THE FLY, OR what was left of it, was wrapped in a sticky cocoon, sealed into the delicate web spanning the corner, when Azul finished. He stared at Father Duran with pain showing in his eyes.
The priest met his gaze now.
‘I’ll help you. As best I can,’ he said firmly. Tut may the Lord help you if the Federales catch you hunting white men. ‘Don’t worry, father, I don’t plan to get caught.’
‘Then ride to Galenas. I have heard of a trader there,’ Duran paused, still uncertain of lending his help to a manhunt. ‘He is called Ramon Padillo and he trades in scalps. If the men you want came this way, they must be making for Padillo’s. Find him and you’ve found the center of the Chihuahua hair trade.’
‘Then perhaps,’ Azul murmured, ‘there should be a parting.’
Padillo, the priest continued, ran a large and very profitable general store in the main street of Galenas. He carried promissory notes on half the small farmers around town and, on the side, acted as the receiver for local scalp hunters. To save the time and possible danger – many hunters were wanted men – of riding into the state capital, the killers sold their grisly wares to Padillo, for rather less than the official price. The Mexican then shipped the hair to Chihuahua and, for the price of a wagon journey, made a profit.
‘If anyone can lead you to the ones you want,’ said Duran, ‘it will be Padillo.’
Linda had finished her cooking now and they settled down to eat. It was simple, but satisfying, and for a time silence fell over the small room.
When they had finished, the priest spoke: ‘You’ll need clothes. Ride into Galenas dressed like that and they’ll kill you on sight.’
He rose from the rough pine table and went over to a cupboard set into one wall. The clothes hung there were few, and durable rather than fancy; Duran shuffled through them then tossed a bundle to Azul.
‘The man who owned these is dead now, but he was about your size.’ He smiled ruefully, ‘His parents couldn’t afford an offering at the funeral so they gave me his clothes instead.’
Linda made a discreet exit as Azul began to pull off his shirt, bustling outside with the dirty dishes. He pulled on a faded linen shirt that was no longer quite white and tucked it into a pair of buckskin trousers made for a smaller man. Then he untied the knee-high moccasins, laying his throwing knife to one side as he pushed the pants down and laced the boots over them. Carefully, he re-sheathed the knife on his right leg before buckling on his gunbelt.
‘Now,’ announced Duran, ‘you look almost like a white man. A suitable hat, and you should pass.’
He drew a Cordoban-styled Stetson from the cupboard, wide-brimmed with a low, flat crown. Azul set the hat on his blond hair, pulling it down to cover the leather war band holding the shoulder-length mane off his face.
‘Well, padre?’ he asked, turning to the waiting priest.
‘Splendid.’ Duran’s approval showed on his smiling face. Dressed like that you will easily pass for white. Sorry.’ He hesitated in confusion. ‘I mean … well, what I was trying …’
‘Forget it,’ Azul’s smile was tinged with regret. ‘I know what you’re trying to say. I’d like to say thanks.’
Duran covered his embarrassment with a wave of his hands.
‘Oh, Azul, if there were another way to end this problem I’d tell you take it. As it is.’ He bit off the next word, then, after a pause, ‘do what you must.’
‘I shall,’ Azul replied evenly. ‘There are some promises a man has to keep.’
He walked out of the little room to say goodbye to Linda then mounted the paint pony and, with the dead Mexican’s horse in tow, heeled the animal down the Galenas trail. He did not look back.
Behind him Linda and the priest watched until he was lost in the heat haze rising from the sand, then turned back into the adobe.
‘Well, my child,’ Duran murmured, ‘it looks as though I’ve found myself a housekeeper.’
‘Sí,’ Linda’s thoughts were some distance away, south into the desert, ‘and maybe I’ve found a man.’
‘Padillo.’ Nolan’s voice cut like a whiplash through the smoke-filled air of the cantina. ‘I brought you seventeen scalps. That means you owe me $1,500. Don’t matter who got killed on the way in, that’s what you owe me.’
Across the table a fat, swarthy man with drooping mustaches wiping the frayed edge of his greasy collar dabbed sweat from his chin with a grubby kerchief. He took a deep breath and a long swallow before he replied.
‘But my friend,’ he bought time off from the American’s cold green stare with another slug of tequila. ‘Things change. It is difficult now and prices rise.’
‘Mine might.’ It was more a promise than a warning. ‘They might change pretty damn’ fast if you keep pissin’ around. We agreed fifteen hundred an’ that’s what you’ll pay.’
Padillo shrugged, an eloquent gesture that was interpreted by two men seated in the shadows at the back of the cantina to mean that it was time to earn the trader’s money. They rose quietly to their feet.
‘Gee,’ said Nolan almost as though he regretted the situation, ‘I’d hate to part on a bad note. And it would mean the end of your little business.’
He smiled cheerfully at the Mexican.
‘Cross me and the trade news could be bad.’
