Arroyo de la Muerte Read online

  He’d intended to continue on south to Mexico, but then one damn thing had led to another, he’d gotten entangled with not one but two women—sisters, no less--and here he was, forking a cayuse in pursuit of outlaws and wearing a five-pointed star on his shirt, beneath the lapel of his black frock coat.

  Yakima Henry—lawdog. Imagine that.

  He snorted a disbelieving laugh as he rode crouched low in the saddle, gazing down at the floury trail marked with the indentations of two distinct sets of shod horse tracks. Recent tracks. Both sets of prints were less than a half-hour old.

  He was on the right trail. His quarry wasn’t far.

  As he rode, the sun rose behind him, the heat intensifying. It was so dry that his sweat evaporated at nearly the same time it oozed from his pores, leaving a salty crust on top of that he’d acquired when he’d ridden out to help his senor deputy, the Rio Grande Kid, and the Apache-stalked stage on which the Kid had been hauling a prisoner back from Tucson.

  Fifteen minutes out of Apache Springs, the twin rails of the Central Arizona Line swerved off to the right, crossing an arroyo via a new wooden bridge that still stank of the coal oil bathing its timbers. As the trail swerved to the left, south, around a rocky hogback straight ahead, Yakima glanced down at the finely churned dirt.

  The fresh tracks remained. So far, the riders hadn’t felt the need to head cross-country to avoid a possible hunter or hunters. They had to know they’d be trailed. You didn’t knife a man as important as Julian Barnes and not think there’d be serious repercussions. Even in a town growing as fast as Apache Springs and in which the local law enforcement was seriously undermanned.

  Barnes was one of the newcomers to town, arriving a little over a year ago to build his almost instantly notorious Bella Union Theater on Third Avenue, where some of the most popular dancing girls on the frontier pranced around on stage wearing no more than hair feathers and smiles. (Barnes even put on Shakespeare plays fully cast by nude women. Who cared if it didn’t make sense? The cowboys and miners wouldn’t have known Shakespeare from General Grant’s three-legged cat.)

  Apparently, Barnes didn’t like to mix business with pleasure, however, so instead of allowing his own doxies at the Bella Union to tend his male cravings, he headed over to Senora Alvarez’s brothel on the main drag and satisfied himself in the Senora’s nattily appointed love nests on the second and third floors of the gaudy Victorian structure. And that was where the man got stuck by the big half-breed Apache, Gabriel Mankiller.

  Something didn’t seem right about the whole affair.

  Why attack and rob a man of Barnes’s stature, especially when there were witnesses? Of course, there’d likely been whiskey involved, and whiskey trumped good sense every day of the week, especially in a boom town like Apache Springs. But, still…something about the mess nagged at the edges of Yakima’s consciousness though he didn’t dwell on it over long.

  First things first—and that first thing was running down Mankiller and his companero, Damaso Guzman.

  Yakima loped along the base of the rocky bluff, angling southwest, the high butte sliding back behind his right shoulder. Another high nest of rocks rose off the trail’s left side—a long, red, vaguely dogleg-shaped dyke appropriately named the Dogleg Rocks. In the past, before the railroad had come to town, stagecoaches between Tombstone and/or Tucson and Apache Springs were frequently robbed near the Rocks, which provided good cover for highwaymen.

  Something told Yakima that he himself should be wary of the Rocks now, too. He checked the blowing zebra dun down to a walk and, holding the reins firmly in his gloved hands, squinted against the intensifying, brassy desert light as he scrutinized the disheveled formation rising thirty or so yards off the trail, above the bristling desert flora.

  A slight breeze erupted, moaning through the rocks and lifting dust from a clearing amongst the greasewood and yucca, shepherding the grit to the southeast. Yakima perused the Dogleg Rocks through that billowing tan curtain, apprehension touching his spine like the cold tip of a witch’s finger.

  Movement in the brush to his hard left quickened his heart. His heart slowed when he saw merely a coyote slinking through the chaparral. Yakima’s ticker quickened yet again when the coyote tossed a wary glance back over its right shoulder, toward the Rocks.

