on the distant horizon, and he could see white mountain peaks gleaming in the sun.

He went where she told him to go, and the land seemed to grow more desolate and lifeless the farther they got off the trail. Lizards blinked as they rested on rocks, and he heard a rattlesnake shake its tail in a clump of prickly pear. A quail sat atop a distant yucca and sounded a warning before it took flight and disappeared.

Slocum learned a great deal from Penny as they rode through the bleak, trackless desert, well off the road. He learned a lot, but not enough. She seemed reluctant to tell him too much, or else, he figured, she did not trust him. But as she talked, he tried to form pictures in his mind, not only of her father's ordeal, but of his addiction to opium, and the mysterious Socorro Saloon.

He did not want to tell her that he thought her father was dying, even as he held him tight against his chest, blood seeping onto Slocum's black shirt.

“Can you tell me how your father wound up in this condition?” Slocum asked.

“I don't know all of it. Some men came into our house. They had guns and their faces were covered. They dragged my father out of bed and took him away. I didn't find out where my pa was until yesterday.”

“Is that where we're going now?” Slocum asked. “To your house?”

“Yes. That's where I keep my medicines. I know Pa is in serious condition. I'm going to try and save his life.”

“Shouldn't you take him to a doctor?”

Penny made a sound in her throat that came out through her nostrils. It sounded like an airy snort.

“A doctor would just tell me what to do. I already know what to do.”

“You do?”

“I think so. Please, no more questions. I don't want to think about Pa just now.”

“Well, he's bleeding,” Slocum said. “I think he might have a back wound.”

“Bleeding a little is probably the best thing for him right now, Mr. Slocum.”

The ground rose beneath them, rising above the level where they had been. They rode through flowered yucca, prickly pear, ocotillo, sage, and scrub juniper, the stately forms of saguaro standing like sentinels over a barren land, hoarding water in their trunks, protecting their treasure with sharp spines.

Something off to the left caught Slocum's eyes, and he turned his head. Sunlight splashed on whitewashed adobe walls and a rusted cistern on wooden stilts.

“That's Socorro,” Penny said.

There were scattered adobes, small earthen dwellings that seemed to have been placed there at random. There was a three-story building that looked like an old fort, surrounded by smaller ones that were one and two stories high, with log ends jutting from the inner ceilings.

“That big building is the main hotel,” she said. “Next to it is the Socorro Saloon, where Pa was held prisoner. It has a basement, one of the few in Socorro.” She seemed to shiver as she spoke, with either fear or revulsion, Slocum couldn't tell which.

“Not much of a town.”

“It was built long ago as a haven for those who managed to survive the
Jornada del Muerto
,” she said.

“The Journey of Death.”

“Yes. That's why it's named Socorro.”

That's when Slocum saw the sloping plain north of the town. It was littered with little white slabs of wood, crosses, headstones, and a profusion of flowers tied together in bundles or fashioned into wreaths. It was the cemetery, Slocum knew, a place where men, women, and children were buried, and likely where the man in the saddle with him would end up. The name of the town, then, was more than a little ironic, considering the number of graves on Boot Hill.

“It wasn't any help to your father.”

“No. The saloon is an evil place. Please, Mr. Slocum, we must ride on, get out of sight of the village. I don't trust those people.”

“All the people?” he asked.

“Those who might be watching,” she said, and he heard the faint tremor in her voice. They rode on, out of sight of Socorro.

“Do we have far to go?” he asked. The blind horse was stumbling and kept pulling against the lead rope as if it wanted to return to the fort and lie down. Its white eyes were a constant reminder of its blindness and its gray-streaked hide a reminder of its age.

“Three or four miles,” she said.

Beyond the town of Socorro, Slocum saw the rippling waters of a mirage, streaks of vaporous silver that glistened in the sun, vanishing and reappearing like the ghost of a lake, the ghosts of shining streams. He shifted his glance to the land around them, and soon the town and the cemetery had vanished like the watery mirage. The sun scorched the already burnt land, and he wiped sweat from his brow with the bandanna around his neck. Penny rode straight-backed, like a princess on a fine steed, and he marveled at the way she held herself in such heat and under such circumstances.

It seemed more like five miles to Slocum before Penny pointed to a low adobe building nestled between two small hillocks. But the dwelling was on high ground, compared to its surroundings, and as they rode closer, Slocum saw that the two hillocks were braced by deep channels cut into the earth, both leading to a wide, rocky plain.

“That's where we live,” Penny said.

“Pretty smart of your pa to cut those ditches on either side of those little hills,” Slocum said.

“We get a lot of flash floods out here,” she said. “Pa dug those canals so that the water, when we get a big rain, just drains off down onto that flat.”

“Like I said, pretty smart,” Slocum said.

“Pa is a smart man,” she said, “in most things.”

Slocum resisted the urge to ask her about those things he wasn't so smart about, but they rode up to the hitch rail, and a black-and-white dog rushed out to greet them, its tail flicking back and forth in a wild semaphoric pleasure.

“That's Daisy,” Penny said. “She's a border collie. She won't bite you.”

Penny tied the halter rope to the hitch rail in front of the adobe house and walked around to the side of Slocum's horse. He stepped out of the saddle with care. He let the wounded man tilt toward him, then pulled him down. Penny took her father in her arms.

“I can take it from here,” she said. “There's a lean-to and a corral out back where you can put the horses up. You can grain and water them there.”

“You don't need any help getting your pa inside the house?”

“John, I'm used to caring for the sick and the lame,” she said, and he thought he detected a slight note of sarcasm in her voice. She put one of her father's arms over her shoulder and walked him to the front door. She went inside and Slocum walked the horses around the adobe.

Out back, there was, as she had said, a pole corral, a large lean-to where a horse and a mule stood under the canopy in the shade. He turned Ferro and Moses into the corral, stripped his saddle and bridle off Ferro. There was a water trough under the lean-to, and a bin full of hay sticking through the slats. Room enough for a horse's or a mule's head between the boards. Well built, he thought, all of it. The corral, the lean-to, the adobe house, which blended into the landscape so well, he knew it would be invisible at a distance.

He walked around to the front of the house and stared at a mirage that bristled on the horizon less than a mile away. He saw movement inside the tilting mirror of silvery waters and shaded his eyes with his hands. Sweat trickled down the back of his neck and streamed along his spine. The hairs on the back of his neck stiffened and began to tingle.

Two riders seemed to wade through the watery mirage, their shapes distorted and ghostly, as if they were the dead rising from a desert lake.

He set his rifle and scabbard down and waited as the riders left the mirage in their wake and continued their steady pace straight toward him.

Slocum patted the belly gun he kept inside his belt and lifted his .45 Colt an inch out of its holster, then let it slide back so that it was loose, but ready to draw at a second's notice.

One man was taller than the other, and older. The younger one was wild-eyed and nervous, with hair poking out from under his hat like straw. The older man was lean, whiplash thin, with a shadow of beard stubble flocking his chin. He was the one who spoke first as the two men halted a few yards from Slocum, their eyes fixed on him as if he were an escaped convict in prison stripes.

“Howdy, stranger,” the tall man said. “You got business hereabouts?”

“If I do,” Slocum said, “it's my business.”

“Maybe not.”

“Oh?” Slocum said.