Arroyo de la Muerte Read online

  “Oh, my god!” she cried.

  “Hold on, now, Miss Emma! Just hold on!”

  Too late.

  Emma ground her spurs into the buckskin’s flanks and shot forward like a cannonball.

  Chapter 22

  Del “T-Bone” Brown shifted the Henry rifle in his hands until the sights lined up on the chest of the big half-breed straddling a handsome black stallion. Brown was about to take up the slack in his trigger finger when the sun angled a bright ray down beneath the brim of his Stetson, momentarily blinding him.

  “Go ahead,” whispered his partner, Bry Thurmon, who crouched beside Brown, squeezing his own Winchester in his gloved hands.

  Brown blinked, glanced away from the half-breed rider, then tried lining up the sights again. He shook his head and lowered the rifle, massaging his eyes still flaring from the assault of that bright ray with his thumb and index finger.

  “What’re you doin’?” Thurmon said in a raspy, scolding tone, scowling down at the big half-breed riding along the trail that hugged the base of the butte he and Brown were on. “Take the damn shot, Del!”

  Brown shook his head as he watched the horse and rider just then disappear behind a thumb of the butte that bulged out over the trail, taking man and beast out of sight though Brown could hear the muffled thuds of the horse’s hooves. “Sun’s wrong.”

  “What? You had a clear shot at him!”

  “I’ll have a clearer one in a minute,” Brown returned in an indignant tone, keeping his voice low. “And without the sun in my eyes.”

  He heaved himself up off his knees, swung to his left, and climbed a little farther up on the rocks strewn around the side of the bluff. When he gained a narrow shelf roughly fifteen up from where he’d just been, he dropped to a knee again and stared down the butte’s north side, where the trail appeared again as it swung back from behind the jutting thumb.

  Thurmon climbed up behind Brown and knelt to his left.

  “See?” Brown said, giving his impatient partner a jeering grin. “Now I’ll have a better shot—with no sun in my eyes. With this bastard, you wanna be certain-sure. I was told in Apache Springs he’s tricky as hell.”

  “All right, all right. No sun. Just make that bullet count. Take him out clean so we can get the hell back to town.”

  “Hold on. Should be here in a second or two.” Brown lined up the Henry’s sights on the spot on the trail he figured the half-breed would reappear as he and the horse clomped on around the far side of the bulging belly of the bluff.

  Brown stared through the sights at the trail. He drew his index finger taut against the trigger, ready to squeeze as soon as horse and rider appeared again.

  He waited. He could feel his heart beating in that finger drawn taut against the trigger. He stared down at the deserted trail.

  “What the hell?” whispered Thurmon beside him.

  The little heart in Brown’s finger beat a little faster.

  “Where is he?” Thurmon rasped in Brown’s left ear.

  Brown could hear the anxiety in his partner’s voice. He could feel it in his own trigger finger. Still, he gazed through his sights at the trail on which at any second he expected the big, half-breed former marshal of Apache Springs to reappear atop his handsome black stallion.

  But horse and rider did not reappear. There was nothing down there but the slender horse trail littered with sand and gravel. Off the far side, a narrow canyon dropped.

  When over a minute had passed, Brown lifted his gaze from his rifle sights. He turned to Thurmon, who was staring at him, frowning. Thurman asked in a soft, pinched voice that trembled slightly, “Where in the hell’d he go?”

  Brown looked down the bluff to his right.

  Nothing.

  He looked behind him and Thurmon, along the bluff’s shoulder.

  Nothing.

  He swung his head left to stare toward the bluff’s crest.

  Still nothing.

  His heart was racing now, kicking against the backside of his sternum. He was sweating, several beads rolling down his face.

  “I don’t like this,” Thurmon said, his voice tight now as he whipped his gaze around wildly. “I don’t like this at all. Where in the hell’d he go?”

  “Here.”

  The quiet, mild voice had come from above. Quiet as it was, it was like a lightning bolt piercing Brown’s chest. Both he and Thurmon jerked their wild-eyed gazes to the crest of the bluff.

  “Oh,” Thurmon said.