  Yakima stopped Galveston Penny’s dun as he returned his gaze to the high, ragged dyke that was likely the result of pitching and breaking plates of earth several billion years ago.

  “What is it?” he asked the coyote too quietly for anyone but himself to hear. Slowly, Yakima reached forward and slid his Yellowboy repeater from the saddle scabbard. “What you runnin’ from, feller? What you see up in them rocks…?”

  Just then sunlight glinted from a notch about halfway up the dyke.

  Yakima hurled himself off the dun’s back as the angry whine of a bullet shredded the air over the now-empty saddle and was followed a half-second later with the hiccupping belch of a rifle.

  Chapter 3

  Yakima struck the trail hard and rolled into the brush as the zebra dun whinnied shrilly then wheeled and galloped back in the direction they’d come from, reins bouncing along the ground behind it.

  Another bullet…and then another…and another plunked into the ground near Yakima.

  He continued rolling deeper into the chaparral, sucking a sharp breath through his teeth when he got too close to a cholla, or leaping cactus, and ended up with a handful of the short, nasty cream bristles bristling from his right bicep. He brushed off the spikes with his gloved left hand then rolled up behind a rock as a bullet slammed into the rock’s face with a deafening whang!

  Another bullet caromed over Yakima’s right shoulder to plunk into a barrel cactus with a hollow thud.

  Yakima had lost his hat in his tumble from the saddle. Now he shook his long hair back from his face and edged a careful look around his covering rock’s left side and across the chaparral to the doglegging dyke. Two smoke puffs shone as the two shooters continued cutting down on him, the next two bullets clipping a branch from a creosote shrub just ahead of him and spanging off a rock behind his left shoulder.

  Yakima drew his head down behind the rock, gritting his teeth.

  Mankiller and Guzman meant business.

  He was glad to have gotten a look, even a brief one, at the dyke they were shooting from. He had a reasonably good sense of where both shooters were. One was hunkered in that notch Yakima had spied earlier, near the trail end of the dyke and about halfway between the bottom and the crest.

  The other man was a little lower down and maybe twenty feet away from the first, farther out from the trail.

  They were close. Damned close. Maybe seventy yards away.

  The trouble was, they had the high ground and Yakima was hunkered down here on the desert floor with sparse cover. He didn’t think they’d be able to keep up flinging lead at the rate they were flinging it, however. Not without running out of ammo. The bullets were slicing through the air all around him and hammering his covering rock resoundingly, angrily. In the frenzied shots, Yakima sensed the killers’ frustration at not having blown him out of his saddle when they’d first drawn a bead on him.

  Fortunately for him, the sun had flashed off what he’d presumed was a rifle barrel. And he’d been right. This wasn’t his first rodeo. If it had been, and he’d dismissed that reflection, he’d likely be sporting a third eye for his witlessness.

  As he’d suspected it would, the shooting tapered off.

  Silence fell over the shallow natural bowl in the desert that the marshal of Apache Springs now found himself in, with two killers perched in the rocks above.

  Yakima peered around the rock’s right side, exposing his right eye. Ready to pull his head back if he saw another puff of smoke, he gazed up at the ridge.

  No more smoke shone. No bullets came.

  Had his ambushers decided to be a little more judicial in their bullet placements, or had they pulled out?

  On
ly one way to find out.

  Keeping his torso low to the ground, Yakima pulled his knees up beneath him, setting his heels in the ground. He drew a breath, squeezed the Yellowboy in his right hand, then gave a grunt as he leaped up off his heels and bolted out from behind the rock, running hard to the right then diving for another, large rock maybe fifteen yards beyond the first one.

  A bullet chewed into the ground just inches off his flying heels.

  As he hit the ground and rolled, the rifle crack reached his ears, echoing around the hollow. Another bullet ricocheted off the large covering rock with an ear-rattling, girl-like scream.

  Yakima sat on his butt and pressed his back against the rock’s hard, cool surface, holding the Yellowboy up and down in both hands.

  Well, they hadn’t pulled out. That much he knew.

  Good. At least, he thought it was good. But they still had the high ground. That was a definite problem.

