Chapter 8
“Lookee there—fresh meat,” Prophet said as he stared up at the dead man hanging upside down and by one ankle from a giant sycamore.
Prophet and young Colter Farrow had been on the trail crossing the desert together for two whole days. This was the early afternoon of the third day, and they were finally starting to reach the Sierra de la San Pedro—as well as Rosario “One-Eye” de Acuna’s cantina on the aptly named Arroyo de los Muertos.
“What do you suppose the poor hombre did to deserve such an end?” Colter asked.
Prophet stared up at the dead man. The corpse was badly bloated, so it had been hanging there for several days, but it was a far more recent expiration than the several other men whom Prophet and Colter had also seen in similar dispositions along the trail.
At least Prophet had assumed they were all men. He’d been able to tell for sure that only one was a man, for given the other cadavers’ extreme states of putrefaction—two were veritable skeletons with only a few strips of leathery flesh clinging to the bones—it was impossible to gauge the sexes.
This was a male, all right. A Mexican in a short leather jacket, white shirt, and pantalones stuffed into high, brown, calfskin boots. The bloating had so disfigured the man that it was impossible to tell much else about him except that he’d been shot several times and also sliced up pretty well with a knife. Something had been shoved into his mouth, and Prophet didn’t even want to think about what it might be, though, given his knowledge of the particularly grisly and punitive Baja form of punishment, he had a pretty good idea.
“No tellin’,” Prophet said. “I know ole One-Eye’s work, though. The severity usually only depends on what kinda mood he’s in at any given time, though I’d say this fella mighta tried to take advantage of One-Eye’s advanced age and rob him or abuse one of his putas.”
“One-Eye?”
“The old mestizo who runs the place. Rosario de Acuna. Claims to be descended from Spanish kings, with an Aztec war chief hidden somewhere in a woodpile, but many a man claims to be a lot of things down here. He also claims to be a hundred years old, but he was claiming that when I first started cooling my heels down here nearly fifteen years ago now so that’d make him older’n Methuselah. So who knows? One thing I do know is that old One-Eye makes a helluva javelina stew. That’s why I risk stopping here.”
“Risk?”
Prophet gave a dry chuff. “You’ll see.”
The bounty hunter booted Mean and Ugly into the arroyo then up the other side. There was more growth here than only a mile back, which meant there was more water.
Agave cactus, elephant trees, the massive cardon cactus, tree yuccas, and spiked shrubs of many shapes and sizes pocked the desert around the rocky trail that showed the marks of recent travelers. Since One-Eye Acuna’s cantina was the only place within a hundred square miles one could find water as well as food and busthead, and since it was on a main freight route from the Sea of Cortez to the Pacific Ocean, anyone passing through this part of the Baja peninsula usually stopped for an hour or two or even a night or two, to rest their horses before the hard climb over the mountains.
It was a remote, lawless place, and any man who stopped here was taking his life in his hands.
“You watch my back, kid,” Prophet said as he rode on into the cantina’s yard, “and I’ll watch yours.”
“You’re makin’ me nervous, Lou.”
“It’s good to be nervous at old One-Eye’s.”
Prophet and Colter stopped their horses in the middle of the dusty yard, near the windmill and stone stock tank ringing its base. The horses had smelled the water from a mile away and were eyeing the tank eagerly while Prophet and his trail companion took their measure of the surroundings, getting the lay of the land.
Several saddled horses stood before the big, boxlike, brush-roofed adobe sitting back from a wide ramada. A barn and corral sat to Prophet’s right. Goats, pigs, and chickens foraged in the low, rocky desert hillocks to his left, around several small stone stock pens and an adobe chicken coop. As far as Prophet could tell, no trouble was afoot. He’d ridden up to One-Eye’s place before when men from rival bandito gangs were exchanging lead, so he knew from experience it paid to be cautious.
Besides, this was Mexico . . .
“All right,” Lou said, reaching down to snap the keeper thong back over his Colt’s hammer. He’d released the strap when they’d left the dead man hanging by the wash. “Quiet as a preacher’s parsonage on Sunday after . . .”
