CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The search had not gone well. Clay Kyle and his band rode under a blistering sun and a sky as transparent as blue glass. The heat was unrelieved by still, hot air that was thick and hard to breathe. Ahead of them, dust devils danced like hunting rattlesnakes and by noon, when the talking mirror again flashed on a mountainside, tempers frayed. One-eyed Morris Bennett and Loco Garrett got into it about Robert E. Lee’s role in the defeat of the South until Susan Stanton told them to shut the hell up. Doug Avila, busy with his own dark thoughts, grew very silent and when he did, the men around him sensed the tension and danger in him and gave him room.
Just before noon, Kyle spotted shade under a massive shelf of rock and ordered a halt for an hour. He and the others drank a little water, ate some jerky, and nobody spoke until Susan Stanton lit a slim cheroot, slowly exhaled a curling ribbon of blue smoke, and said, “Clay, so far we’ve passed a couple of arroyos too narrow to hold a palace and we’ve found nothing else. Maybe the Sheik’s place is on a shelf higher up the mountain.”
“Maybe,” Kyle said. He sounded almost disinterested, as though heat and exhaustion had gotten to him.
Doug Avila spoke for the first time that morning. “Woman, the sky islands you speak of are at least five thousand feet above the flat, impossible for men and horses. And I know it’s a good day’s ride, maybe two, through these badlands until we reach the foothills at the end of the Sierra del Carmen. And all that time we’ll have Dave Shannon’s gunmen on our backtrail.”
Susan Stanton had an elegant way of holding her cigar, her right elbow resting on her left arm, which she held across her waist, the cheroot near her cheek.
“What are you telling us, Doug?” she said.
“I’ve laid it out for you,” Avila said. “Make of it what you will.”
“Shannon’s men are the Sheik’s bodyguards, I know it,” Kyle said. “Dave Shannon is lying through his teeth, but I’ll deal with him when the times comes.”
“You’ll do it without me, Clay,” Avila said. “I’m done.” He nodded in the direction of Jenny Calthrop. “You can keep my share of the girl, just look me up sometime and buy me a drink.”
Kyle shook his head. “You’re going nowhere, Doug. I need all the men I got.”
“Clay, I’m leaving. This is a ride from hell into nowhere,” Avila said. “I advise you to call it quits and in the future don’t listen to tall stories told by Chinamen.” He looked around him at men with hard, exhausted faces. Only the distant mountains and Susan Stanton looked cool, and everyone stank of sweat but her. “Anyone coming with me?” he said.
Clay Kyle rose to his feet, sunlight harsh on his face, the rest of his body in shade deep enough that it could cover up his draw. He’d also positioned his gun so that it was handy, the butt between his elbow and wrist. He was angry now and that made him unpredictable and dangerous. “Doug, no one is riding with you, because you ain’t leaving. You’ll stick this out with the rest of us, and at the end of it, you’ll be a rich man.”
“Or a dead man,” Avila said. “I’m saddling up, Clay. It’s been nice knowing you.”
The breed half turned in the direction of his horse. Then one word from Kyle, low, dark, and ominous, like a whisper in a sepulcher, stopped him.
“Avila.”
The man’s back stiffened. He turned slowly. His hand was close to his Colt. “Clay, don’t try to stop me,” he said.
“Nobody walks out on me,” Kyle said. “Nobody. Seems like you’ve got a decision to make.”
“I can shade you, Kyle,” Avila said. “Any day of the week.” His voice was calm, evenly paced, but his whiplike body was tense. “I’m pulling out of here without water and grub, but I’d rather do that than stay in this hellhole a minute longer.”
“I said you ain’t going, Doug,” Kyle said. “You’ll stick, by God.”
“Go to hell,” Avila said.
Clay Kyle didn’t telegraph his draw. An amateur will raise his gun hand shoulder as he makes his play, but only Kyle’s arm moved and since it was in in deep shadow and difficult to see, Avila lost a full half second before he clawed for his Colt. It was all the time Kyle needed. His gun hammered, shot after shot roaring among the surrounding rock faces like the sound of a titanic boulder bouncing along a marble corridor.
Avila staggered back, a bullet in his belly, another two in his chest. A dying man, the death darkness closing in on him. But he fired back, missed, fired again, missed. Suddenly his revolver seemed too heavy for him, and it fell from his hand onto the rocky ground. Avila fell a moment later, dead when he hit the ground.
In later years there was talk that Clay Kyle was not fast on the draw and shoot and that he got lucky the day he killed Doug Avila. But most agreed, and still do to this day, that after Kyle’s gun was in his hand, he got his work in very quickly. They compared him to the shootist Wyatt Earp who thumbed off shots at extraordinary speed once his firearm was drawn. What’s sure is that light and shade played a part in the Kyle/Avila gun battle and for now, that’s where the matter must rest.
Susan Stanton walked to the dead man and looked down at his shot-up body. She turned to Kyle and said, “You sure ventilated him, Clay. It’s a pity. I kind of liked him. He was a sharp dresser.”
“I didn’t want to lose him,” Kyle said. “But he pushed it. What about you, Suzie? If he’d bested me, would you have shot him?”
“Probably not,” Susan said. “It wasn’t my fight.”
Arlo Palmer and Boon Shanks scuttled across the rocks like grounded vultures and studied the dead man. Shanks grinned and said, “Mr. Kyle, can we have his gun and boots?”
“Sure, go ahead,” Kyle said. “His madre probably wanted him buried with his boots off anyhow.”
Palmer and Shanks stripped the man bare and then shared out his gun, boots, pocketknife, a few dollars, a silver ring, and from around his neck a small gold cross and chain.
Kyle watched this happen and then said, “You two shared the spoils, now you two bury him. There’s plenty of rocks around, so pile them high to keep animals away.”
Shanks looked stricken. “Boss, is that necessary? Avila was only half a white man.”
“I told you to bury him,” Kyle said. “Boon, he may have been a breed, but he was ten times better a man than a piece of white trash like you. Now get it done or as God is my witness, you’ll join him under a pile of rocks.”
* * *
Jenny Calthrop sat with her head on her knees quietly sobbing. Susan Stanton stepped beside her and said, “What ails you, sweetie? Sight of a dead man trouble you?”
The girl raised her tearstained face. “I saw a dead man before. I saw my father, the man you killed.”
“I didn’t kill him,” Susan said. “Clay Kyle did that.”
“You were part of it. You helped kill my entire family and as long as I live, I’ll never forgive you.”
Susan Stanton smiled. “Well, don’t worry about it, you won’t live long. Bought-and-paid-for whores seldom do.”
“Unlike you, I’m not a whore,” Jenny said. “And I’ll live long enough to see you in hell.”
Susan backhanded the girl across the face, the sharp crack of knuckles meeting flesh turned the heads of the men around her. “You have an impertinent tongue,” the woman said. “Someday I may silence it for you permanently.”
Kyle said, “What just happened? I don’t want that girl damaged.”
“Just a little disagreement about who’s the whore in this outfit,” Susan said.
“Ain’t any question about that,” Kyle said.
Susan Stanton watched him walk away, the sound of his mocking laugh loud in the silence.
It crossed the woman’s mind right there and then that someday she might have to put a bullet into Clay Kyle.