Chapter One

When they come at you out of the darkness, there is perhaps one second to make the choice: kill them or run. MacIntyre was a good man, trained to think fast, but he wasn’t expecting trouble and so he made the wrong decision. The two men were professionals and good at their job and they had the advantage of surprise. They left him huddled dead in an alleyway on the north side of town and moved away silently into the night without arousing a flicker of interest from the passers-by on the brightly lit street a few yards away.

Two days later Mike Stevens was efficiently knifed outside a cantina in San Patricio. Two miners going in for a drink saw the scuffle and ran into the street as they saw Stevens fall. His throat was slit and the blood was still pumping in a red arc from his jugular vein long after the sound of hoofbeats faded into the night. Somebody said later that there had been two men, one of them tall and dark haired.

Inside the same week someone discovered what was left of Oliver Freeman. He was staked out in a patch of prickly pear, his eyelids cut off the way the desert Apaches used to do it, and S smeared with molasses to attract the ravenous red ants. He had been out there a while, and they had to bury him on the spot because nobody would bring his body into town.