Marshal Jeremy Six #8 Read online

  The cantina doorway was propped open against the close heat. From his angle, Six could see inside to a rear corner, where a blind old guitarist sat folded over his guitar and played a soft, intricate melody from Chihuahua. Six looked back across the plaza; for a moment the guitarist’s song was drowned out by the passage of a company of mounted troops that swept into the plaza, clattered across without a glance at Six, and drummed out along the road to Tajo, column of twos at a trot. Peace settled slowly, with the dust, and the gentle tune of the guitar filled the night.

  Six left his horse and walked inside the bar room. Smoke rolled heavy under the low ceiling. A few men stood at the bar drinking beer, talking in liquid soft Spanish – talking of crops: San Juan Day was near and still there was no rain; the river ran low, the land was dry.

  Lamplight reflected frostily against Six’s jewel-hard eyes. At the far end of the bar a man looked up, a very tall black man with sleepy, half-arrogant eyes. The eyebrows went up and the suggestion of a sardonic smile appeared on the Negro face; he came out from behind the bar and came toward Six, a long-stepping man with his legs fitted into soap-faded Levi’s and his feet cased in walking boots of roughout leather. Dark sweat circles stained his shirt at the armpits where it showed through the wide armholes of the black vest. At his hip rode a heavy revolver, holstered backhand, the way a gambler who needed to reach his gun fast while seated would wear it.

  “Evening, Jeremy.”

  “Hot as Hell down here.”

  “Wait a month, it’ll get worse.”

  Six said, “How’ve you been, Jericho?”

  “Still taking nourishment.” The black man’s voice was deep and resonant.

  “Using your real name down here?”

  “Jericho Stride, like always. As close to a real name as I want to come.” Stride scraped a thumb along the angle of his jaw and observed, “You’re not wearing the badge but you didn’t ride this far from home to pay a social call.”

  Six showed his teeth. “I took a chance you’d still be running this place. I’d like a word with you.”

  “Sure. Beer?”

  “All right.”

  Jericho Stride signaled the squat brown bartender. “Dos cervezas, Miguel, por favor.”

  The barkeep lifted a pair of foaming mugs onto the bar. Six clicked his against Stride’s and drained half of it. “That’s a thirsty ride,” he said.

  “Fit for lizards and bobcats.” Stride gave him a level, appraising stare. “The charges against me,” he said in a spuriously soft voice, “they still open?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you didn’t come for me?”

  “No.”

  “Still, I can’t go back.”

  Six said, “Do you want to?”

  “Not so much, any more. I kind of like it here. They never heard the word Nigger around hare.”

  “I never heard you yassuh any white gringos either.”

  Stride laughed a little. “I reckon. It kind of gravels me not to be able to go where I please. I set foot north of the border and they’ll clap me in Yuma Prison for fifteen years. Hell of a price to pay for kicking up my heels once when I had too much cougar sweat in me to know any better.”

  “You treed a whole town and shot three people,” Six said. “I wouldn’t exactly call that kicking up your heels.”

  “Still a sobersides, ain’t you? Hell, they all survived, nobody was hurt bad.” Stride’s big shoulders lifted and dropped. “All right, that’s enough on my miseries. What you want to talk about?”

  Six’s glance swept the room. Stride took the hint; he said, “We can talk outside if you want.”

  They took their mugs of beer outside into the empty plaza. Jericho Stride tipped his high shoulder against the front of the adobe wall and watched Six over the rim of his beer schooner.

  Six regarded him with close attention, trying to decide how much he could tell Stride. They had been friends once, but that had been a lot of miles ago. When you hadn’t seen a man in half a dozen years it didn’t pay to take the chance he hadn’t changed. Six tried to size him up as if he had never met the man before, but memories kept intruding, recollections of good times and bad times shared along the old gamblers’ circuit – Fort Griffin, Denver, Leadville, Tombstone; they hadn’t ridden together but they had run across each other a good deal, as circuit riders usually did. Now they were two big men pushing into their upper thirties, two who’d seen the elephant together. Casual friendships had become important along the circuit, where knives and guns and fists were part of everyday life and it paid to know the men who could be counted on in a tight place. Jericho Stride had been one of those men. But six years of loose easy living in a strange country could make changes in a man.

