The Thunder Riders Read online

“Leave him,” Considine ordered. He glanced at the others. “Let’s go. I need a drink.”

  When the column was again moving toward the large adobe casa growing above the chaparral before them, Considine turned to Anjanette, showing his perfect white teeth in a grin. “He’s behavin’ right fine now.” He patted the black’s right shoulder. “I reckon we’re friends!”

  Anjanette didn’t turn toward him but continued riding stiffly beside him, facing straight ahead.

  He frowned. “You know who owns this hammer-head?”

  Anjanette glanced at Wolf, looked away, then pooched out her lips to hide her pensive expression. “I never saw him before.”

  As they rounded a bend, the thatch-roofed adobe barn and log corrals slid back to the left, revealing an ancient windmill with a large stone tank. Water streamed into the tank with a steady metallic murmur. Around the tank stood ten or so rurales, in their customary dove gray uniforms, Springfield rifles hanging down their backs—a dusty, unshaven lot with pinched eyes and evil sneers.

  They held the reins of their horses, most of which were drawing water from the tank, though a couple lifted their heads toward the approaching desperadoes, swishing their tails nervously. A cream Arab with a silver-mounted saddle jerked its head up from the trough and whinnied.

  The rurales turned their heads slowly to watch the gang heading toward the roadhouse. One of them spoke quietly to the man standing beside him—a rangy Mex carrying his Colt revolvers in a double rig across his chest.

  Considine grinned and threw a hand up. “Howdy, boys!”

  The rurales didn’t say anything. Several of the desperadoes behind Considine chuckled. The lone black man in the group, Ben Towers, grumbled, “The only truck I got with Mexico is all the greasers.”

  “Especially those in uniform,” added Mad Dog McKenna, riding directly behind Considine.

  “And them with their hands out,” said Latigo Hayes, loosening his Buntline Special in its oiled holster and swinging his sawed-off shotgun around to hang down his chest.

  As the desperado leader put his horse up to the hitchrack, a face appeared just over the top of the roadhouse’s batwing doors. It was a square, pale face with short gray whiskers. The light blue eyes caught the afternoon light and flickered humorously.

  The man chuckled, pushed through the batwings, and said in a heavy Irish accent, “Well, I be damned. Chacon was right—you boys were headed this way, sure enough!”

  “Mick,” Considine said by way of greeting, then turned his head to glance at the rurales around the windmill. “We got a welcoming party, I see.”

  “How in the hell Chacon knows you’re coming, I’ll never know!” Mick said, planting his small, freckled hands on his hips as he stood before the doors, running his gaze up and down the group flanking Considine, Anjanette, and Mad Dog McKenna.

  The roadhouse proprietor wore a buckskin tunic and a bloodstained apron around his considerable paunch. A .36-caliber revolver was wedged behind the apron. His eyes settled on Anjanette for a time, the corners of his small mouth rising slightly as he said, “I see you gotta new woman.”

  “Anjanette, meet Mick O’Toole. Came to fight the French and stayed to run a whorehouse. Mick . . . Anjanette.”

  Mick nodded, his eyes brazen.

  “The pleasure’s mine,” Anjanette murmured, the man’s gaze making her aware of her breasts pushing out from behind the flannel shirt and fringed leather vest.

  “My old friend inside?” Considine asked Mick.

  Mick tore his gaze from Anjanette’s breasts. “Sure.”

  Considine and Mad Dog shared a meaningful glance. “Boys,” Considine said, lifting his voice so the others could hear, “why don’t you water the horses?”

  He glanced at Anjanette. She was studying him, her fine black brows furrowed.

  “You can stay out here where it’s safe,” Considine told her, swinging down from his saddle. “But the adventure’s inside.”

  Mick chuckled, adjusted the pistol in his pants, turned through the batwings, and disappeared into the roadhouse.

  Anjanette threw her hair back from her shoulders, swung down from her saddle, and tossed her reins over the hitchrack. “Well, then, I reckon I’m going inside.”

  “I kinda figured you would.” Considine grabbed her shoulders and kissed her.

