IT APPEALED TO his savage sense of humor: that one of the men he intended to kill should ask him to destroy another. Like hungry wolves, they turned upon their own kind, unaware of the killer in wolf’s clothing come secretly amongst them.
With a secret smile he accepted the five hundred dollars Padillo offered, agreeing to carry out the assassination before he left Galenas.
The trader seemed well pleased, and the eyes of his wife suggested that she, too, was glad that Azul would be staying around town for a while. Gold coins chinking at his side, he left the store late in the afternoon, heading back towards the cantinas to locate his prey.
Padillo had described them to him, confirming what the dead one had told him; now only the killing remained.
Galenas was a small town, and more of it was given over to the sale of liquor than to houses, so Azul spent the next hours drifting casually from bar to bar looking for Nolan and his men. He encountered a variety of vaqueros and saddlebums, but of the men he sought, there was no sign.
It seemed unlikely that they would leave again so soon and he decided to hang around a day or two more. Anyway, he intended to kill Padillo before he left.
That night he used the money the scalp trader had given him to book the hotel room for three more days and began his rounds of the cantinas again. In an American-style saloon called the Lost Dollar he got his first word of Nolan.
A big man with a shock of wiry black hair sat down uninvited, pushing an empty glass significantly close to Azul’s bottle.
‘Hear yore lookin’ fer someone.’
Azul nodded without speaking.
‘Could be I know where he is.’
‘Then I’ll listen to you.’ Azul dropped his left hand casually below the table, close to the hilt of his knife. He pushed the bottle across with his right. ‘Have a drink.’
The man poured a generous slug and downed it in a single gulp, helping himself to a second without waiting to be asked.
‘Shore oils the vocal chords nice,’ he grinned, wiping a grimy wrist across his mouth. ‘One more might get ’em working.’
Azul topped his glass. ‘So talk.’
‘Heard you was lookin’ fer Nolan,’ said the man slowly, watching Azul’s eyes, ‘been askin’ around.’
‘That’s right.’ Azul wondered if the man had any useful information, or if he was just another panhandler.
‘Might just be I know where to find him.’ Shifty eyes darted around the saloon. ‘Could pass that news on, if it was worth my while.’
‘How much?’ asked Azul, directly.
‘Fifty dollars?’ The man sipped his whisky nervously.
‘Thirty,’ said Azul, ‘thirty pieces of silver.’
The man nodded his agreement and Azul counted out the coins, pushing them across the table. They were hurriedly snatched up and stuffed into a pocket.
‘There’s a small spread eighteen, twenty miles outta town. It ain’t much, just a frame ranch house an’ a barn set off the Caretas trail. Head east an’ you can’t miss it. Nolan an’ his boys hole up there.’
He looked suddenly angry.
‘Nolan keeps it pretty quiet, but I know all about it. He’s got a woman. She runs the place. Good-lookin’ lady name of Ginny Levy, got a big thing for Nolan.’
‘How come you know so much about it?’ asked Azul.
‘My name’s Levy, too,’ said the man bitterly, ‘Ginny was my wife until Nolan showed up.’
Azul reached the place just after dawn the following morning. The rising sun would dry out the tracks he had left through the dew, and a pinon thicket hid his pony. He slid the Winchester from the saddle scabbard and tied a length of cloth around the animal’s muzzle to prevent it from snorting, then he began to move towards the house.
He had ridden past it on the Caretas trail in the greyness of the dawn, a silent shape that went by unseen. A quarter mile farther on, sure that he was not being followed, he had turned off the trail and headed towards the ranch.
Now he slipped silently through the mesquite, the thin column of smoke rising from the stovepipe chimney serving as a marker post.
It was, he thought, very much like the smoke rising above his village after Nolan’s visit.
Two hundred yards out in the scrub he dropped to the ground and began to belly through the spiney bushes. He halted at the edge of the mesquite; for the hundred-odd yards between him and the house, the scrub had been cleared, so he lay on his stomach, waiting.
His patience was infinite, that of the Apache warrior on a raid. And now, he was more Apache than white, the savage blood of his mother’s people crying out for vengeance against the men who had killed her and her husband. Azul breathed slowly, not letting the hate that filled him interfere with his caution as he stretched on the sand.
A lizard scurried across the fresh oath-scars marking his left forearm, and a fly paused, attracted by the barely-healed wounds. He ignored them both.