  A knowing smile touched Stride’s dark face. “You don’t need to tell me anything you don’t want to.”

  Six took the time to finish his beer. Stride said, “Your face looks like it could hold a three-day rain, Jeremy. You’ve toted a lot of grief a long way.”

  “A lot farther than the limits of my jurisdiction,” Six agreed.

  “Down here a man’s jurisdiction goes about as far as the ballistic range of his gun – badge or no badge. Who you looking for?”

  Six didn’t give him a direct answer; he said, “Up north there’s talk of a revolution down here.”

  “Big word. There’s always some bandit back in the hills that says he’s leading a revolution. It hasn’t hurt my business. I don’t pay too much attention to politics.”

  “This Carlos Santana sounds like more than a run of the mill bandit.”

  “Could be,” Stride said. “He makes a lot of promises. You have to, if you want to get enough followers to build yourself an army. There’s a hell of a lot of miserable dirt-poor people around this country. What it cost Governor Orbea to build that palace up there, you could have put clothes on the back of every peon in this province and fed them for six months. But most of them don’t give a damn. Nobody cares. Things have always been like that so nobody cares. That’s why the Governor gets his palace and his fine wine and fat women. You take a mess like that and it’s bound to breed a few reformers like Carlos Santana. Maybe Santana means what he says about putting in a fair government, maybe he’s just another Governor Orbea out to grab the big palace for himself. Who knows? You see that troop of horse soldiers that went through here a little while ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “They were chasing off to Tajo, down the road there. I hear Santana’s bunch overran the barracks at Tajo, killed eight or ten of the Governor’s troops, captured fifty or sixty of them and took some guns.”

  Stride drained his mug and made a wide gesture. “You can’t keep secrets in a country like this. I hear things down here about as soon as the Governor finds out about them. Orbea, he’s big and fat and pretty slow, but he’s got a mean lizard for a militia commander. Fellow called Colonel Sanderos. Sanderos sent that company of pony soldiers down to Tajo, the one you saw ride out. But it’s six hours to Tajo and by the time they get there you can bet Santana’s rebels will be a long time gone. They won’t find anything but ashes where that garrison used to be. A stripped storehouse and pigs eating on the corpses. Those soldiers have got Yaqui trackers with them but they won’t find Santana. That’s the way Santana fights – hit hard and run fast. He hasn’t got enough men to fight a real war, occupy towns, that kind of thing. He just raids and goes back into the Sierra to hide out.”

  “Where in the Sierra?”

  “If the Governor knew that,” Stride said, “Santana’d be all through. Nobody knows where they hide out. There’s a hell of a mountain range up there. You’d need half a million troops to search all of it. Look, you must have a reason to pump me about all this.”

  Six nodded. “I’m looking to find Steve Lament.”

  A slow wicked smile widened Jericho Stride’s mouth and drew his eyes into slits. “Old Steve. Tall order, Jeremy. Very tall.”

  “His partner let it drop he was on
his way down here to throw in with Santana, Some high-priced gun work.”

  “I didn’t know he had a partner.”

  “He doesn’t. Not now.”

  “Cashed in?”

  “Yes.”

  “You kill him?”

  “No,” Six said, and didn’t elaborate. “Steve Lament’s down here somewhere.”

  “And you want him. How bad?”

  “Bad, Jericho.”

  “Personal or law?”

  “A lot of both “

  “Steve rough up some friend of yours?”

  Six said, very low, “He put a bullet in someone … close to me.”

  “A woman.”

  “Yes.”

  “She dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you weren’t there at the time … otherwise you’d have killed him on the spot, or got shot trying. How much of a jump did he have when you started after him?”

  “Three days.”

  Jericho Stride nodded. “And you want to know if he came by here, if I happened to see him.”

  “He used to be a friend of yours,” Six said.

  “He used to be a friend of yours, too.”

  “Yeah.”

  “If he’s still a friend of mine, and if I’ve seen him, I might not want to sell him out.”