He let the words die on his tongue when boots thumped and spurs chimed on the ramada. He glanced at the cantina. A man was just then walking through the batwing doors that were made from woven greasewood stems. The tall Mexican outfitted in the brightly colored trail garb of the border country stopped just outside the doors, as they slapped into place behind him.
He lifted his chin as though to take a deep breath, composing himself after too much drink, then walked forward with pronounced carefulness. He stepped out from under the ramada into the sunlit yard then stopped again.
Suddenly, he dropped straight down to his knees. He knelt there for a second then gave a little whining, strangling yell before falling on his face in the dust. The crown of the red velvet, silver-stitched sombrero hanging down his back poked straight up at the sky. Below the sombrero, the brass-framed, pearl handle of a stylish knife jutted from the man’s back.
Something moved behind the cantina’s batwings. A man stood there, staring out. He pushed through the doors and stopped under the ramada, staring straight out into the yard at Lou Prophet and Colter Farrow. He was dressed very much like the now-dead vaquero, only he was shorter, with a slight paunch, and he sported long drooping black mustaches.
As he sized up Prophet and Colter, the Mexican’s right hand strayed toward a pistol holstered high on his right hip. Prophet smiled without guile at the gent and opened his hands to show that he was no threat.
Colter did the same.
The mustached Mex slid his eyes between the newcomers cautiously, then removed his hand from his gun and strode over to the dead man. He placed his left foot on the dead man’s rump and pulled the knife free of the man’s back with his right hand. The knife made a sucking, grinding sound as it slid free of the dead man’s flesh.
The dead man’s killer cleaned the blade on the dead man’s short leather charro jacket, then stuck the fancy pig sticker into a sheath jutting up from the well of his right, silver-tipped, high-topped black boot. He crouched once more over the dead man and pulled something from the dead man’s right coat sleeve.
He looked at it then, giving a Spanish curse, angrily flipped the object into the dirt. Prophet’s eyes were good enough for him to make out the queen of hearts.
When the Mexican had returned to the cantina, Prophet turned to Colter and narrowed one eye in warning. “You don’t want to cheat at cards here.”
“No,” Colter said, staring at the pasteboard lying faceup beside the dead man. “No, I don’t.”
He and Prophet swung down from their saddles and loosened their horses’ latigo straps so they could drink freely from the stock tank. The men tossed their reins on the ground, effectively ground-reining the beasts, who wouldn’t stray far from the water, anyway, then headed over to the cantina.
Prophet pushed through the batwings first, Colter flanking him. He looked around at the men playing cards at tables around him. Then he squinted his eyes into the smoke-hazy shadows at the rear of the earthen-floored room, where a raisin of a little one-eyed man held his place beside his range upon which a stewpot perpetually smoked, sizzled, and bubbled, filling the room with the peppery, tangy smell of Mexican stew.
The stew was One-Eye Acuna’s specialty whose Spanish name Prophet couldn’t remember. What he could remember was that it was one hell of a rib-sticking meal chock-full of goat or javelina and seasoned with chili peppers and several other spices Prophet didn’t recognize and which he’d eaten only in Baja. (One-Eye had once confessed to the bounty hunter that his secret was simmering a goat’s head in the estofado overnight then removing it the next morning. There was no seasoning in all of Mexico like boiled cerebros de cabra, or goat brains!)
Prophet stopped in the middle of the room, folded his thick arms across his broad chest, and grinned toward the old man whose head poked up maybe a foot above his plank board bar. “Lookee there, the old reprobate is still kickin’!” Prophet intoned. “Now, if that ain’t proof ole el diablo walks amongst us, I don’t know what is!”
The old man looked up from the age-yellowed newspaper spread out before him. It was a big paper likely left here by some pilgrim from Mexico City.
One-Eye’s face was so dark he might have been mistaken for a full-blood Aztec. It was every bit as creased as a raisin. The man’s longish, extremely thin hair was coal black and swept straight back over his head, tucked behind his tiny black ears. The hair was so thin that warts and black cancers showed through its thin screen, all over his head. He had more abrasions on his face. He squinted his lone, milky black eye toward Prophet, a black patch covering the other one.
