He and Bontemps shouldered through the crowd to Ettinger’s table. Ettinger stood, smiling broadly and shaking the rurale’s hand, as if he couldn’t be happier to see the man.
As Ettinger and the rurale conversed standing up, Bontemps tapped the shoulder of one of the buscaderos, who reluctantly set his cards down, stood, and strolled up to the bar. Grinning, the slaver adjusted his pistols, doffed his bowler, and sat down, taking over the bodyguard’s hand.
A minute later, Ettinger and the rurale walked away from the gambling table. Tom’s heart started beating irregularly when the two men stopped at the couch where Karla sat with the three Mexican miners. Ettinger lifted her chin, giving the rurale a look at her face. The rurale nodded and grinned.
Smiling like a proud horse trader, Ettinger pulled Karla off the miner’s lap. The rurale held his arm out formally. Karla looped her own arm through his, and the man led her through the crowd toward the stairs at the room’s rear.
Behind them, Bontemps grinned and, cupping a hand to his mouth, told the man to enjoy himself and that he’d have a bottle of his best mescal sent to his room.
Navarro watched the rurale and Karla disappear up the staircase. His ire must have been written on his face, because the Mexican dove had stopped squirming. Regarding him cautiously, she stood, muttering under her breath, then sidled off to be swept away by a knob-nosed, bull-necked miner in a cloth cap and denim jacket.
Standing, Navarro manufactured a neutral expression, and strode toward the right end of the bar at the front of the church. Tending the altar bar was a fat, middle-aged brunette in a silly pink dress with white ruffles, and a tall, sallow-faced American gent with pomaded hair and a stained green shirt buttoned to his throat. As the woman drew beers, sloshed liquor into shot glasses, and swept change from the bar with her pudgy white hands, she kept up a running harangue against the sallow-faced gent’s inability to move faster “than an April calf in a mud creek.”
Angrily, she turned to Navarro and shrieked, “Name your poison—I ain’t got all night!”
When Navarro’s tequila shot was plunked down before him on the plank bar winging out from the altar, he watched the woman bustle away to fill another order. He tossed back the shot, slid his eyes right and left. Sure no one was watching him, he took three steps straight back and crouched at the foot of the stairs. Turning and staying below the wainscoted railing shielding him from the rest of the room, gritting his teeth as he hoped against hope no one had seen his crazy move, he crawled on hands and knees to the top.
As he gained the shag runner in the second-floor hall, he took a deep breath and stood. Hearing the near-deafening roar from below—the piano player was banging out a rousing Mexican festival tune while others clapped and stomped to the beat—he moved quickly along the hall lit with a wavering umber glow.
Several doors were open, revealing empty, tidy rooms. Through several others he heard heated murmurs and squeaking bedsprings, the soft thuds of a headboard hitting the wall.
Navarro had no idea which room Karla and the rurale were in. He began sweating in earnest, his chest squeezing, when he heard the deep rumble of Spanish-uttered curses. Karla groaned a protest.
Navarro reached for the doorknob. Locked. Taking two steps back, he whipped his right boot back, then forward, connecting soundly with the door. It snapped wide, slammed against the wall. On the bed before him, the naked rurale lay sprawled atop Karla, who was still dressed, her gown pulled down around her waist. The rurale was on his knees, tying Karla’s wrists to the bedframe with his pistol belt.
The man had just whipped his head toward Navarro when, bolting forward, Tom punched him soundly across the jaw. Several bones in the man’s face broke with a dull crack. With a clipped scream, he flew off the other side of the bed.
Tom grabbed one of the big Dragoons from the man’s pistol belt, leapt upon the bed, and plucked a pillow from beside Karla. He stepped off the bed, knelt over the groaning rurale, and slapped the pillow over the man’s face. He cocked the Dragoon, jammed the barrel into the pillow, and fired one belching round. Black smoke wafted, and feathers flew.
The rurale’s arms fell to the floor, and his body relaxed.
Leaving the smoking pillow over the man’s head, Navarro leapt onto the bed, and untangled the pistol belt from the headboard, freeing Karla’s wrists.
Pulling her dress up, she stared groggily at him, tears veiling her eyes. “Tommy?”
“I’m gettin’ you outta here, kid.” Navarro shook her harshly. “Can you follow me, run when I tell you?”
She blinked and nodded, tears flowing over her eyes and down her pale cheeks.
Navarro grabbed the rurale’s double-barreled shotgun off the dresser, broke it open to make sure it was loaded, snapped it closed, and looped the lanyard over his neck and right shoulder.
He grabbed the second Dragoon from the pistol belt, shoved both behind his waistband, and pulled Karla off the bed.
“Let’s go!”
Chapter 24
Holding the double-barreled barn-blaster barrel out before him, and Karla’s right hand in his left, Navarro stole a glance up and down the hall.
A door had opened across the hall. A bare-chested man with a thin blond mustache peered through the crack, drunk eyes bewildered.
Navarro shot him a poignant look and raised the shotgun. The man stepped quickly back and slammed the door.
All the other doors were closed. The din rose up the stairs, as raucous as before. Apparently, only the man across the hall had heard the pistol shot, or paid it any heed.
Moving sideways down the hall, Navarro glanced over his shoulder at Karla stumbling along behind him on bare feet. “We’re gonna walk down the stairs nice and slow,” Tom told her. “You keep just back from my right shoulder. When I say go, you light out for the front door and hightail it across the street. There’ll be a woman and an old man waiting for you with horses.”
Eyes wide, Karla bobbed her head.
Navarro led her down the stairs, moving at a normal pace, not too slow, not too fast. His back was stiff, nerves taut. He stared straight ahead, sliding his eyes left to peer into the main hall below, all but invisible beneath a heavy layer of tobacco smoke.
He felt the vibrations of the piano in the steps beneath his boots.
Men howled, cheered, cheerfully berated one another.
The fat woman and the dour man scurried around behind the bar, drawing sudsy beers or tipping bottles over shot glasses. Before the bar and about halfway across the room, Ettinger and Bontemps played cards with the border bucks.
Holding the shotgun down low at his right side, his finger curled through the trigger guard, Navarro pulled Karla to the bottom of the stairs, then slowly turned, and walked along the bar. Ettinger and the others at their table were intent on their cards or each other.
When he and Karla had walked ten feet, Navarro turned again and strode passed the piano player and through the crowd toward the front door. He glanced around the room, neck hairs tingling. When it came, it would come from Ettinger’s table on his right flank.