The next day, mid-morning, Haskell and Arliss halted their mounts at the west edge of Sundown, just beyond the old depot hut.
“Something’s wrong,” Arliss said, staring straight ahead along the deserted main street.
Haskell nodded. “You ever ridden through a mountain valley, far from anywhere, and not seen a single critter? No deer, elk or coyotes? No songbirds? Even the squirrels layin’ low?”
“Yes. I’ve ridden through such a valley.”
“Kinda looks an’ sounds like that here, don’t it?”
“When that happens, it usually means there’s a particularly nasty breed of predator about.” Arliss reached forward and slid her Winchester carbine from its saddle boot. “A rogue grizzly or a stalking wildcat.”
“Or a jackal.”
Haskell’s nerves had been on edge since they’d arrived at the line shack on Jack Rabbit Wash just before sundown the previous evening. There’d been no telling for sure, but Haskell had suspected that Jack Hyde had holed up in the shack while he’d been orchestrating his dirty work in the area.
Hyde hadn’t left behind any identifying markers, but someone had obviously been living in the shack, for the stove had recently been used and there’d been fresh trash—mostly airtight tins—tossed onto the rubble pile in the draw behind the cabin.
And the cot that Haskell and Arliss had taken turns sleeping on when the other was keeping watch for the Jackal’s possible return, had smelled like fresh sweat.
Jackal sweat.
Odd how sweet the sweat had smelled, he’d thought. A vaguely feminine smell.
Cigarette butts lying about had been of the cheap wheat paper variety. But they’d been deftly, tightly rolled. There had been no liquor bottles. At least none that had appeared recently discarded. Not a one.
Was the Jackal a teetotaler?
Also plucking the lawman’s already strained nerves was the sense that he and Arliss had been followed when they’d left the shack and ridden over to the Silver Ranch. And then it was as though the ghost haunting their back trail had suddenly disappeared.
But the ghost had returned.
Haskell could sense it again now in Sundown.
Had the Jackal swung around and ridden ahead of him and Arliss, and beaten them back to town?
As Arliss quietly racked a cartridge into her Winchester’s action, Haskell shucked his own rifle and cocked it. He stared ahead along the dusty, sunny street. Nothing moved. Not a horse. Not a dog. Not even a tumbleweed.
Despite the heat that had returned after the storm, a bead of cold sweat rolled down the lawman’s back.
“All right,” he muttered, half to himself, and touched spurs to his mount’s flanks.
They rode slowly into town, hooves thudding softly, dust rising.
None of the shops around them had ‘Closed’ signs in the windows, but the shops looked closed, just the same. Closed and abandoned.
Soft laughter sounded just ahead. It was coming from Rosa’s Cantina on the right side of the street. A man’s voice rose, buoyant with humor. A familiar voice. Another man spoke with a Spanish accent, and that voice was also familiar to the lawman’s ears.
The sounds—the only ones anywhere in the town—were coming from Rosa’s Cantina.
Haskell glanced at Arliss then gestured to the little watering hole with his eyes.
They turned in. As they did, Haskell spied movement up the street on his left. Three men stepped out of the Cantina San Gabriel and took up positions against the stout adobe columns fronting the place. One was the Mexican-Apache, Hector Valderrama, who’d ridden into Sundown with five other lobos just as Bear and Jordan Tifflin had been riding out.
The mestizo crossed his arms on his chest and grinned beneath his sweeping black mustache.
“Ah, shit,” Haskell grumbled.
“What is it?”
“I been to this dance once before.”
Arliss dismounted and turned toward Valderrama and the three others. The other two were Anglos, but all three looked as savage as they came, clad in buckskin and deerskin, pistols and knives bristling on their hips. A silver capped bowie knife was sheathed on Valderrama’s right calf, over his knee-high moccasin with the pointed toe that made it look like an elf shoe.
That was the only thing one bit elfish about Hector Valderrama.
“Nice looking bunch,” Arliss said. “Who do you suppose they ride for?”
“I have a feelin’ we’re gonna find out.”
Haskell tossed his reins over the hitch rack and walked slowly under the arbor fronting Rosa’s cantina, keeping a cautious eye skinned on the Cantina San Gabriel and the three, hard-eyed men standing in front of it.
Flanked by Arliss, Bear pushed through the batwings. Rosa looked at him from behind the bar. A smile began to tug at her mouth corners, but then she saw Arliss walk into the cantina behind Haskell, and she arched a skeptical, faintly accusing brow.
Haskell smiled and pinched his hat brim to the pretty Mexican woman. Then he turned to where Redfield sat in his wheelchair, in his usual place, his back customarily against the wall. He was playing checkers with Orozco La Paz, who sat at a table beside the Ranger captain. La Paz was just then chuckling enthusiastically through his teeth as he jumped several of the Ranger’s checkers, cleaning the board.
“Goddamn you, Oro, you bean-eatin’ son of a bitch!”
La Paz lifted his head, laughing girlishly. “No disrespect intended, el Capitan, but I was setting you up for that move since the very start of the game!”
“Well, you were setting someone up for somethin’, anyway!” Haskell said, planting his fists on his hips and chuckling.
Both checker players snapped their heads toward the big man standing just inside the doorway, as though they’d been jerked by the same string.
“Well, look what the coyotes dragged down the wash and into our humble abode!” bellowed Redfield. As appeared to be the custom, his blue eyes were glazed from drink. A nearly empty tequila bottle stood on the table to his left, with two shot glasses. “I see you’re still kickin’, ya big catamount!”
He might have acted delighted, but there was a vague disappointment in his eyes.