  Now he could wait for the two bushwhackers to grow impatient and to come to him, where they’d be on even ground, or he could go to them. That was a tricky alternative, there being sparse cover between him and them. If he waited for them to come to them, however, they might pull out, and then he’d be back where he’d started--tracking them.

  There was no telling how far Galveston’s horse had run. All the way back to Apache Springs, for all Yakima knew.

  Best to run his quarry to ground, though at the moment it looked more like Yakima was their quarry.

  Oh, well. This wasn’t his first rodeo. He’d turned the tables on killers before. Take Bill Thornton, for instance, the son of a bitch who’d murdered Yakima’s wife, Fay.

  No.

  This was no time to go down memory lane. Yakima had to stay right here, right now. Fay was dead. He’d buried her years ago, and he had to move on. If one thing coming to Apache Springs had helped him with, it was with moving on. Letting go of the past and realizing it was possible for him to fall in love again. Fay would understand. In fact, she’d have wanted him to do just that.

  It was just too bad he’d fallen in love with the wrong damned woman with the wrong damned father wielding a very inconvenient wanted circular…

  Yakima was moving now to the southwest, imitating a snake writhing its way across the desert floor. The thoughts sifting through his brain were vague whisperings in his ears. He closed the door on them now as he came to a patch of cleared ground that he’d soon have to negotiate his way across most delicately if he wanted to be spared a bad case of lead poisoning.

  He stopped and peered to his left, toward the dyke. He had a limited view of the dogleg formation between a short, broad barrel cactus and a tall ocotillo poking its octopus tendrils skyward. From his position, so low to the ground and not wanting to raise his head and risk getting it shot off, he couldn’t see the ambushers’ positions.

  That was all right.

  He assumed they were trying to track him with their rifles. If so, they’d get a glimpse of him in a second.

  He drew his knees up again, drew another deep breath, and vaulted up and forward. He ran across the small clearing, keeping his head down, scissoring his arms and legs, his long hair whipping wildly about his head. After six long strides he hurled himself off his heels again, launching into a dive.

  He hit the ground behind a covering of brush and scattered rocks, rolling, wondering why more bullets had not come, probing the air for him, the rifles on the dyke screaming like witches on All Hallows Eve.

  There was only the high whine of insects emphasizing the desert’s surreal silence.

  An eerie silence.

  Yakima almost would have preferred gunfire. At least, he’d have a good estimation of his stalkers’ positions. But now he didn’t know where in the hell they were. Were they moving toward him or away from him? Maybe they were pulling out, heading on down to Mexico or north to Tucson and Phoenix, maybe intending to get lost even farther north, on the Mogollon Rim.

  Or maybe they were moving in for the kill…

  From somewhere ahead came a sound. A very furtive sound, and not a natural one. Possibly the crunch of a slender branch under a stealthy boot.

  Yakima rose to his knees. Quietly, gritting his teeth, he racked a cartridge into the Yellowboy’s action then off-cocked the hammer. He rose to his feet and moved, keeping very low, to a mesquite several yards ahead.

  He looked around.

  Seeing nothing, hearing no more sounds but desert birds piping in the spikes and thorns around him, he moved around the mesquite and traced a meandering course toward the dyke dead ahead of him. The climbing, intensifying morning sun sucked up shadows along the rocky formation’s left side, casting the outcropping in a harsh, flame-colored glare and seemingly pulling it back away from the Apache Springs lawman, obscuring it with the optical illusion of increased distance.

  Yakima stepped around the left side of a one-armed saguaro. A man stood twenty feet away from him, on the other side of an oblong clearing. Damando Guzman’s tall, rangy figure was clad in leather and deerskin, a filthy red bandanna knotted around his neck. The dragon on Guzman’s forehead breathed fire just above the bridge of his broad, dark nose and beneath the wide brim of his ragged black opera hat sporting a single hawk feather.

  The Mexican smiled a toothy grin, seedy eyes slitting.

  Yakima jerked back behind the saguaro as the Mexican’s rifle spat smoke and orange flames. The bullet screeched over Yakima’s left shoulder and sang off a rock behind him. Two more bullets sailed toward him, one plunking dully into the far side of the saguaro.