  “Shit,” said Brown.

  The big half-breed stood on the bluff’s crest, twenty or so feet straight above them. His long black hair buffeted behind his shoulders in the hot breeze rising from the canyon. His jade eyes smoldered with small hot fires of contained fury. His lips moved against his severely featured, copper-skinned face.

  “You boys were gonna backshoot me.”

  Brown’s heart skipped a couple of beats. He shared a fearful glance with Thurmon, whose open mouth formed a perfect ‘O’ against his long, angular face carpeted in several days’ worth of brown beard stubble. The mole just off the corner of his right, gray eye twitched along with the vein beneath it.

  Brown looked at the half-breed again. Henry’s hands were empty. His single Colt .44 was still snugged down in the holster thonged on his right thigh clad in black broadcloth. He’d tucked the flap of his black frock coat back behind the staghorn grips, and he’d freed the keeper thong from over the hammer.

  Brown squeezed the Henry rifle in his hands, wondering…

  Could he raise the rifle, which was already cocked and ready to go, before the half-breed drew his Colt?

  He cast a quick glance at Thurmon. The faint curl of a grin on Thurmon’s lips told Brown that his partner was wondering the same thing and coming up with an optimistic answer.

  Brown looked up at the half-breed.

  The half-breed narrowed his eyes slightly, and quirked the corners of his broad mouth in a challenging smile.

  Brown drew a deep breath, let it out. He squeezed the Henry in his hands. His heart was a wild stallion kicking and bucking inside him.

  He jerked the rifle up, slamming the rear stock against his shoulder, and heard himself scream when he saw that he’d made a big mistake in underestimating the half-breed’s speed. As he began to squeeze the Henry’s trigger, the Colt in the half-breed’s own gloved hand bucked and roared, blossoming red flames and pale smoke.

  ***

  Yakima slid his Colt slightly right and squeezed the trigger once more, the second roar following so closely on the first one that both shots together sounded like a single shotgun blast.

  Both of his stalkers flew screaming down the face of the bluff, their black suitcoats flapping like wings. Dust flew up around them.

  One piled up with a smacking thud against a large rock protruding from the side of the bluff. The second one, the first man he’d shot, continued rolling down the bluff before landing with a thud onto the trail below.

  Yakima leaped forward and descended the steep slope sideways, sort of leap-sliding to keep his feet. He paused over the man who’d piled up against the rock. The man’s gray eyes stared up at him, opaque with death. Yakima’s bullet had taken him through his low middle chest.

  Yakima continued down the bluff, leaping onto the trail.

  The second man lay writhing and pressing both his hands to his upper right side. His dusty face was a mask of agony. His long, thin, sandy brown hair flew about his oval-shaped face with a thin mustache that drooped down both sides of his mouth. He had a star-shaped scar on the nub of his chin.

  Yakima stepped forward to straddle the man’s writhing body, one of his boots off the man’s right hip, the other off his left hip. He glared down at him.

  “Who you ridin’ for?”

  The man glared up at him, his eyes bright with pain. He winced, his cheeks rising like two billiard balls, then grunted, “Go to hell.”

  “Might as well tell me. You’ll be dead in three jangle
s of a whore’s bell.”

  The man stared up at him, vaguely, fleetingly thoughtful behind the pain.

  “Kosgrove? Or…” Yakima asked.

  “Hopkins.” The man shook his head slightly.

  “Why?”

  “Two reasons. The gold and Kosgrove’s daughter.”

  Yakima frowned. “The gold?”

  “The gold in the canyon.”

  Yakima continued frowning down at the man. He looked familiar. “You were with Booth. You an’ Booth killed the Bundrens.”

  The dying man winced, writhed, kicking his right boot out with a pain spasm. “Hopkins and his brother hired us and several others to make sure no one found the gold before they could get to it.”

  Yakima spat to one side in anger. “There’s enough gold in that church to make a dozen men richer than their wildest dreams.”

  “You damn fool,” the dying man spat out. “Hopkins’s greedier’n those twelve men put together.”

  “You were a fool to ride for that bastard. To try to backshoot me, you coward.”