Redfield turned to Oro La Paz and said, “Henry Dade said he was sendin’ me a catamount, and ole Henry wasn’t whistlin’ ‘Dixie’! We used to ride together—Henry an’ me.” The Ranger’s eyes flicked to Arliss and held on her with goatish male interest. “Sayyy, what you brought home with ya, son?”
“Si,” said Oro La Paz, grinning, showing all his large, crooked, tobacco-stained teeth, his chocolate eyes fairly devouring Bear’s comely partner. “What you bring home with you, Senor Oso? A girl? Where did you find a girl out there in those rocks? And one so pretty ... ?”
Haskell glanced at Arliss, who rolled her eyes at the seedy checkers players as she turned to stare out over the batwings. She held her Winchester carbine up high across her chest, ready for action.
“This here, gentlemen ... and Senora Rosa ... is Miss Arliss Posey of the famed Pinkerton Agency. Arliss is a whole lot smarter than me.”
“If looks make us smart, she is smarter than us all,” intoned La Paz, then glancing quickly at Rosa and adding, “Except for Senora Rosa, I mean!”
Rosa beetled her brows at him.
“What do you mean Miss Posey is smarter than you, Bear?” asked Redfield. “Did she help you run down, the Jackal, did she? Boy, I hope so.” He frowned. “An’ ... what did you mean by your remark about Oro’s remark about him settin’ someone up?”
“Oh, don’t worry about it, Cap,” Haskell said, walking over and slacking into a chair near the two checkers players. “He set us all up. You, me, likely the whole town and both shooting factions out there in the rocks. He’s probably gonna kill you—don’t you realize that, or are you too damn drunk? Him an’ the Jackal.”
Oro frowned, curious. “I do not comprende, Oso. What are you saying? Speak English!”
Bear said, “You see, we were sitting around talking last night at the old line shack on Jackrabbit Wash, Miss Posey an’ me, and I told her I was wondering if all the killing out here was really about a land war. I told her that in the entire file my boss gave me on Jack Hyde, otherwise known as the Jackal, I didn’t see any mention of the gold bullion that Hyde and his partner Oscar Alvear stole nearly twenty years ago ever being recovered. I told her I was wondering if all the shooting out here wasn’t really about that loot and not about a land war at all!”
Redfield and Oro shared a dubious look.
Oro smiled uncertainly as he turned back to Haskell and said, “And what did she say, the bonita Pinkerton?”
Haskell glanced at Arliss still standing by the door, staring cautiously over toward the Cantina San Gabriel. “I had to prod her a little. She’s a good agent, Arliss is. She plays her hand close to the vest. I reckon she was startin’ to trust ole Bear, though, so she finally explained how the loot hadn’t been found.
“She also explained how this wasn’t the first time the Pinkertons had been poking around about it. They had a pretty good-sized, open file on that loot, because the government had hired them to recover it way back when it was first stolen. Miss Arliss also explained about how that loot had become somewhat of a poorly kept secret in these parts, and that occasionally men of many stripes, from both sides of the border, passed through here looking for the Jackal’s Bullion, as it was called.”
Bear shook his head. “As far as anyone knew, no one had found it. It remained where a much younger Jack Hyde and Oscar Alvear had buried it when they’d passed through this neck of western Texas, with the frontier cavalry hot on their heels.”
Arliss kept staring over the batwings as she said, “Hyde had been wounded during the holdup. After a couple of days’ hard riding with just himself and Alvear, as the others in their gang had been run down by the cavalry and killed, Hyde started to lapse into unconsciousness. So he was never sure where Alvear had buried the loot before both men had ridden on to Kansas, where Hyde sought medical help. Alvear had hidden the money because he was afraid the cavalry would catch up to them, which they eventually did, but only after a town marshal—one Homer Redfield—took him into custody.”
Redfield stared, hang-jawed at the pretty Pinkerton.
So did Oro La Paz.
“She’s a keeper, that one,” Redfield said, splashing more whiskey into his glass. His right hand shook slightly.
Haskell dug an Indian Kid out of his shirt pocket and turned to Rosa. “Miss Rosa, I’d have a glass of your delicious tequila, if you wouldn’t mind ... ”
Rosa had been staring as though in a trance, absorbing the information she was hearing. Bear’s request snapped her out of it. She grabbed a bottle from a shelf beneath the bar then walked over and set the bottle and the glass down on Haskell’s table.
She looked at Redfield, “So ... you arrested the Jackal and Alvear?” she asked. “All those years ago?”
“I reckon that’s right,” Redfield drawled, guiltily, his weathered cheek twitching nervously.
“How come you never said anything?” she asked the aged Ranger. “You brag about everything but not about arresting the Jackal?”
Redfield just stared down at his shot glass, a faint smile tugging as his silver-bearded face.
“Because Alvear was due to be released from prison soon,” Arliss said from the batwings. “The Captain knew that. That’s why he had himself transferred here to Sundown, so he’d be in the area when Oscar Alvear was released from prison ... and he and Jack Hyde and Alvear threw in together to retrieve the loot.”
“A conspiracy of old men who needed each other,” Haskell said.
“Why you old diablo!” Rosa said, scowling at Redfield in shock. Redfield winced, raised his glass in a sheepish salute, and threw back the entire shot.
Rosa looked from Haskell to Arliss and then back to Arliss again. “When is Alvear getting out of prison?”
“Oh, he’s done his twenty years,” Arliss said. “His sentence was up nearly a year ago.”
Haskell looked at Oro La Paz. “Right, Alvear?”
Oro La Paz, aka Oscar Alvear, grinned. He let a little air out through the gaps between his teeth.
At the same time, Haskell heard the heavy, ratcheting click of a shotgun hammer being eared back. He turned to see Redfield aiming both his sawed-off shotguns at him, all four bores yawning wide.
Redfield cocked another hammer and smiled icily.