  “Break it up, lovebirds,” Mad Dog said, mounting the porch steps. “We got business.”

  Considine chuckled and turned through the saloon doors behind his partner. Anjanette followed Considine, squinting against the hazy light and the wafting blue woodsmoke rife with the smell of roasting pig and harsh Mexican tobacco.

  Considine and Mad Dog stopped a few feet inside the door, and Anjanette squeezed in between them. The three shuttled their gazes around the large stone-floored room and the makeshift bar on the right.

  Mick had taken his place behind the bar, grinning, fists on the bar’s rough-sawn planks. Several wizened peasants in serapes and frayed sombreros were playing dice on the floor in a corner, a scrawny, spotted cur gnawing a knucklebone nearby.

  A couple of fat whores in sack dresses and heavy rouge were hunched over stone mugs and playing cards at a table close to the bar. One had a cigar snugged in a corner of her mouth. They glanced at the newcomers with interest, but when their gazes fell across Anjanette, hope leached from their eyes and they returned to their drinks and poker.

  Considine’s eyes were on the table at the far end of the room, near the narrow stone steps rising toward the roadhouse’s second floor. Two men in rurale uniforms, jackets unbuttoned, sat at the table, plates and bowls before them.

  The man on the left—short, round-faced, and curly-haired—sat back in his chair, ankles crossed, thumbs hooked inside the bandoliers crossed on his chest. Seeds and dust matted his tight black curls.

  He was grinning at the other man, Captain Chacon, a grossly fat mestizo with long silver-streaked hair hanging down both sides of his broad, fat face, and silver-streaked mustaches hanging down both corners of his mouth.

  A young girl, no more than eighteen, straddled the captain’s right knee, facing the table. She had full lips and wide-set light brown eyes, with a faint mole on the nub of her right cheek.

  She was topless, and the captain was flicking the brown nipple of her right nubbin breast with his index finger, laughing and glancing back and forth between the girl and the curly-haired man, Lieutenant Miguel Pascal Ferraro, as if the jostling nipple were the funniest thing he’d seen in a long time. The girl stared down at the table, bored.

  Considine turned to look past Anjanette at Mad Dog, then sauntered forward. Heading toward the captain’s table, he called to Mick for a bottle.

  Chacon and Ferraro jerked their heads up and around at Considine’s voice. Chacon spread a grin. He was missing both his eyeteeth, and it gave his fat, savage face a strange, rabbitlike look.

  “Ah, Senor Considine and Senor McKenna!” the captain said, removing his hand from the girl’s breast but keeping his arm wrapped around her shoulders. “It is an honor and a privilege to see you both again!”

  Considine sighed. “I’d like to say the feeling’s mutual, but I never tell lies in Mexico. Too many Catholics.”

  “Ain’t it funny,” McKenna said, “how you always seem to know when we cross the border.”

  While Ferraro remained staring cow-eyed at the three newcomers, as if the English were too fast for him, Chacon threw his head back on his shoulders and laughed from his belly, shaking the girl sitting on his knee so that her long, dark brown hair fluttered on her shoulders.

  When the captain’s laugh had settled to a slow boil, he said, “It would indeed be a strange coincidence if it were not for the fact that I watch the border so closely and have three Yaqui amongst my border guards. They, as they themselves boast, can smell a gringo from as far away as the last full moon!”

  Again, he threw his head back and laughed.

  Ferraro glanced at his superior, skeptically amused, and
his thick upper lip curled slightly.

  “Yaqui, huh?” Considine said, hooking his thumbs behind his cartridge belt. “Well, I’ll be damned. That’s almost like cheatin’!”

  “Reckon you gotta watch them snake-eaters pretty close, don’t ya?” said Mad Dog. “I mean, I’ve heard they’d as soon cut a rurale’s throat as look at him.”