A grin shaped itself slowly on his lipless mouth, showing what appeared to be a full set of badly tobacco-stained teeth. Ashes from the loosely rolled corn-husk cigarette dangling from a corner of his mouth dribbled onto the newspaper, which lay beside a five-gallon glass tarro filled with pickled baby rattlesnakes—another Baja delicacy.
Tears came to the ancient mestizo’s lone eye. He shook his head as the tears started to dribble down his nearly black cheeks, the skin drawn so taut against the severe bones that it appeared on the verge of splitting.
Making a strangling sound that Prophet knew to be warm, delighted laughter, One-Eye walked out around his bar, small and frail and slightly bent forward at the waist and with a slight hump pushing his head down but still fleet on his feet for all his years and ailments.
He walked up to Prophet, rose onto the toes of his desert moccasins, and placed his gnarled hands, the left one showing the middle finger hacked off at the middle knuckle, on Prophet’s cheeks. He wagged the big bounty hunter’s big head with affection, making Lou’s lips pooch, and cried, “¡Por todos los santos en el cielo, es una alegría rara verte de nuevo, mi viejo amigo! ”
(“By all the saints in heaven, what a rare joy it is to see you again, my old friend!”)
Prophet placed his gloved hands on the old man’s shoulders; they appeared nearly as large as the man’s head. “The pleasure is all mine, One-Eye. How you been, you old raptor?”
One-Eye lowered his head and looked up from beneath a thin, dark brow mantling his wizened eye socket. “Mean as a snake!” He grinned, wheezing out another laugh. “Who is your friend, Lou? The rojo. Your son, maybe, huh? I didn’t know you had any, but I’m not surprised, the way you throw your seed around, uh?” He laughed until the laughter became a racking cough.
“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised myself,” Prophet said. “But the younker ain’t mine. Leastways, not that I know about.” He winked at the redhead. “This here is my new pard, Colter Farrow.”
One-Eye cast his one-eyed gaze over the batwings into the yard, frowning. “Where is the gringa? The rubia with . . .” He held his hands up to his chest as though hefting a couple of heavy melons, grinning lewdly. “She is the one I want to see!”
He laughed again until he hacked.
“The persnickety, teetotaling Vengeance Queen and I parted trails a ways back. I wouldn’t doubt if she’s holed up in a snake den in West Texas. Them sand rattlers can have her. She might stack up nice, but she’s a harpy, just like all of . . .”
Prophet frowned. The old mestizo, apparently distracted, had walked up to Colter and now rose onto the toes of his moccasins again, placing his knobby, nearly black hands on the younker’s face. With the index finger of his right hand he traced the S branded into young Farrow’s left cheek.
Colter looked incredulously down at the old man. He shifted his uneasy look to Prophet then returned it to One-Eye, who sucked a sharp breath through his teeth, squeezing his lone eye closed, dropping his chin, and saying, “Pain, El Rojo.” He placed his right hand on Colter’s chest, over his heart. “So, so much pain, you have endured—am I right?”
He opened his eye and looked up at Colter, probing the young man with his single, milky black eye, keeping one hand on his face, the other on his chest.
“What—you don’t like it?” Colter asked.
One-Eye grinned. He cut his one-eyed gaze to Prophet. “¡Fuerte! They are tough when they are young—are they not, Lou?”
“Some of ’em have to be tougher than others.”
“I know just what you need to take the pain away. Both of you. The pain of the long ride across the desierto solitario . . . if for no other reason.” One-Eye winked his lone eye at Colter then turned toward the bar.
“The Brand of Sapinero is what that is,” said a man’s voice on Prophet and Colter’s right. Louder, edgier, the man said, “Or, as some call it, the Mark of Satan . . .”
Prophet saw the speaker rise from a chair over there and flick the keeper thong free of a pistol hammer.
Ah hell.