Across the yard he could see figures moving inside the ranch house, then the door swung wide and a tall figure emerged, yawning in the early sun. Azul recognized the handsome features of Manolo and let the barrel of his rifle move gently to the left, lining up on the broad back as the Mexican bent over the water butt. Luis joined him on the porch, splashing water on his face.
Azul eased back the hammer of the carbine, reviewing the possibilities of two swift kills.
He decided to wait: Nolan, Christie and the woman were still inside the house, protected by sod and timber walls. Heavy shutters were evident on the windows and the place looked as though it was built to withstand a siege. Better, he decided, to catch them all in the open where he could pick them off one-by-one. Better still to catch them alone and kill them slowly, using all the agonizing tricks the Chiricahua braves had taught him.
He grinned, a tight, feral grimace, and let the Mexicans go back inside.
The odor of frying bacon and boiling coffee drifted from the house, and Azul ignored the grumbling of his belly. He remained where he was as Christie hung a mirror on the outside wall and shaved; he watched Nolan wash and shave and return to the house; and still he waited. A fifth man appeared, a grizzled Mexican Azul took for a hired hand, and then the woman showed herself.
She was as her husband had described her, a tall, auburn-haired woman with a voluptuous figure that pushed against the seams of her calico dress. She stretched in the sunlight, large breasts lifting as she threw back her arms. Azul studied her, noting the rich hair as a vague plan formed in his mind.
The sun was just beginning to warm his back when Luis and the hired man appeared again, walking over to the barn. They disappeared inside, emerging with four horses in tow. Nolan, Christie and Manolo joined them on the porch together with the woman, one arm around Nolan’s waist. The green-eyed man said something to her and she laughed, reaching up to kiss him. Then he moved away, climbing on to his horse. The others joined him and the woman stood watching, the old Mexican at her side, as they rode off in the direction of Galenas.
The hired man turned towards the barn as the woman went back into the house. And Azul made his move.
He darted through the scrub, a fleeting shadow amongst the sunbaked mesquite, until he was level with the barn. A rail fence barred his way and he crawled beneath it, coming to his feet in a run that took him straight through the barn door.
The Mexican looked up from a pile of drying alfalfa as he came through the doorway, lifting a pitchfork like a spear.
Azul knocked it aside, slamming the butt of the Winchester hard against the old man’s jaw. His mouth closed with a snap as his eyes went blank and he crumpled on to the mound of fodder. Swiftly, Azul lashed his wrists and ankles together, tore the bandanna from his scrawny neck, and gagged him.
‘You are lucky, old one,’ he muttered as he tied the knot, ‘you can live a few years more.’
Then he turned towards the ranch house.
He was across the yard and inside the building before the woman even heard him. The creak of a floorboard betrayed his presence, and she turned, opening her mouth to speak. It grew to a gasping hole in her face, the words transforming to a high-pitched scream as she saw Azul. Desperately, she tried to reach the shotgun standing by the open door, but Azul grabbed her around the waist, lifting her off the floor.
‘Buenas dias, Señora Levy,’ he said coldly, and threw her bodily across the room.
Nolan rode into Galenas intending to buy supplies and talk to Padillo. He planned to spend no more than two nights with Ginny before heading north again to hunt up fresh scalps. With two men dead, the last share-out had gone farther than usual, but the American was still hungry for more money; and he enjoyed his work. ‘
He anticipated fresh killing with relish.
Padillo, curiously, seemed less sure. The Mex was always nervous, worried for his greasy hide, but this time he acted like he was hiding something, and Nolan couldn’t figure out what it was.
He warned Padillo to expect him back in about a month and walked down Main Street to the Lost Dollar. It was no big deal as saloons went, but it was the only American place in this Mexican dung heap of a town. Nolan plied his deadly trade south of the border because that was where the bounty money was: he didn’t have to like the place.
He pushed through the bat-wing doors and headed for the bar. On his way he caught sight of Zach Levy hunched around a bottle, and grinned. Levy always made him grin like that.
The man had come south of the river back in the early ‘60s, buying up a cheap land grant the alcalde probably didn’t have the right to sell. Nolan had been a wild youngster then, out on the prod with Mexico a handy retreat when the American side got too hot for comfort. He’d shared a few bottles with the young rancher and, over the years, watched him build a nice little spread. They’d almost been friends, at least they were about as close as Nolan had ever got to another human being.
