The Graves at Seven Devils

THE GIRL KNOWN as Cora swept a lock of her green-streaked red hair from her eye and scanned the barren yard in front of her.

She rode her cream Arabian at the head of the Three of a Kind Gang, which was named after the identical triplet brothers who’d started it—Rafe, Billy Earl, and Custer Flute—because she’d gotten tired of eating the others’ dust and of listening to Captain Sykes endlessly passing wind. The ex-cavalry officer, who’d taken one Sioux tomahawk blow to his head too many, was rather infamous for his troublesome digestion, especially when he was trying to digest beans, though one would think an ex-cavalry man would have gotten used to beans a long time ago.

Cora drew back on the Arab’s reins and, holding her windblown hair back from her eyes with a gloved hand, frowned incredulously at the porch of the old mission-style building sitting like a couple of sun-faded adobe salt boxes wedged together amidst the sage and creosote. A pedestal rock loomed behind and above, making the nondescript old house appear even smaller, even more insignificant here on the cactus-studded, sun-blasted canyon deep in the Seven Devils Range.

But it wasn’t the adobe house itself or the formations behind it that interested Cora. Her narrowed, disbelieving gaze held steady on the man sitting under the house’s brush arbor—a strawberry-blond, mustached gent with a black, flat-brimmed hat and with a bare-breasted girl on his knee.

“Well, I’ll be ding-dong-damned,” said Rafe Flute, poking his low-crowned sombrero off his head, his long black hair blowing around his face in the dusty breeze. He rode up beside Cora and cut his eyes at her, grinning mockingly. “Is that who I think it is?”

Cora clucked the stallion ahead, her heart thudding in her chest as she drew close enough to see that the blond man was the very man she’d feared he was, with his ruddy, handsome face from which two piercing blue eyes stared out like blue fire from beneath the brim of his dusty, black Stetson.

“Hello, darlin’!” greeted Jay Squires, resting both his hands on the thighs of the young, bare-breasted Apache girl straddling his left thigh. He bounced the knee up and down, and the girl’s brown, pointed breasts jiggled. Squires laughed his characteristic rakish laugh. “Fancy us meetin’ up out here in the middle of this devil’s wide-open asshole!”

Before Cora could say anything, Billy Earl Flute rode up, his shabby black opera hat denting in the desert wind, and placed his right hand on the butt of one of his several pistols. “Cora, you want me to drill this squirrel right here and now, you give me the word, girl!”

Jay Squires laughed. “Billy Earl, how many times do I gotta tell you—that hat and them rose-colored glasses don’t so much make you look mysterious as downright tin-horned stupid.”

“Hold on, Billy Earl,” Cora said, holding out her hand and keeping her befuddled gaze on the handsome man she’d once been so in love with that just hearing his name had tied—still tied!—her innards in knots. “I wanna hear what he has to say.”

No, she didn’t. Not really. She wanted to swing her horse and head for the high rocks, holding her ears closed lest she should hear the siren cry of his masculine, intoxicating voice. But she couldn’t kill him. Not yet. She wanted to feast her eyes on the rake’s handsome countenance for just a little while . . . as long as he was here, sitting suddenly before her like some heart-shredding specter out of a past she’d tried so hard to forget.

“You always was a bighearted gal,” Squires told her, his tan, handsome cheeks dimpling with a grin, white teeth flashing beneath his strawberry-blond mustache.

Cora hardened her jaws and narrowed her eyes. “What the hell are you doin’ here, Jay? I told you when I left you in Oregon that if I ever saw you again, I’d unleash the wolf inside me, and you’d suffer for it bad!”

“Hold on, hold on!” Squires chuckled again as he held his hands up, palms out, on either side of the half-naked Apache girl, who regarded the strangers as though they were nothing more than a small dust devil that had swirled out of the desert. “You’re the one who did the shootin’ back there, if you remember.”

“I shot that bitch because I told her to keep her hands off you.” Cora leaned forward in her saddle, jutting her dimpled chin like a weapon. “People just have to understand that if they don’t mind what I say, I’m going to get angry, and the devil take the hindmost!”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Squires said, that infuriating, toothy grin in place, complete with dimples deep enough to hide thimbles in. “You cheated on me first! Remember the little mulatto bath-house girl?”

“It excited me when I was there to watch. Not when I just walked in and there you two were, goin’ at it like two she-wolves in a mud puddle!”

“Shut up!” Cora said, turning a shriveling look on the man. Beside Sykes, Rosco Heinz saw the look the girl gave Sykes, and the black man let his own amused grin fade.