Suddenly, as the sentence ended, two explosions blasted smoke and flame across the cantina. Nolan came up out of his chair with the pistol he had clutched under the table pointing at the quivering finger of Padillo. Behind him and off to one side, Jude Christie laughed and thumbed the hammer of his own gun. Rapidly, so that the roar of the discharge echoed like a prolonged peal of angry thunder, he ploughed bullets into the staggering figures of Padillo’s bodyguards.
The two men staggered backwards as the .45 caliber shells blew holes through their chests. They knocked over chairs as they reeled under the impact, spattering blood across the fleeing drinkers. Then one twisted and pitched face down across a table, hurling glasses into the air as his dead companion dribbled blood on to the sawdust of the floor, exhaling his life in one last, gusting froth of crimson.
Nolan holstered his gun and sat down.
‘See what I mean?’ he said calmly.
‘Sí,’ Padillo’s acceptance of the harsh facts of death showed in the trembling hand that lifted the glass to his mouth. Half the contents spilled out over the table.
‘Like I said,’ Nolan was almost friendly now, ‘we got a deal.’
He paused, sipping his own drink with a rock-steady hand.
‘And we’re sticking to it.’ The icy green eyes probed Padillo’s face across the rim of the glass. ‘It would be almighty unhealthy for you if you thought otherwise.’
He beckoned Christie over to the table and poured the man a drink as he pushed fresh shells into his Colt. The southerner sat down, grinning wolfishly at Padillo.
‘Whyn’t we gun him too?’ he asked, spinning the cylinder of the revolver before setting the hammer down on the empty sixth chamber and sliding the gun back into its holster.
‘Because Ramon here,’ said Nolan, ‘is our friend. The guy who looks after our interests in Chihuahua. Ain’t that right, Ramon?’
Padillo gasped urgent agreement as his eyes darted between the two men. They were like wolves, these Americanos, quiet one minute, the next ravening beasts, baying for the blood they spilled. He cursed the greed that had prompted him to attempt to double-cross Nolan. He should have known it was impossible; would have known if Maria had not prompted him with soft words and a softer body to try cutting the cold-eyed Yankee’s share of the scalp bounty. It had seemed a good idea last night, in bed. In the dim cantina, filled now with the stink of cordite, it seemed madness of the greatest degree.
Padillo had known Nolan for only six months. That smiling, handsome bastard Manolo had brought him to Padillo, introduced him with promises of wealth won easy. The American had frightened him then with his calm assurance and those green eyes. He had looked like the kind of man you didn’t cross if you wanted to stay alive. The kind of man who regarded death as a stock-in-trade, no stranger than the tools Padillo sold on the other side of his business; and most likely more familiar. The kind of man you met in nightmares.
And his partner, Christie, was little better. The southerner never bothered to hide the fact that he enjoyed killing, would go out of his way to find it. But where Nolan was calm and calculating, Christie was pitched high. It showed in his giggle and the way the soft, Virginia drawl would reach up at the prospect.
Manolo, Luis and the other two – dead now, according to Nolan – were different. Padillo had known them for some time: vaqueros too lazy to work the range. Mexicans lusting after fast money without being too particular how they got it. Manolo and, what was his name? Roberto. He had hidden once after they attempted a futile, foolish holdup of the Galenas stage. It was in gratitude for that that they had brought Nolan to him. Nolan with his plan for scalp raids into Arizona and New Mexico. All right, Padillo had taken scalps himself and the trade was a lucrative side-line in which he made a handsome profit, taking the odd hank of Apache hair into the city. But Nolan had promised so much more. Whole villages of the filthy Indians wiped out for their mutual benefit. It sounded a good idea and the government paid the bounty, so it was no crime.
What Padillo had failed so dismally to realize, what he cursed now, was that the hand clasping his so firmly when they finalized the deal clasped his soul, too. Clasped it in a grip that had proved itself in fifteen seconds of bloody gunplay to be inescapable.
Nolan had him, held him by the hair and by the soul in a grip as tight as a dead man’s on a knife hilt.
‘Sí,’ he muttered, ‘we got a deal.’
Azul – Matthew Gunn, he reminded himself, now that he wore white dress – rode into Galenas the morning after Jose Blanco and Felipe Gijon had been gunned down by the two Americans. He gathered, from the stable hand who took his two horses, that no one mourned the parting very much except, maybe, the dead men’s employer, Ramon Padillo.
Señor Padillo was, it seemed, an important man in Galenas. Owner of the biggest store in the district, he also had several sidelines that a humble stable hand would not venture to question. Or, when Azul looked at him, to dabble in. As the señor would doubtless understand, one did one’s work and if another traded in hair then that was his business.
Azul tossed the man a silver dollar taken from Juan’s saddlebag and told him to feed, water and groom the two horses. He added an extra fifty cents to have the big Sonora saddle polished up so that it would shine even under the moon.
Then he booked himself into the only hotel in town and went looking for Padillo.