  Before the report of the third shot had stopped echoing, Yakima stepped out to the right side of the saguaro and cut loose with the Yellowboy, firing from his hip. One, two, three times he pulled the trigger, quickly and smoothly working the cocking lever. The Mexican stumbled back and ran, returning fire with his carbine.

  Yakima’s bullets plumed rocks and gravel around the Mexican’s high-heeled Sonora boots with their large, silver spurs until the fourth shot smacked the tall, rangy Mex’s right leg out from beneath him. Guzman dropped to his knees with a curse, grabbing his right thigh.

  Cursing the Mexican scrambled away, crawling desperately, kicking up dust, toward a boulder as Yakima emptied the Yellowboy at him. More dirt and gravel hammered the desert around where Guzman heaved himself to his feet and flung himself headlong behind a boulder, cursing loudly in Spanish.

  Hot lead tore a chunk out of Yakima’s side a quarter-second before he heard a man’s wild laughter and the screeching and bellowing of what sounded like a Spencer carbine—a big caliber popper, maybe a .50 or .56 caliber. The pain of the bullet searing his side, just above his cartridge belt, Yakima threw himself left and down behind the saguaro.

  More of those big-caliber bullets tore up the ground around him. He crawled out away from the direction the shots were coming from, away from the saguaro, keeping the big cactus between him and his would-be killer.

  He dropped the empty Yellowboy, drew his stag-gripped Army Colt, and rolled behind a tuft of greasewood and a low, cracked rock close beside it.

  More bullets came, hammering the rock, peppering Yakima with the sharp rock shards.

  The Spencer fell silent.

  Gritting his teeth against the pain in his side, leaning the back of his head against the rock, Yakima rolled onto his left shoulder and glanced quickly around the rock’s right side. Mankiller was striding toward him, just then pausing to carefully set the empty Spencer on the ground near his left boot.

  He was partly concealed by a mesquite, its branches sagging under the weight of beans. Through the long slender leaves of the tree, Yakima could see the big, broad-shouldered man striding toward him, crouched low, head down, his deep-copper face mostly concealed by the broad brim of his bullet-shaped hat.

  Yakima could see the dark eyes staring up at him from beneath the very edge of the hat. An animal hide pouch, maybe a tobacco or a medicine pouch, dangled from a braided rawhide thong from around his thic
k neck. Mankiller was a big man, as tall as Yakima, but thicker through the belly, beefier, his face broad and savage, his thin-lipped mouth set cruelly below his broad, belligerent nose. Long black hair hung down past his shoulders.

  Yakima jerked up his Colt. Mankiller stepped behind the mesquite’s trunk, and the two shots Yakima triggered flew wild. The reverberations of the second shot were still echoing when Mankiller bounded back out from behind the tree, triggering his own six-shooter toward Yakima as he ran from Yakima’s left to his right, weaving between creosote shrubs and ocotillos, his long hair dancing about his broad, thick shoulders. He moved like a big man, his gate lumbering, heavy-footed. Yakima could hear him grunting.

  Crouched low, wincing against the bullets peppering the ground and air around him, Yakima returned fire, the Colt bucking wildly as he tracked the big figure clad in dark denims, a calico shirt, and high-topped, mule-eared boots racing through the chaparral in a broad semi-circle around him.

  Through his own wafting gray powder smoke, Yakima saw Mankiller go down. He couldn’t tell if the man had gone to ground intentionally or if he’d bought one of the .44 rounds Yakima had triggered.

  Quickly, Yakima raised the Colt’s barrel. He flicked open the loading gate and turned the wheel quickly, shaking out the spent cartridges. He replaced them with those on his cartridge belt, clicked the gate back into place, and spun the cylinder.

  He aimed the gun straight out before him. He was breathing hard from pain and anxiety, expecting to see the big Apache half-breed bearing down on him with Mankiller’s own six-shooter.

  Yakima squinted one eye down the Colt’s barrel, ready to plant a bead on the Indian’s thick figure. He slid the gun left, then right. He turned his head to peer behind him then swung it forward again.