  “Yeah, well, the joke’s on you, you half-breed son of a bitch!” The dying man was dying fast. He’d barely gotten those words out, hissing and snarling like a leg-trapped bobcat.

  “What’re you talkin’ about?”

  The dying man gave a crooked smile. “We left you a little surprise…in your room…in Apache Springs.”

  Yakima’s scowl deepened. “What kind of surprise?”

  The dying man strangled on a laugh. “Go to hell…”

  His eyes rolled back in his head, his head fell back on the trail and quivered a little as he died.

  The man’s last words echoed around inside Yakima’s brain.

  He holstered his Colt and ran back down the trail to where he’d left Wolf.

  ***

  He galloped into Apache Springs a half-hour later.

  Wolf leaped the twin rails splitting the main street in half and pulled up in front of the Conquistador Inn. This time of the day, there were few people out on the hotel’s broad, sun-washed front veranda. One of those people, however, was Julia. She’d been pacing back and forth when Yakima had ridden up, but now she swung toward him, holding a mug of coffee in both her hands.

  “Yakima!”

  He tossed his reins over the hitchrail and stopped, gazing up at her through the dust wafting around him in the sparkling midday air.

  She hurried along the veranda to stand atop the steps. “Hopkins!” She gritted her teeth, her eyes on fire. “He killed Candace Jo. Slit her throat!”

  “Where’d you find her?”

  “In his room. He told me she’d be there. He killed her because he…he knew…about us…last night.” Her eyes turned sheepish. She opened and closed her hands around her coffee mug.

  Yakima paused to think through the information. The Hopkins ambusher had told Yakima he’d find the surprise in his own room.

  Yakima looked at Julia again. “Have you seen Rusty Tull today?”

  Julia frowned. “No. As a matter of fact, I forgot all about…”

  She let the sentence die on her lips as Yakima hurried up the porch steps. Apprehension blazed inside him. As he reached the veranda, Julia looked up at him, walking along beside him as he entered the hotel. “Hopkins rode out of town earlier. With several men, including his brother Ferrell. Business associates and hired guns.”

  Yakima stopped and turned to her, incredulity furling his brows. “Why?”

  “They’re after something out there. Something valuable. They took three big wagons,” she called as Yakima continued walking along the bar to the broad staircase at the rear. “Emma and your deputy rode out after them.”

  Again, Yakima stopped and turned back to her.

  Christ, what the hell was going on? Why did he have the uneasy feeling a very large powder keg had exploded, and he’d been the last to know?

  First things first. He had to get up to his room to check on Rusty.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said, then hurried up the stairs, one hand on the rail and taking two steps at a time.

  He jogged along the second-floor hall to his room.

  He twisted the knob. Unlocked. He shoved the door wide, took one step into the room, shuttling his gaze from left to right, and stopped cold in his tracks.

  “You sons of bitches,” he said slowly, under his breath, his heart striking his breastbone like a smithy’s hammer.

  Rusty Tull’s slender body hung from a ceiling beam between the end of Yakima’s bed and the wooden dresser abutting the room’s right wall. The lanky redhead was clad only in his longhandles. His pale feet were bare. His stringy hair hid his eyes and part of his mouth.

  His executioners—the two men now lying dead on Yakima’s backtrail—must have found him in bed earlier this morning. They’d pulled him out of bed, tied a stout noose around his neck, and hoisted him up until the back of his head was snug against the ceiling beam.

  They’d tied off the end of the rope to a leg of the heavy dresser, which had slid out a little from the wall, at an angle. The kid had fought them, of course. A picture had been knocked from the wall.

  They’d choked off his screams with a dirty sock. The sock was still in the poor kid’s mouth, slithering out of it like an oversized worm, the patched toe hanging down near the boy’s skinny, floury white chest.

  “Oh, my god!”

  Yakima had been so shocked and enraged to find Rusty hanging dead from the beam that he’d only vaguely heard running footsteps in the hall outside his room. Now he turned to see Julia standing behind him, gazing up in horror at the poor dead redhead, one hand cupped to her mouth.

