CHAPTER 20
Gila Crossing, Arizona
A curtain of beads hung across the entrance to the cantina in this little border settlement. The beads swung back and forth and made a faint clattering noise as Luke Jensen brushed them aside and stepped into the building.
The thick adobe walls kept the air in here cool despite the bright sunshine and heat outside. Winter might be in full swing elsewhere in the country, but here, less than a mile from the Mexican border, the days were still sultry.
Luke paused to let his eyes adjust to the dimness. He wasn’t expecting trouble—well, not too much, anyway—but in his line of work, a man always had to be careful.
After all these years of manhunting, he didn’t want to do something stupid and get his light blown out now.
He was closing in on sixty, too old for this job, really, but what else did he know? Ranching held no appeal for him, and clerking in a store would be pure misery, and he damn sure didn’t want to go sit in a rocking chair on some porch and wait for death to kindly stop for him.
So he would keep hunting men who had a price on their heads, and if the risks inherent in that caught up to him someday. . . well, hell, it was the life he had chosen, wasn’t it?
Or at least, the life fate had chosen for him.
Luke was a tall man, still ruggedly built despite his age. His craggy, deeply tanned face showed the wear and tear of decades spent mostly outside. His dark clothes were gray from trail dust. He wore two long-barreled .44 Remington revolvers, butt forward in their holsters.
The guns were old, like him, but could still kill a man just fine. Also like him.
Luke’s keen eyes needed only a second to account for everyone in the cantina, six men and two women.
A man and a woman stood behind the bar, both of them short and fat, the woman looking more Indian than Mexican. The other woman, more of a girl, really, since she couldn’t be a day over fifteen, stood in front of the bar.
Despite her youth, her shape was womanly already, with her full, brown breasts mostly exposed by the low-cut blouse she wore. The daughter or granddaughter of the couple behind the bar, Luke thought.
Two men stood at the bar with mugs of beer in front of them. Cowboys from one of the local spreads, by the looks of them. Neither wore a gun where Luke could see it.
At a table sat two more men, older, maybe vaqueros, maybe bandits from across the border. They had glasses and a half-empty bottle of tequila on the table. Gun belts were strapped around their waists, with holstered revolvers attached.
Luke wasn’t after them, but they were unknown quantities. They might try to kill him if they decided he posed a potential threat. Or they might just feel like killing him.
He would need to keep an eye on them.
It was the sixth man in the cantina who interested him, the man sitting at a table in the corner, slumped forward, snoring. Luke couldn’t see his face, just silvery hair askew.
That was the man Luke was after . . . if the information he’d been given in Tucson was correct.
The fat man behind the bar spoke to the girl. She hesitated, and the man gave her an emphatic, imperative nod. She picked up a round wooden tray from the bar and came toward Luke, holding the tray in front of her.
“Something to drink, señor?” she asked him.
“Perhaps later, señorita. Right now I seek information.”
She tossed her head defiantly, making her thick mass of raven hair swirl around sleek shoulders left bare by the blouse. “We sell beer and tequila and whiskey, not information,” she said.
“Not even for the right price?” Luke said.
“Not everything has a price, señor.”
“I’ve never run across anything that didn’t.”
Her dark eyes flashed at him as she said, “And I am not for sale, either.”
Luke felt a thousand years old. He let out a little grunt of laughter and told her, “That’s good. Stick to it as long as you can. But for now, tell me if that slumbering gentleman over there in the corner is Jefferson Gillette.”
The girl looked a little surprised, and genuinely puzzled. Luke supposed it was possible that no one here in this tiny settlement knew Gillette’s real name. He might have given them one of his aliases, or no name at all.
“We call him Old Tiger. Tigre. That is all.”
With his left hand—his right never strayed far from the butt of a gun—Luke took a folded piece of paper from his shirt pocket and held it out to the girl. By now, everyone in the cantina except the sleeping man was watching this conversation.
She unfolded the paper, revealing it to be a reward poster for one Jefferson Gillette, wanted for numerous armed robberies and murders across the southwest. The girl caught her breath when she saw the drawing of the man on the paper, and Luke knew she recognized him. Her eyes even darted toward the man in the corner.
“How old is this?” she asked.
“Twelve years,” Luke said. “But the rewards have never been lifted. I’m sure he’s changed some since then, but that man is the one you know as Old Tiger, isn’t he?”
“You should go,” the girl said as she thrust the wanted poster at Luke. When he didn’t take it, she dropped it on the floor between them. “We want no trouble here.”