  The captain’s laughter stopped abruptly, and he absently brushed his fingers across the whore’s nipple, making it twitch. “My men respect me, Senor McKenna. Even the Indios.” His gaze strayed to Anjanette, and turned smoky. “I see you have, uh, found a new companion, Senor.” Again his left hand lightly caressed the young puta’s tender breast. “An especially fine one, if you don’t mind my saying so, Senorita.”

  He cupped the whore’s breast with his hand, rubbing it, while staring lewdly into Anjanette’s eyes.

  Anjanette returned his stare coldly, saying nothing. Considine laughed and wrapped a proprietary arm around her neck, drawing her toward him and kissing her cheek. “Captain Chacon . . . Lieutenant Ferraro . . . let me introduce the lovely Anjanette.”

  The lieutenant’s drunken gaze flickered up and down Anjanette’s curvy body, a deep flush rising in his broad, dark cheeks. The captain closed his hand around the young whore’s breast and gave a courtly nod. “They are getting more lovely every trip, Senor Considine. My compliments. If only I could find one as lovely as she in this godforsaken country.”

  He shifted his gaze to the desperado leader, slitting one eye. “What will you take for her?”

  Anjanette’s back tensed. She opened her mouth to speak, but Considine gripped her more tightly and laughed, “She’s not for sale, Captain. Not this trip, anyway!” He laughed again, nuzzled Anjanette’s stiff neck, and muttered in her ear as he glanced toward the bar. “Mick’s lookin’ lonely over there, Chiquita.”

  Meeting the captain’s lusty, glassy gaze with a hard one of her own, Anjanette turned slowly. “Reckon I better buy him a drink.” She hooked her thumbs in the waistband of her long wool skirt, and strolled over toward the bar.

  When Anjanette had gone, Considine glanced at Mad Dog, then kicked a chair out and sat down. During the introductions, Mick had brought two stone mugs and a bottle of the pulque that he brewed himself and mixed with tequila—a heady, gut-wrenching combo.

  “Well,” said Considine, leaning forward on the table and popping the cork from the bottle. “I reckon you’re lookin’ for what you’re usually lookin’ for.”

  “Our border pass,” said Mad Dog, removing his hat and sweeping a hand through his long, greasy hair, jingling the hoops hanging from his ears. “Me and Jack been wantin’ to talk to you about that, Captain.”

  Chacon exchanged glances with Ferraro. The girl sat on the captain’s knee, seemingly oblivious of her exposed breasts, staring into space.

  Considine said, “We work hard for our living—me and Mad Dog. Stealin’ gold from stagecoaches and banks and trains—shit, that takes a lot out of a man. And me and Mad Dog ain’t gettin’ any younger.” He glanced at his partner. “Ain’t that right, Mad Dog?”

  “We sure as hell ain’t, Jack.”

  “We’re gonna have to slow down a little here pretty soon. The fifty-six thousand we took out of Saber Creek won’t last more than a few months. Not the way we like to drink, gamble, and fuck.” Considine chuckled. “So we’ve readjusted your fee, Captain.”

  As Considine reached into his shirt, Chacon and Ferraro tensed in their chairs.

  Considine froze, smiled. “At ease, boys.”

  Slowly, he lifted out a rawhide pouch. He jerked his hand, breaking the leather lanyard hanging around his neck, and tossed the pouch onto the table with a dull thud.

  “Take it or leave it,” McKenna growled.

  Lips pursed, nostrils expanding and contracting angrily, Chacon plucked the pouch off the table and hefted it, frowning. Ferraro stared at the pouch as he held one hand beneath the table, his fingers no doubt wrapped around a revolver.

  Finally, with a dubious glance at Considine, Chacon turned the pouch upside down.

  Sand and penny-sized stones sifted onto the table, the stones clattering against the planks. Something larger dropped along with the stones, and when the dust had cleared, the two rurales leaned forward, staring down at the black, dust-floured tarantula crawling around atop the debris.

  The whore jerked back against the captain’s chest, her eyes regarding the furry black spider with revulsion. With a soft cry, she scrambled off the captain’s knee and backed slowly away from the table, staring in horror at the tarantula moving its hairy legs about the sand and rocks.