Cora turned back toward Squires and spoke with barely controlled fury. “You know she meant nothing to me. It was late and I was drunk and she’d been makin’ eyes at me all evenin’, said she felt we was bonded an’ such.” She shook her head suddenly, annoyed at herself for letting him lure her into an argument. “I asked you what the hell you’re doin’ here. Don’t try to tell me it’s just a coincidence that I find you trampin’ around down here in my very own territory.”

“Your territory,” Squires grunted. “Christ! You’re as goddamn self-centered crazy as you ever were.” His eyes brushed the men beside and behind him. “At least you found the right gang!”

“Well, that’ll be enough of that,” Rafe said, dragging a Colt Navy from a shoulder holster and thumbing back the hammer.

A rifle boomed behind him, and Cora and the other men all jerked with a start as a bullet clanged and sparked off a copper bell hanging beneath the brush arbor, just ahead and right of Custer. The Apache girl whimpered and ducked, slapping her hands to her ears. The clang set Cora’s ears to ringing. As the echo flatted out toward the bald, surrounding ridges, she looked over her right shoulder.

A tall, broad-shouldered Mexican in a short, brush-scarred, fancily stitched charro jacket stood inside an otherwise empty corral grown up with weeds. Aiming a rifle across the corral’s top slat of bleached ironwood, he ejected the spent shell with a menacing jerk, then rammed a fresh cartridge into the breech.

The bearlike man wore a straw sombrero that shaded his face though Cora could just make out the whites of his eyes as he leaned over his rifle, which was aimed at the middle of her group.

“That there is Chulo Alameda,” said Jayco Squires. “He’s big, mean, and stupid . . . and he can blow the eye out of an eagle at four hundred yards.” He winked. “Rafe, I’d holster that hogleg, ’cause losin’ your head wouldn’t do that silly getup of yours any good at all.”

Custer turned back toward Jay, grinning at him winningly, and depressed the revolver’s hammer as he raised the barrel.

“What’s your game, Jay?” Cora narrowed an eye and leaned forward on her saddle horn. “If you came to get me back, you can forget it. I’m so far away from you that it took me near on a minute to recollect your name.”

Squires chuckled again and canted his head toward the adobe’s two stout wooden doors standing open to his left. The half-naked girl stared with the eyes of a frightened doe toward Chulo Alameda aiming his rifle from the corral. “Why don’t you and your boys come on in and have a drink on me? I got a proposition for you.”

“Oh, don’t worry. I ain’t gonna try to get into your drawers. Little Alvina here’s been treatin’ me just fine the past few days.” Squires hugged the girl to him and kissed the back of her bare shoulder. “Ain’t you, Alvina?”

“Come on in,” Squires said, shoving the girl off his knee and rising to his lean six feet two and adjusting the black hat on his head. He wasn’t wearing his two matched Remingtons. In fact, he wore only his underwear shirt, unbuttoned halfway down his hairy chest, under a shabby suit coat. The tweed trousers were shoved down into the tops of his beaded moccasin boots.

That was just like Jay, Cora thought. He trusted his charm even more than his gun savvy. And, on that off chance his winning smile and sparkling eyes didn’t work, he had the big bear with the Winchester on the other side of the yard.

Cora looked around at her group, all of whom regarded her curiously. She knew Squires better than they did. Could they trust him?

“I reckon we did stop for a drink,” Cora said, swinging down from her saddle. “Might as well listen to the cheatin’ son of a bitch flap his gums awhile, if it’ll make him feel better.”

The others swung out of their saddles, tack squawking, the horses blowing and shaking their dusty manes. Cora looped her reins over the hitchrack and glanced toward the porch.

Squires had already disappeared inside, his self-satisfied chuckles floating softly out the darkened, fly-woven doorway behind him. Cora’s gut tightened with anger while her loins puttied with the memory of the better times she’d shared with Jay Squires—a Baptist minister’s son from Missouri and one of the best train robbers and safecrackers in all the West.

Her gaze caught on the Apache girl standing stiffly and staring toward the corral. The girl covered her breasts with an arm and, grunting fearfully, wheeled and bolted through the saloon’s open doors, her bare feet slapping the flagstone tiles.

Cora turned to see Chulo Alameda sauntering toward the house, his rifle on his shoulder now, a pistol held low by his side. The big, bearded face beneath the straw sombrero was bearlike and menacing in its lack of expression.

Cora curled her lip at the man, then turned and headed into the saloon, flanked by the Flute brothers and Sykes and Heinz. The latter two hung back near the door to cover the group’s flank; there might be more gunmen than Chulo Alameda outside, and they could be planning an ambush.