  “They headed southwest, I take it,” Yakima said and hurried back out of the room.

  Chapter 23

  “Fools!” Emma screamed as she galloped toward the church. “You damn fools!”

  Gunshots ripped through the canyon, echoing like thunder. Several bullets screeched through the air near Emma and the buckskin.

  A man shouted, “Trouble, Mister Hopkins!”

  More gunfire, smoke puffing from the maws of rifles facing Emma from in front of the church.

  Emma drew back sharply on the buckskin’s reins. The horse skidded to a halt, Emma throwing up her empty hands and screaming, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!” Her carbine was still in its scabbard, her pistol still in her saddlebags. She knew she couldn’t win a shoot-out with these men. She wanted to talk reason to them, if possible.

  She stared at the men before her. There were at least a dozen forming a semi-circle out front of the church and a large cream tent that had been set up in front of it and to its right side, near a small clump of mesquites.

  Just now standing outside the tent and smoking a fat cigar was John Clare Hopkins and a shorter, younger man whom Emma knew to be the man’s brother. Three other men, as well-groomed and as well-dressed in flashy suits as the Hopkins brothers, were just now stepping out of the tent, looking wary, tentative. They were also smoking cigars. One also held a shot glass in his hand. Another held a stout brown beer bottle.

  Three wagons had been pulled up in front of the church. At least a dozen more men—large, beefy, bearded types who appeared day laborers or possibly miners—stood around the church, many of them wielding sledge hammers. They’d been slamming the hammers against the church walls, shattering the ancient adobe to get to the gold that lined the church’s inside walls. Some now stood around the front door, having stepped out from the church’s bowels to see what all the shooting had been about.

  Emma held her reins taut in her gloved hands, facing the duster-clad, cold-eyed men Hopkins and his moneyed partners had apparently hired as guards and who now stood aiming rifles at her. A couple of these professional killers were down on one knee, staring with chilling flintiness at her through the sights of their Winchesters, daring Emma to come one more step closer.

  One of them, a man with a thick, blond, soup-strainer mustache and close-set eyes beneath the
brim of his tobacco-brown Stetson, glanced over his shoulder at the well-dressed men standing in front of the tent. “It’s a girl, Mister Hopkins. I’ll kill her if you say so.”

  The man’s threat was flatly indifferent. He might have been saying he was about to head to the grocery store for a pound of beef and a basket of eggs.

  “Hold on.” Hopkins glanced at his nattily dressed partners then walked forward, scowling. Her stepped between two of the gunmen then shuttled his glance toward Emma to the workers standing around before the church. “What the hell are you men gawking at? I’m not paying you to stand around. Get to work!”

  A couple of the workers resumed smashing their stout-headed hammers against the adobe walls.

  “No!” Emma screamed, kicking the buckskin forward then drawing back on the reins again when one of the riflemen fired a warning shot perilously close to her head.

  She jerked her head back, hair flying around her shoulders, then cast her horrified gaze to Hopkins. “You don’t understand what you’re doing! You can’t do this! You can’t take any of that treasure!”

  “I can’t, can I?” Hopkins said with a defiant, mocking grin. He tapped ashes from the end of his cigar and said, “Well, have a look.” He gestured at the church. “That’s exactly what I and my partners are doing.”

  Emma gaped in horror as the burly workers continued hammering at the church’s walls, smashing large holes in the adobe. Gold plates flashed within those holes, some of the inside gold tiles tumbling onto the ground outside the church, along with the crushed adobe. As dull and dusty and sooty as it was, the sunlight still glistened off of it.

  Two men emerged single-file from the church’s doorless opening. They were hugging gold and silver candleholders and silver, jewel-encrusted chalices to their chests. The tramped over to one of the wagons and dumped the loot into straw-lined crates.

  Jerking her gaze back to Hopkins, Emma said, “It’s cursed! It’s all cursed, you fool! You can’t remove any of that treasure from this canyon!”

  Hopkins stood before Emma, the grave-eyed gunman flanking him, still aiming their rifles at the girl. “What are you talking about, Emma? Cursed? What’s cursed?”