  Making no immediate reply, Six tugged a cigar out of his shirt pocket and turned against the wall, out of the wind, to put a match to it. The sulphur flame glowed brittle and brilliant against the hard surfaces of his eyes; he was looking at Stride, unblinking. His strong teeth bit down on the cigar as if to sever it. Still trying to size up his man, he spoke in a hard voice, rigidly controlled: “Here’s how it went. Steve Lament came into my town with a partner, a tough called Miller. They were passing through, that’s all. On their way down here. I was up in Prescott testifying in a trial, I didn’t see any of this - I got it secondhand from witnesses when I got home. Lament and Miller went into Clarissa Vane’s place to have a few drinks. Jack Vermillion was there and they got into a card game with him.”

  “You going to tell me Lament shot Clarissa?” Stride’s face, tightly composed, revealed no expression whatever.

  “It was a fight over cards. Miller was drunk and calling names, Jack Vermillion started to slap him down for it. Clarissa sent the bouncer in to throw them out in the street and Miller started shooting. Vermillion and the bouncer were both shooting back at him and Lament bought into it. I guess there was a lot of shooting. Vermillion put a slug in Miller and the bouncer pinked Lament with one before Lament put two bullets in the bouncer. One of them killed him, the other went through the soft part of his arm and drilled straight into Clarissa.”

  Stride wasn’t looking at him. “How long did she hurt?”

  “She never knew what hit her.”

  “What about Jack Vermillion?”

  “Not hit. But I heard some toughs rolled him for his winnings and dumped him off a train in New Mexico, dead.”

  “It does go like that on the circuit,” Stride muttered, remembering. He said, “And this Miller, he was hit?”

  “Belly shot. It took him a while to die. Steve Lament got on his horse and left town on a dead run before anybody thought to stop him. Miller got mad because Lament left him behind. He told the crowd they could find Lament down here, working for Santana’s rebels.”

  “About the only place left where he can hire out his gun, I imagine,” Stride observed. “And Steve’s not much good for anything else but guns.”

  “I want him, Jericho,” Six breathed. “I want his hide on a spit.”

  Three

  Jericho Stride tapped his knuckles against the empty beer mug and said, “Jeremy, was I you, I’d ride back to your regular job and if anybody asks, you tell them you couldn’t find Steve Lament.”

  “So it’s like that, is it?”

  “It’s not what you think. If I had to pick a side I’d rather see Steve hurt than you. Look, you want an answer, and I’ll give you a straight one. I saw Steve. He came through a few days ago, we had a drink and talked over a few old times and he went on. I expect he got himself to Santana’s camp up in the mountains, one way or another. That’s what he came for. But you sure as hell can’t go in there after him.”

  “I’ve got no choice.”

  “They’ll roll your head down the mountain. You wouldn’t have a chance in Hell.”

  “You can’t always go by that,” said Six.

  “You’re as much a fool as he is,” Jericho Stride said with a head-shake and a vicious swiping gesture.

  Six began to reply, but stopped, alerted by the advancing sound of wheels and hoofs. Stride lifted his head and moved away from the wall, his proprietary interest stirred: anything that took place in the plaza this late at night would elicit his curiosity.

  A buggy made the far bend and came into the plaza, veering past the covered well and bearing down on the cantina. Six had an impression of long-waisted femininity on the seat - a tall woman in long dress and shawl, dark hair flowing. He sucked in his breath.

  Jericho Stride grinned. “I thought she’d be back. But I wasn’t expecting her this soon.” Glimpsing Six’s intent expression, he said, “Holly Moore. You know her?”

  For just a moment there Six had thought it was: Someone I knew. He shook his head. “No … I guess not.” Stride stepped forward; when the woman reined in and braked the buggy, Stride grabbed the horse’s head, then moved alongside the buggy to offer his hand up to her.

  Holly Moore gave him an arch look of disgust, climbed down, and immediately shook off his arm. Stride chuckled. “That sure as hell didn’t take long.”

  “I don’t want to hear a word about this from you. Not a word, Jericho. You understand me?” There was just a trace of Irish in her talk.

  “Mum’s the word,” Stride agreed good-humoredly.