Cora strode across the flagstone of the dim room toward Squires. The handsome outlaw had flopped down behind a long, rectangular table with two other Americans—one a middle-aged gent and a young stringbean nearly as tall and thin as the Flute boys though not nearly as well attired. Both the stringbean and the middle-aged gent wore the nondescript clothes—brush-torn and sweat-stained—of the nomadic yanqui outlaw.

“Come on in and meet my friends,” Squires said, canting his head toward the two men on his left. They sat behind plates littered with the remains of a recent meal and two half-empty beer mugs.

Squires popped the cork on a bottle and yelled at the bartender, Rudolpho Salinas, standing behind the plank-board bar along the room’s right wall, to bring glasses for Squires’s friends. As the gray-haired Mexican did as he’d been told, sweating nervously and raking his eyes across the newcomers, Cora heard spurs ching on the stone flags behind her. She glanced over her shoulder.

Chulo Alameda ducked through the door as he entered the saloon, eyeing Sykes and Heinz, who stood now with their backs to the bar, rifles ready. They both looked the bearish Mexican up and down, eyes flickering apprehensively.

Alameda had three big knives strapped to his bulky frame and two long-barreled Colt revolvers. His Winchester appeared no larger than a bung starter in his massive arms and hands, and his bearded face, framed by two thin braids hanging down from under his frayed sombrero, was a veritable cutting board of savage, knotted knife scars.

Either the big Mexican understood no English or he had an uncommonly thick skin, for he merely gave an animal grunt, sauntered over to the bar, and stood facing the room while regarding Sykes and Heinz with bleak menace.

As the bartender heeled it back to safety behind the bar, Squires poured drinks from his whiskey bottle and clucked with admonishment. “Cora, my dear, it’s a real tragedy how little your mother taught you about proper manners.”

“Never knew my mother,” Cora said. “And who are you to teach anyone about manners, you murdering swine.” As Squires squeezed the cork back into the bottle and lounged in his chair, chuckling without mirth, Cora said as she turned a chair backward and straddled it, “Now, why don’t you tell me about this so-called proposition? Not that I care, or I’m even interested in any damn thing you have to say except, possibly, ‘good-bye,’ but I just know you won’t let me sit and drink in silence until you’ve flapped your jaws awhile.”

“Could you two save the lovey-dovey stuff for later?” said Custer Flute. He and his brothers had pulled chairs out from another table, far enough away to see beneath Squires’s table, with their drinks in their non-gun hands.

“Yeah,” agreed Billy Earl, flanking Cora and throwing back his entire shot. “We don’t intend to be here more than a night, ye understand.”

“Here.” Squires nudged the bottle toward Cora. “Fill Billy Earl’s glass before it starts collecting fly shit.”

As Cora refilled Billy Earl’s glass, Squires said, “As you can see, there’s only four of us. He glanced at the older gent on his far right and the stringbean beside him, each man strategically spaced about three feet apart in case of a dustup. “Pee-Wee Grayson here and Sonny Dark.” He glanced at Chulo Alameda sharing dark stares at the bar with Heinz and Sykes. “You’ve met Chulo. I met him a couple of weeks ago, just after he delivered a passel of Chinee girls to the miners down in Palo Pinto.”

“Shit,” Billy Earl growled, setting his opera hat onto an empty chair and glancing over his shoulder at the big bear at the bar. “Slave tradin’, huh?”

“Good money in the slave trade.” Squires grinned proudly at the big Mexican. “Chulo broke out of Yuma pen a year ago, killed two guards and four of the Mojave Indians sent to track him.”

“Ate the last one,” chuckled the stringbean, Sonny Dark. “Cut him up and rock-fried him on the desert floor.”

Both Sykes and Heinz turned toward the group at the tables. Then, as though their heads were both tied to the same string, they turned back slowly, brows mantling their eyes grimly, to Chulo Alameda regarding them cow-like as he leaned on an elbow and rested his rifle on his shoulder.

“Chulo is worth a good handful of average shooters, but even so,” Squires continued, leaning back in his chair with a shot glass in his hand, “we need more men . . . and, uh, women . . . for a job we have planned. A job too big for only the four of us.”

Squires squinted back at her. “When I came down here, I didn’t know you were here. I came down here, to the Seven Devils, for a job, hopin’ to pick up some help from one of the gangs in these parts . . . if there was any I could trust. I learned last week from Rippin’ Robbie Price that the Three of a Kind Gang was hidin’ out in these rocks. So”—Squires raised his hands—“I’ve been lookin’ around, found out from Salinas you and your boys stopped in from time to time.” He smiled. “Between jobs, I reckon.”