“I don’t want trouble either, but it’s my job to bring lawbreakers to justice.”
The two vaqueros—or bandidos—stood up from the table. One of them said, “Your job is to suck blood money from the bones of good men, cabron.”
“I’ve no quarrel with you,” Luke said.
“You should leave now, hombre,” the second man said. “You do, and we let you live.”
“No man lets me live,” Luke said. “My life is mine, and anybody who tries to take it gets what’s coming to him.”
“Carmencita!” the fat man behind the bar blurted out. In rapid Spanish, he told the girl to come away from where she was. Her bare feet slapped the floor quickly as she obeyed the order.
Over at the bar, the two gringo cowboys edged away, putting themselves out of the line of fire as much as they could.
The man in the corner kept snoring.
Luke stood calmly where he was, waiting for the men who faced him to call the tune. He wasn’t going to push them into a fight, and he wasn’t going to let them prod him into drawing first, either.
The nerve of the man on Luke’s right broke first. He snarled a curse and clawed at the gun on his hip.
Luke’s arms flashed as he pulled both Remingtons from the cross-draw rig. Time had shaved the tiniest fraction of speed from his draw, but facing these two, it wasn’t enough to matter. They were cruel, ruthless men, but they weren’t really fast.
The right-hand Remington boomed and bucked against Luke’s palm. The .44 slug bored into the man’s chest and burst his heart. He had just cleared leather. His finger jerked the trigger involuntarily and he blew his right big toe off, but he was already too dead to feel it.
The gun in Luke’s left hand went off so soon after the first shot that it was hard to tell them apart. Luke’s aim was a little high—he had never been quite as good with his left hand—so the bullet ripped through the side of the man’s throat. Blood spurted in a high arc from a severed artery.
The wound didn’t kill the man instantly, though, and he was able to bring his gun up and trigger a round in Luke’s direction. The bullet whined past Luke’s ear. He didn’t want to risk the man getting off a second shot, so he put a slug between the hombre’s eyes. That knocked him down.
With all that gun thunder echoing from the cantina’s low ceiling, Luke couldn’t have heard the scrape of the chair’s legs on the floor as Jefferson Gillette—Old Tiger—surged up and swept a sawed-off shotgun from under the filthy poncho he wore. It must have been instinct that warned Luke to twist and dive out of the way of the blast.
Gillette might have actually been asleep when Luke came in, but he had woken up at some point in the proceedings, enough to be aware that a day of reckoning had arrived at last. He wasn’t completely drunk, either; otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to react as quickly as he did now. He tracked the figure rolling swiftly across the floor and fired the sawed-off’s second barrel.
Luke kicked an empty table over as he rolled. It absorbed the buckshot from the second blast. As he came up on one knee and tried to bring the Remingtons to bear on Gillette, the man slung the empty scattergun at his head. Luke had to duck.
When he did that, Gillette leaped onto a table with an agility that belied his years and dived at him.
The old outlaw’s shoulder rammed into Luke’s chest and drove him over backward. Luke’s head hit the floor hard enough to make the cantina spin crazily around him.
The impact also caused the Remingtons to fly out of his hands. He lay there stunned for a second with Gillette’s weight pinning him down, and when he got his wits back about him, he looked up to see that the man had pulled out a big knife and was about to plunge it into his chest.
As the deadly thrust fell, Luke grabbed Gillette’s wrist just in time to keep the cold steel from ripping into his body. It took both hands to stop the knife.
That left Gillette’s other hand free to hammer punches into Luke’s face. He jerked his head from side to side, avoiding the blows as much as he could, but enough of them landed that he felt consciousness slipping away from him.
If he passed out, Gillette would gut him like a fish. Luke knew that. He brought his right leg up, bones and muscles creaking and resisting more than they used to, and hooked his ankle across Gillette’s throat. When he swung his leg back, that ripped Gillette off of him.
Luke rolled over onto hands and knees and looked around for his Remingtons. He spotted one of the revolvers lying on the floor nearby and made a grab for it.
He had to jerk his hand back as Gillette brought the knife down and almost impaled it. The tip of the blade stuck in the floor, though, and Gillette couldn’t wrench it free right away. He grunted with the effort as he tried to do so.
That gave Luke a chance to slide across the floor on his belly the other way and scoop up the second Remington, which he had just spotted. As he closed his left hand around the revolver, he rolled onto that side and thrust the barrel toward Gillette.