  “Muerta!” she rasped, her pleated skirt buffeting about her bare brown legs.

  Cutting a glance at her, Mad Dog snorted. Considine slid his gaze to his partner, then back to Chacon, and chuckled.

  Chacon’s eyes brightened and his lips stretched back from his rabbit teeth. He chuckled then too, head bobbing, eyes shuttling between the desperadoes and the lieutenant, who appeared baffled. As the desperadoes and the captain cut loose with booming, belly-deep guffaws, the lieutenant grinned. Soon he joined them, laughing and pounding the table with his open left palm.

  Behind the bar, Mick’s eyes were dark as he stared at the four laughing men.

  Anjanette picked up a shot glass from the bar, raised it slowly to her lips, her hands shaking slightly, and tossed the drink back. When she set the empty glass on the bar, the men stopped laughing all at once, as though her setting the glass down had been a signal.

  Silence.

  The fire snapped, echoing in the adobe-lined room. Outside, a horse nickered. Sensing trouble, the fat whores, the dice players, and the dog scuttled outside.

  The whore backed up against the bar, between Mick and Anjanette. Slowly, staring toward the four men at the table, she lifted her hands to her ears.

  Chacon’s laughter had faded without a trace. His eyes hard, his lips set in a grim line, he shuttled another glance between Considine and Mad Dog. Then he leaned back in his chair and snapped his right hand to his side.

  At the same time, the two desperadoes fired beneath the table—Considine at Chacon, Mad Dog at Ferraro. Chacon screamed and dropped both hands straight down toward his crotch as Ferraro bolted up, hands crossed beneath his belly. Throwing his chair back, he twisted around and fell. The lieutenant rolled to his side, raising his knees toward his chest, yowling, blood oozing down the insides of his thighs.

  On the floor to his left, Chacon screamed as a great cacophony of gunfire sounded outside, like a sudden army battle or an Indian attack. His misery-pinched eyes rose to Considine’s, and his jaw hardened as his right arm jerked again toward his holster.

  Casually, as the gunfire continued outside, men and horses screaming, Considine slid his chair back, extended his revolver straight across the table at Chacon, and drilled a neat round hole through the middle of the captain’s forehead.

  To his left, Ferraro bellowed and fumbled his Colt Navy from its holster. He bellowed again, lay back, and extended the revolver toward Considine.

  To Considine’s right, a gun boomed, and the lieutenant’s head jerked back. He fired a round into the ceiling, dropped the gun, and grabbed his bloody throat with both hands, gasping, choking, his eyes bulging from their sockets.

  After several seconds, his body relaxed, his hands sagged to the floor, and his eyes glazed with death.

  Considine glanced at Mad Dog, who still held his silver-plated Smith & Wesson out before him, smoke curling from the barrel. He arched an eyebrow at Considine.

  “What?” Considine said. “I never covered your ass before?”

  Behind him, someone whistled. Considine and Mad Dog turned to see Cal Prewitt—a strap-thin former cow waddy in a high-crowned Stetson and patchy beard— hanging like a devious schoolboy between the half-open batwings. He had an arm draped over each door, knees bent, boots about a foot off the floor. His eyes were round with excitement.

  “Hey, Ja
ck! Mad Dog!” Prewitt swung back and forth between the batwings. “What you want us to do with the carcasses?”

  Considine holstered his revolver and fastened the keeper thong over the hammer. “Drag ’em off so ol’ Mick doesn’t have to live with the stench. Lead the horses off and let ’em go. And, for Pete’s sake, get off those doors, less’n you wanna pay for ’em!”

  “They stink as bad alive as they do dead,” said the roadhouse owner, staring down at the two dead rurale leaders. He turned to Considine, rubbing his hands on his apron. “But I appreciate the gesture, Jack.”

  Considine walked over to Anjanette, standing back against the bar, her eyes on the dead men, one hand holding a recently refilled shot glass before her lips. Considinetook the drink out of her hand, threw it back, set the glass on the counter, and wrapped his left arm around the girl’s shoulders.