Cora glanced at Rafe, Billy Earl, and Custer Flute. “Yeah, well, there wasn’t no money in the last job, but it was right satisfyin’ just the same.” She removed her straw hat decorated with dry desert wildflowers, and pinched up the crown. “What kind of a job you got? Mexico, I reckon. Guns, money, or gold, and how much? Or you just wanna kill somebody?”

“It’s gold.” Squires raked his gaze around her men before letting it settle back on Cora. “You in? Perhaps you’d like to talk about it?”

“If my information is right, we should each walk away with between five and ten thousand. Each of us. That’s a lot of walkin’ anywhere we wanna walk for as long as we wanna walk.”

Custer and Rafe Flute whistled at the same time. “You must be figurin’ on one o’ them Mex immigrant trains,” said Billy Earl, his eyes lighting up and his long, thin lips shaping a smile inside his scraggly black beard. His glasses hung low on his nose.

Squires shook his head. “Nope. One of the hacendados down in Sonora found gold on his hacienda. An old Franciscan digging, I hear. I got a man down there workin’ for the don, and he sent word that the don will be sending a shipment of gold, almost a hundred thousand dollars’ worth, to a Tucson bank.”

Squires smiled, slid his eyes to Cora and the other two Flute brothers and to the men at the bar, then back to Custer. “That’ll have to wait until we’ve gotten to know each other better.” The handsome outlaw stretched his lips, showing more teeth. “Suffice it to say, we’ll be hitting it soon not far from here.”

Cora sat back in her chair and crossed her arms on her chest. Her stony expression belied that her heart had swelled at the prospect of riding the outlaw trail with the once repulsive and irresistible rake who still set her blood to boiling and her loins to quivering . . . and that she hated herself for it. “How many men will be guarding the shipment? How much firepower?”

“At least twenty well-armed men. My man working for the don says the old boy has a couple of Gatling guns. I doubt he’ll leave them at home. But if we surprise them at the right time and place along the trail, we should be able to pull it off.”

Rafe flushed slightly, hiked a shoulder, and gave his hat a hard bounce. “I didn’t say that.” He glanced at his brothers. “If you boys are in, I reckon . . .”

Cora feigned an indifferent yawn and looked around at the others. “Well, I could stand a few thousand dollars in my pocket—I know that. I’m tired of workin’ like a dog and runnin’ around this desert like a fuckin’ pack rat.” She turned around to scowl at Jayco Squires. “My problem is you. If you think you can keep your hands off me and give me about twenty feet elbow room at all times, I’ll give it some serious consideration.”

Squires dropped his eyes to her blouse and the pale cleavage that the undone buttons revealed. “I’m guessin’ you’ll be fightin’ your way under my blankets in two nights.”

She let her voice trail off as high-pitched grunts and groans rose from near the bar. It was the Apache girl. She’d donned a baggy sackcloth shirt, which hung off one slender, brown shoulder, and she was carrying a wicker basket filled with bedding. She was sidestepping toward the door around Chulo Alameda. The big man stepped back and forth in front of her, harassing her, guttural chuckles rumbling up from his chest.

The shot crashed like thunder. Chulo Alameda’s hat flew off his head and bounced off the back wall to reveal his sweat-matted, louse-peppered hair.

His eyes snapped wide with shock and fury. As the Apache girl screamed and ran outside with her basket, Alameda jutted his lower jaw and stepped toward Cora while raising his rifle.

Holding her smoking revolver straight out from her shoulder, Cora thumbed back the hammer with a ratcheting click and aimed down the barrel at the center of the big Mexican’s broad forehead. “You leave that girl alone, hear? Or you and me gonna dance, you shit-smelly son of a bitch!”

Alameda stopped, his rifle halfway to his chest. He blinked. His dark features turned darker. The rest of the room had fallen silent, all the men with their hands on their guns, each faction glaring at the other, wondering which way the wind was going to blow.

Cora heard Squires chuckle as relieved sighs rose from his group as well as from her own. A firefight in close quarters was never a pleasant experience.

“Jay, you keep this big tub of rancid hog guts away from me, understand? Or I’m gonna turn his ugly hide into buzzard feed.”

She holstered her revolver and hooked her thumbs in her cartridge belts. “Now, if you boys’ll excuse me, I’ll be seein’ if that poor girl is all right.” Holding the big man’s stare, she backed across the room and out the door.

Behind her, Squires threw back another whiskey shot and slammed the glass on the table. Chuckling, he shook his head and stared at the door.

“Got that girl wrapped around my little finger.” He switched his sparkling gaze to the Flute brothers regarding him distaste-fully. “Yessir, boys, I purely do!”