The store was easy to find with Father Duran’s instructions to help him, but the owner was not there. The large-busted woman whose eyes suggested that she might like him to stay in the absence of her husband offered three possible meeting places. Two were cantinas, the other the store next day at noon. Azul thanked her, noting the hair that flowed, raven-black down to her waist along with the way she looked at him, and went looking for her husband.
He found Padillo in the second of the cantinas. The Mexican was a good way into his second bottle of tequila, the fiery liquor loosening his tongue and dulling his senses. Azul was guided to him by the bar tender and found a ready companion in the near-drunk trader.
Politely, in fluent Spanish, he asked for Senor Padillo’s permission to join Galenas’ celebrated citizen. It was readily granted, and before they had finished the second shot Padillo was telling Azul of the terrible events preceding his arrival.
‘Señor,’ Padillo turned the words into a slur of tequila-soaked sound, ‘it was amazing, frightening. Two of my men wished to speak with me. They were shot down. Like dogs.’ He put his elbows on the table, swaying in his chair. ‘And by friends, too. A horrible misunderstanding.’
He stared glassily at Azul.
‘Yes,’ the younger man nodded his sympathy for life’s tragedies, ‘but surely there must have been a reason?’
Padillo gave it. ‘A little misunderstanding, in our mutual business. You know how it is.’ He wagged his head sagely, like an overfed owl.
‘I hear that your business is wide and,’ Azul waited a moment while Padillo raised his head, ‘a little … specialized?’
‘What do you mean?’ The trader was not so drunk that he would reveal himself fully. ‘Señor. Forgive me, I don’t know your name.’
‘Gunn. Matthew Gunn,’ said Azul. ‘I heard of you from friends.’ He lowered his head so that it came close to the Mexican’s and tried hard to ignore the fumes of cheap tequila and hot chili. ‘They said that a man who wanted to get ahead should contact you. Especially if the head carried hair.’
Padillo sat back, this time like a vulture, grinning a confession of mutual guilt.
‘Ah. Yes, they were right. Give me a head with hair.’ Drunkenly, he caressed the words, ‘long, beautiful hair. There’s a lot of money in hair.’
‘It shows,’ agreed Matthew Gunn, who was also called Azul, ‘and a show like that has to be popular.’
‘Señor,’ Padillo was boozily cautious. ‘I’m not sure I understand.’
‘Suppose,’ Azul said evenly, ‘that a man wished to make money fast, without too many questions asked. How would he do it?’
He sipped the fiery tequila, watching the Mexican’s bland face.
‘It would depend,’ Padillo remained careful, ‘on what he was prepared to do for this fast money.’
‘Anything,’ said Azul simply.
Padillo looked into the cold blue eyes and believed him. There was a hardness to this man, a cold deadliness that simultaneously chilled the fat Mexican and sparked an idea in his tequila-swilled mind. This curious young man, Matthew Gunn – was that his name? – exhibited the same contained violence that made Nolan so frightening. Maybe a clever man, a man like Ramon Padillo, could use this rubio, play him off against the oveja negra, the black-clad killer, so that Nolan got the bullet he deserved and the lucrative scalps kept coming in.
A good business mind, Padillo told himself, will overcome all problems.
‘Come and eat,’ he rose ponderously, clutching the half-emptied tequila bottle in a sweaty fist, ‘and we shall talk more of this business venture.’
Azul climbed obediently to his feet and followed the trader out of the cantina.
They went back to the store, where the raven-haired woman flirted her eyes over the lean form of the man with her husband. Azul was aware of the invitation, and wondered if Maria Padillo’s obvious lust might not prove useful at some later date.
For now, he was happy to seat himself in the room behind the store, sip more tequila and savor the odor of chili that wafted from the kitchen.
‘Anything?’ Padillo took up the conversation from where it had ended in the cantina.
Azul nodded, ‘though I understand from my friends that your business is mostly kept under your hat.’
Padillo laughed, wobbling his chins in agreement.
‘Sí,’ continued Azul, ‘if I speak boldly, we are talking about hair. Apache scalps.’
He concentrated on keeping his face impassive as he spoke, hiding the raw hate seething behind the smiling mask.
‘Sí, sí,’ Padillo bobbed his fat face in agreement, ‘one hundred dollars American for each male scalp. Can you deliver enough?’
‘Yes,’ Azul watched the man as he spoke, hating him, ‘I can bring you scalps. But first, we must arrange a price.’
‘Seventy dollars.’ Through the mist of tequila, Padillo’s eyes grew suddenly shrewd. ‘For each male scalp. How does that sound?’
‘Faint,’ said Azul, forking hot chili into his mouth. ‘I heard the price was one hundred.’
‘Eighty.’ Padillo swigged tequila.
‘Ninety-five.’ Azul chewed on a tortilla.
They settled on ninety dollars a scalp and Padillo brought his chair up to the table, pressing his belly against the rough wood as he leaned his head closer to Azul.
‘There’s something else that could make you a lot more money.’
‘What?’ Azul picked at his teeth with a splinter from the table.
‘I want you to kill a man. His name is Nolan.’