  “Oh, to hell with you,” she said, and turned the direct blaze of her eyes against Six. It was a frank, sensual appraisal she gave him – head to foot. ‘Well, now,” she breathed, and formed her face into a slow smile of unconcealed appreciation.

  “This here goes by the name of Jeremy Six,” said Stride.

  Holly Moore dipped her head coyly, still smiling, her eyes locked frankly on Six’s. “How very pleased I am to meet you. Where’ve you been hiding this, Jericho?”

  Six met her glance, sizing her up as openly as she had done, but his expression remained cool. Close up, standing in the splash of lamplight issuing from the cantina, she still reminded him - so strongly it was like a belly blow - of the woman he had not forgotten and would not forget, for a long time yet to come. After a moment he saw the resemblance was not in her face. The bone structure was different – the high-boned construction of that kind of beauty which would, likely, remain ageless. She might have been twenty-five, she might have been forty-five. Her eyes were large, set wide apart, hooded indolently – he could not make out their color. Her lips were full, characterized by a quizzical turning.

  Her face was smaller, bonier than Clarissa’s had been. She had a direct manner, blunt and unapologetic, reflected in her expression; not at all like Clarissa’s gentle surface of courtly manners, which had covered—but not concealed—a core of tough resolve and subtle courage. This woman was far more open, rougher at the edges without being any the less feminine.

  It was the way she carried herself, he decided. The rare tall grace of lean, willowy length. The back straight without being stiff – none of the self-conscious shoulder-hunching that so many tall women resorted to. The long waist, trim without bulges, flaring into high proud breasts and long gently curved hips. She stood like Clarissa; she even moved like her. It was uncanny. The fall of her hair was the same, even the length of it, though the color was different: in the light he saw it to be auburn, tinged reddish at the edges where lamplight filtered through. She wore a shawl against the evening chill, over a dove gray traveling dress which revealed a well-turned display of ankles.

  Not unaware of Ho
lly Moore’s direct sensual interest, and all too aware of the dangers his own hard-shaken emotions could lead him into if he relaxed his guard, Six instinctively surrounded himself with a protective barrier of cool defenses. His murmured greeting to her was one of precise courtesy, giving no opening; he kept his eyes half-shuttered, his face strictly composed. It made Jericho Stride look at him in surprise; it made Holly Moore frown petulantly and say, “What’s the matter with you – have I stepped on a sore corn?”

  “Maybe you have,” Six said. “But it’s not your fault. I don’t mean to seem rude.”

  “Will you listen to that,” she said. “The last time I met a man with drawing-room manners like that … Hell, I can’t remember that far back, Jericho, can you?”

  “You trying to tell me I’ve got bad manners?”

  “Hell, you, Jericho, you’re nothing but a one-horse nigger with manners to match.” She grinned and snorted.

  “Only human being alive can get away with that,” Stride murmured. “I’ve killed men for less.”

  “I’m not a man,” Holly retorted, “in case you haven’t noticed lately.”

  “Lately,” said Stride, “you haven’t been around for me to notice anything at all.”

  “You can go plumb to Hell, Jericho Stride.” She stood by the front wheel of the buggy, frowning at the starlit façade of the saloon. “This place gets uglier every week, do you know that?”

  “Be it ever so humble,” Stride breathed, smiling softly. “Welcome home, Holly.”

  “Agh,” she said in supreme disgust. She glanced toward the back-bed of the buggy. “I’ve got valises there, you know.”

  Stride ambled toward it. Holly smiled with mock sweetness. “Why, thank you ever so much, darlin’.”

  Stride glanced into the back of the buggy and then looked at Six with bland innocence. “Hell,” Stride said, “He’s bigger than I am.”

  “Still tryin’ to impress us with your damned independence,” she observed.

  “I came down here to run a saloon,” Stride said, “not lug carpetbags.” But he reached into the back and easily lifted the two bulky valises out. With a sardonic inclination of his head he nodded toward the cantina. Six smiled slightly and stepped forward to relieve him of one of the bags. Stride said caustically, “That’s right, Jeremy, pick the light one.”