Then Levy shipped his bride in. Ginny had been one hell of a woman even then, with that mane of hair shining dark red in the Chihuahua sun. That and the ranch work dried most women up so they shifted rapidly from the freshness of youth to a premature age, toughening and wrinkling a little bit more with each passing summer.
Not Ginny, though. Hell, she flourished in the sun, ripening like some luscious fruit. Until she was ready for picking.
Nolan had waited, his cold green eyes admiring. And Ginny had known it, shown it in lots of little ways until Nolan couldn’t wait any longer. It wasn’t that he felt guilty about betraying the man who considered him a friend - shit, guilt was for fools and preachers - it was simply that he valued a useful hide-out more than any woman alive. But when he judged that he could have Ginny and the hide-out both, he had made his move.
Zach had always been a lousy poker player, overly fond of hard liquor to hold a steady hand, so it had been easy to talk him into staking the ranch in a rigged game.
Nolan had left him high, dry and homeless, pistol-whipped to a bloody mess when he objected, and ridden out to claim what was then his. And he took Ginny along with the spread. She had welcomed him like her husband never existed, laughing when Nolan drove a beaten, terrified Levy away from the ranch the next morning.
Dammit, he could see her now, standing there bare-ass naked on the porch, watching her husband scuttle away like a frightened jackrabbit, dragging him back inside to that big bed before Levy was even out of sight.
After that, Zach Levy had gone to pieces. Any man worth a spit would have come after Nolan with a gun, and he rode careful for some time. But Levy wasn’t made that way. He didn’t have the spine to clear out and start someplace else; instead he hung around Galenas riding line, busting hardass broncs, sweeping stores, bumming drinks. Anything that brought in a few dollars to buy his whisky. He was a loser, and Nolan had even less time for losers than he had for the rest of mankind.
He turned his back on the booze-fogged eyes watching him and called for a bottle, waiting for the others.
Ginny Levy cowered on the floor, too frightened to notice the stove singeing her dress. The heavy thud of the closing door made her gasp involuntarily, raw fear knotting her stomach in tight curls of pain as she looked up at the man standing over her.
It was hard to tell whether he was white or Indian. The features were square and broad, like an Apache, but the hair that hung down to his shoulders was sun-bleached blond, almost white, and the eyes were a pale, piercing blue. He wore a gunbelt like a white man, and his buckskin pants could have belonged to either race; but they were tucked into high, Chiricahua moccasins, and his mane of light hair was banded by a leather thong.
He spoke fluent American in a faintly guttural voice and the flat, deadly tone chilled her.
Ginny was scared as hell, but she was proud and toughened by long months of waiting alone for her lover to come back. She used up a great deal of that toughness as she spoke.
‘Who the hell are you?’
‘Azul.’ It was a statement cold as a diamondback’s rattle. ‘I am also called Matthew Gunn. You see, my mother was Chiricahua Apache, my father white.’
A scarred arm reached out, lean brown fingers playing through her hair.
‘Your man scalped them both.’
Ginny choked on the sob rising in her throat. This man was going to kill her. She knew that, suddenly, definitely, as surely as she knew the sun would rise the next morning.
‘He came into our village and killed everyone.’ The voice was cold, dispassionate. ‘He scalped them so that he could sell their hair to Padillo.’
Ginny prayed for the first time in too many years, hoping that God still remembered the sound of her thoughts. Nolan had left a couple of hours after dawn; if he wasn’t holed up in the Lost Dollar or the red-light house next door, he could be on the way back. Maybe close enough to save her.
As she prayed, Nolan was climbing into his saddle. Manolo, Christie and Luis followed him at an easy canter down the Caretas trail.
Behind them, Zach Levy hauled himself astride a sway-back pony and drove whisky-laden heels into the beast’s ribs, kicking it up to a gut-shaking run that kept it far enough behind Nolan’s dust that the scalp hunters wouldn’t see him coming after them.
Azul hauled the woman to her feet, yanking her up with one hand as the other drew the Bowie knife from its sheath on his left hip.
Her hands clawed at his wrists, scraping scarlet lines down his arms as she screamed her fear. He stopped the shrieking with his fist, ramming it hard against her parted lips, smashing the flesh back against the ivory whiteness of her teeth. Bright blood ran from the split lusciousness of her mouth, trickling over her jaw to drip down on to the swelling of her heaving breasts.
He pulled her halfway upright by her hair, the afternoon sun shining bright through the open windows, so that her head was turned the color of red placer gold.
