As the riders approached riding two by two, Navarro made out several badges pinned to shirts or jackets. Two of the five wore high-peaked sombreros. Probably rurales out to avenge their leader’s death in Ettinger’s Lady of Sorrows.
Navarro waited till the men were ten yards down the grade, their horses slowing as they approached the crest. Navarro stood, snapped the Winchester to his shoulder, and fired four quick rounds into the group.
As the men fell from their saddles and horses screamed, rearing, Tom ran into the trail, drew a bead on a badge glittering in the moonlight, and fired, the ping resounding as his bullet plunked through the tin and into a heart.
The man grunted and tumbled off his buck-kicking horse’s rump and lay groaning in the sage right of the trail, his three fallen comrades spread out around him.
Navarro had taken the group by complete surprise. Only one man managed to snap off a shot, the slug spanging off the rocks around Navarro as the shooter tried to get his pitching mount under control.
Tom lowered himself to a knee, drew a bead on the man, and dropped the hammer. The bullet punched through his left shoulder. The rurale screamed and twisted around as his horse leapt high, its front hooves flailing skyward.
Pitching off the left side of his horse, he hit the ground with a dull thud. His horse ran screaming straight up and over the crest and down the other side.
Two other wounded men groaned and cursed along the trail. The thuds of the fleeing horses dwindled in the quiet night.
The rurale had dropped behind a rock. Crouching, Tom waited. The man’s silhouetted head appeared, hatless. His gun glittered. Tom fired, his round barking off the rock a few inches from the rurale’s head.
The man cursed in Spanish, bolted to his feet, turned, and ran east along the ridge’s rocky spine. Tom triggered a shot and followed, leaping rocks. The man snapped off two shots as he ran.
Running toward him, Tom returned fire, jacking and levering his saddle gun. His third shot evoked a grunt, but the man kept running, his shadow staggering. The rurale triggered off another wayward shot, and Tom returned it.
The man groaned. His shadow fell.
Tom approached the fallen man at a walk, holding the Winchester out at his waist.
The rurale was down on his left side, clutching his right thigh with his right hand. He held his old Remington in his left, but he didn’t try to lift it. He raised his head to Tom, his eyes snapping wide.
“Please have mercy!” he cried in Spanish.
“I always heard there wasn’t any mercy in Mexico.”
Navarro triggered the Winchester from his hip, drilling a round through the rurale’s heart, then turned and walked back to the trail. He put the other two wounded men out of their misery, then stood in the middle of the trail, peering into the valley bisected by the silver stream. He watched and listened.
No hoofbeats or moving shadows. Only crickets and the breeze ruffling the sage and Mormon tea.
Leaving the dead men where they’d fallen, Navarro mounted his bay and gigged it over the ridge.
Chapter 25
Navarro’s group traveled for two more hours, heading steadily northward, navigating by moonlight. When Karla and Billie were nearly falling from their mounts with exhaustion, Navarro found a hollow below a rocky pass. He and Hawkins picketed the horses near a grass-lined spring, while Louise set up camp and rolled out blankets near a small fire for the girls.
When the horses had been fed, watered, and rubbed down with dry grass, Navarro walked into the small circle of firelight reflecting off the jumbled boulders behind it. Karla and Billie lay curled beneath their blankets while Louise filled a speckled blue pot from a hide-covered canteen.
“They all right?” he asked the woman.
“As far as I can tell, there are no lasting physical injuries. It looks like they’ve both been drugged.”
“Opium, no doubt.”
“Tommy?”
Navarro turned to Karla. She lay regarding him from beneath her blanket, firelight flickering in her drawn hazel eyes. He knelt beside her and she rose up on her hip, threw her arms around his neck, and sobbed, “I’m so sorry!”
“Shhh,” Tom said, smoothing her hair down the back of her head. “You rest now. We got some hard ridin’ ahead of us.”
She sobbed again, then lay her head back down, and her eyes closed. A minute later, her shoulders rose and fell slowly and her breaths grew deep and regular. The blanket had slipped up her leg, revealing a smooth curve of tender thigh and a bare foot. Tom thoughtfully pulled the blanket down over the bared skin, drew it up snug to her neck.
When Louise and Hawkins had turned in, Navarro climbed a rise on the other side of the spring to keep the first watch. The night was quiet, and for that, he felt great relief. He was sitting with his back to a boulder, fighting sleep, when something rustled on the slope behind him, toward the camp. He turned his head quickly to see a shadow moving toward him.
“It’s me,” Louise said, weeds crunching beneath her shoes. She knelt down beside him, extending the steaming tin cup in her left hand. She held another in her right. “I thought you might need this.”
“Just what the doctor ordered.” Navarro took the coffee and sipped. “I figured you’d be asleep.”
“So did I,” Louise said, sitting down beside him and resting her back against the rock. “But when I lay down, I felt like I was still riding. I can take the first watch, if you’d like.”
“Me and Mordecai can manage.”
She sipped her coffee and turned to him with a wistful smile. “Don’t trust a woman?”
“You got the girls to tend.”
Louise rested her head back against the rock and stared out at the desert rolling away below the pass, beneath a sheen of milky light shed by a high, shrunken moon. After a while she said, “She’s beautiful.”
Navarro looked at her.
“Your Karla’s a beautiful girl.”
Navarro shrugged and scratched his neck. “She’s had her share of suitors. It was a Mexican boy who caused to her run off like she did.”
“If I’m not being too shamelessly forward, may I ask what your relationship is?”
“I reckon that’s a might forward,” Navarro allowed with a grunt, blowing on his coffee. “She’s like a daughter to me. The daughter I never had, never will have. Nothing more, nothing less.”
Louise set her cup down beside her. “Never will have? How can you be so certain?”
“I’m certain.”
“Even if the right woman came along?”
“The right woman won’t come along. I’m an ornery old cuss with a bad reputation. I’m going back to my cabin in the desert, and I’m going to stay there.”
“If I’ve learned one thing in my thirty-six years, Mr. Navarro, it’s that one should never feel so certain about anything in this life.”
Navarro grunted. “What about yourself?”
She turned away, but he thought he saw a flush rise in her cheeks. “I’ve closed no doors. I reckon, if the right man came along. . . .”
Tom looked at her, only inches away in the misty darkness. She was indeed a woman to twist a man’s heart. Looked good, with those brown eyes and that deep red hair. Smelled good, too, even after a long day’s ride. He liked the way he felt when she was near.
Why in the hell did he have to be so set in his solitary ways?
She’d turned to him again. They locked glances. His heart thumped, and he placed his hand under her chin, gently lifted her face, and closed his lips over hers. She pressed closer, placed her right hand on his arm, squeezed gently.