The outlaw had just pulled the knife loose from the floor and lifted it with a triumphant grin on his weather-beaten face when Luke pulled the trigger. The bullet smashed through the yellow stubs of teeth revealed by Gillette’s expression and on out the back of his head, taking a good-sized chunk of skull with it.
Gillette stayed there on his knees for a second before he fell forward onto his face with a thump, the third dead man to hit the floor in not much more than a minute.
Breathing hard, Luke lay there hoping that his heart, which was racing a mile a minute, wouldn’t burst. His pulse beat a loud, swift tattoo inside his head.
Over that racket, he heard the furious shout from the fat man behind the bar.
“You killed El Tigre!”
Luke saw the man come around the end of the bar holding a machete, of all things. A great weariness flooded through him. He didn’t want to kill this cantina owner, who was probably an honest, hardworking man who felt sorry for the old outlaw and doubtless had no idea what a bloody-handed scoundrel Gillette had been.
He certainly didn’t want to kill the man in front of his wife and daughter—or granddaughter, as the case might be.
Luckily, he didn’t have to. The two cowboys caught hold of the fat man’s arms and halted his charge toward Luke. One of them yelled, “Paco! Stop it! That hombre’ll kill you, you damn fool!”
The other man told Luke, “Mister, you better get outta here while you got the chance.”
“Not without . . . what I came for.”
Luke climbed to his feet, holstered the Remington he held, picked up the other iron and pouched it as well. He found his hat and put it on.
Standing beside Gillette’s body, he asked, “Does he have a horse?”
The girl—Carmencita, the fat man had called her—looked disgusted and said, “A horse? He has nothing. Only the pity of the people in this place.”
“He had a sawed-off shotgun and a knife,” Luke snapped. “And he used both of them to try to kill me.” A cold edge came into his voice. “You’re welcome to them, to settle his bar tab.”
“Mister,” one of the cowboys said, “Ol’ Tiger rode in a year ago on a burro even more ancient than he was, and it died two days later. Since then he ain’t had any kind of a horse or much of anything else, like Carmencita there said.”
“What about the horses tied outside?”
“Two of ’em are ours. The other two belonged to those hombres.”
“You know who they were?”
“I’m pretty sure they used to ride for Diego Ramirez.” The cowboy leaned his head toward the border. “One of those so-called revolutionaries south of the line who’s really just a bandit. Nobody around here’s gonna miss ’em or try to settle the score for ’em, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I wasn’t worried,” Luke said, “but I thought I might take one of the horses to carry Gillette.”
The cantina owner had been sputtering in fury, but he regained control of his emotions enough to say, “Take them both, just get out, gringo. You killed two bad men here today, and one good one.”
“He was trying to kill me,” Luke said, “and his act might have fooled you, but he wasn’t a good man. He was a very bad man, in fact, hiding out from the law.”
The second cowboy said, “For God’s sake, mister, don’t argue. Just take him and go.”
Irritated though he was, Luke knew that was good advice.
Five minutes later, he had Jefferson Gillette’s body lashed facedown over the saddle on one of the horses belonging to the bandidos. He would take both horses; they would fetch a decent price in Tucson. He rode away from the little border settlement without looking back.
* * *
The next day, in the sheriff’s office in Tucson, the lawman wrinkled his nose and said, “I hate the stink of a corpse that’s started to get too ripe. Takes a long time for me to stop smellin’ it.” He pushed the stack of greenbacks across the desk to Luke. “There you go, Jensen. You should’ve hauled in Ramirez’s boys, too. Might’ve been some dodgers out on them.”
“A couple of pissant bandidos like that, I didn’t figure the reward would be worth the trouble. Besides, I didn’t have an extra horse.”
“Well, there’s that to consider,” the sheriff admitted. “Mex bandits are a dime a dozen around these parts.” He frowned. “Jensen, right? Luke Jensen?”
“I told you my name, Sheriff,” Luke said. He was ready to go.
“Telegram came for you. They brought it over here, figurin’ if you showed up in Tucson, you’d likely come here.” The man added loftily, “Your reputation precedes you.”
The news surprised Luke. His brother Smoke and Smoke’s wife, Sally, knew he was down in this part of the country—he was headed for their place in Colorado next—but he wasn’t sure who else would.
The sheriff dug out the telegram from the litter of papers on his desk and handed it over. Luke read it, then folded the paper and stuck it in his pocket.
“Bad news?” the sheriff asked.
“No. Just a change of plans. I was going to Colorado, but now I’m headed for Reno.” It was none of the lawman’s business, but Luke added anyway, “Going to see my brothers and my boys for Christmas.”