The gleaming blade of the big Bowie knife swung in a short, vicious arc; and Ginny Levy fell to the floor of her ranch house, wailing.
Azul stood over her, a great mane of red hair clutched in his hand.
At his feet, the woman wailed and beat her fists against the rough planking of the ranch’s floor, howling her loss at a deaf world. There was no one to hear her except the cold-eyed man standing above her, her hair dangling from his fist.
Ginny Levy ran her hands across the ravaged stubble of her scalp and screamed afresh.
And above her, Azul laughed.
‘Why do you cry?’ He dangled the hair before her eyes. ‘An Apache woman cuts her hair when she loses her man. You will lose yours soon, and show your grief in the proper way.’
Ginny howled and spat a stream of curses that would have curled the ears of a Front Street whore. She wasn’t sure whether she cried for Nolan or for herself. It was Nolan who kept her penned on this God-forsaken patch of scrubland, partly out of fear of what he might do if she tried to leave, but mostly out of love. Like it or not, she had to admit that: she’d taken one look at the man and wanted him. After that nothing else seemed to matter, not running Zach off his own land, not waiting cold and lonely for the green-eyed man to return from one of his ‘hunting’ trips. And Nolan had been good to her. He gave her money, enough that she had a few hundred dollars salted away; he’d taken her to Mexico City and Galveston, and once even as far as St Louis, putting up in the best hotel and carrying on like real gentry when they weren’t in bed.
But now, it looked as though all that was due to end.
‘The Federales will get you,’ she snarled, grief giving way to anger, ‘hunt you and shoot you down like a dog.’
‘They must find me first,’ laughed Azul. And kicked her hard in the stomach.
He reached down as she doubled over, grabbing the front of her dress, ripping it open. Ginny shrieked and tried to cover her exposed breasts, but the blond Apache knocked her hands away, tearing the calico from her body.
She wondered if he was going to rape her, thinking that it might give her a chance to reach his gun and put a bullet in him where it would hurt the most.
She’d done that once before, back in Pomona when, her uncle caught her dressing while her parents were out of the house. He’d thrown her down on the bed and taken her virginity in a sweaty welter of flailing limbs and whisky-laden breath. Then she had sneaked his big Walker Colt out of the holster, pulled the hammer back, shoved the barrel against his hip and squeezed the trigger. Uncle Sam had flipped out of bed like a landed fish, screaming as he clutched at what was left of his groin.
There’d been a trial after he died, and Ginny had been acquitted, but that didn’t stop people pointing at her, talking about her. So she had packed a bag one morning and bought a stage ticket with the money she stole from her father’s desk. She’d got as far as Little Rock, Arkansas, before the money ran out and she had to take a job in a hash house. The customers had made it obvious that she could earn more money plying a different trade, so she quit the eatery and hung a red lantern outside her room. Pretty soon she’d made enough to head farther west to Oklahoma City, then west and south to Wichita Falls, drifting on to Fort Worth and down to San Antonio. Zach had found her there and offered to marry her with promises of a growing cattle kingdom south of the Rio Grande.
So here she was, stuck in the middle of a godless desert with her hair cut off and a crazy half-breed waiting to kill Nolan.
Azul ignored her sobbing as he stripped her. The sight of her naked body produced a stirring in his loins, but he had neither the time to pleasure himself, nor the inclination to taste the well from which Nolan drank. Instead, he pulled her to her feet, forced her down into a high-backed chair and tied her there, using her hair as rope.
Then he lifted woman and chair together, carrying them out to the porch. He set Ginny down in the morning sun, facing towards the Galenas trail, so that Nolan would see her as he rode through the ranch gate. Then he went back inside, looking for food.
Zach Levy knew where Nolan was going, so there was no difficulty in trailing him, just in staying far enough back that he wasn’t seen. Every so often he hauled his pony to a stop and took a healthy swig from the bottle stuffed into his saddlebag. It was good whisky, real stuff with a genuine label on the bottle to prove it, and a whole lot better than Levy was used to drinking. But then, he giggled, a man should have something to drink at a funeral. Whoever got buried.
He leaned forward to stroke the stock of the Sharps big .50 sheathed beneath his right thigh. Hell of a gun, that, the old buffalo rifle. It’d throw a ball one clear mile.
And at just a few hundred yards, it would blow its target clear in two.
He took another long swig from the bottle, making up his mind to do something he should have got done a long time ago, and pushed the horse on, down the Caretas trail after Nolan.