A warning sounded in his mind, alerting him to danger. There was no threat from the constable in Santa Rosa, but the people of the Arizona desert were a rugged species, used to dealing with their problems privately, by force. Some of them might resist him, take up arms against him when his mission was revealed. He could not hope to strip them of their weapons absolutely; searching house-to-house would spread his force too thin, and even so they might miss something. But he could eliminate the source, make sure that no one had a ready call on extra guns or ammunition when he made his move.
"Jorge. Esteban." When the gunners stood before him, he explained their mission, forced them to repeat it, making certain that they understood. He could as easily have raised Camacho on the walkie-talkie, but he was afraid that Hector might get side-tracked, waste more precious time.
When this matter was finished, he would have to take another long, hard look at Hector, and decide if he was truly leadership material. So far this day, Rivera had not been impressed with his performance. It was possible that soon he would have need of someone to replace his second-in-command. This afternoon would tell the tale.
He watched Esteban choose a third man to accompany them, all piling into a sedan equipped with radio and automatic weapons. They would pass Camacho on the highway into Santa Rosa, but Rivera's number two already had his orders, and he would not think of turning back to follow. He had better not.
Within the hour, Santa Rosa would be ready for him, still unconscious of the blow about to fall. He cherished the advantage of surprise, aware that it could make the crucial difference in a situation where his men would be outnumbered five or six to one. Discounting women, children and the elderly, the odds might still be even, but the populace of Santa Rosa numbered no proficient killers in its midst.
Well, there just might be one.
The man Rivera hunted, whom he would destroy before he slept again. The bastard who had cost him millions, slaughtered members of his household, brought him here to save his reputation while some tatters of it still remained.
Before Rivera finished with him, he would know the gringo's name, the names of his employers, everything there was to know about the man who had attempted to destroy him. Death would not come easily or swiftly for Rivera's nemesis. The bastard would be praying for oblivion before he was allowed to rest in peace.
Luis Rivera smiled in sweet anticipation. The day might not be wasted after all. There might be entertainment still in store, a treat before the sun went down in violet shadows to the west.
A feast of blood Santa Rosa would not soon forget.
10
"Your change from twenty comes to seven ninety-five. You-all come back now."
"Sure, Gib, sure."
Gib Schultz stood back and watched his only customer of the morning disappear through the swing doors. Old Arnie Washburn was a character, and no mistake. He had a fresh supply of ethnic jokes on hand each time he stopped into the hardware store... although that wasn't near as often as it used to be. Three weeks or was it four? had passed since Arnie had been in the last time, and his purchase today would not put Gib in another tax bracket with the IRS. You had to see the bright side, though; at least he was a customer with money in his pockets. That species had been rather few and far between of late, as witnessed by this morning's trade. One customer, a lousy thirteen-dollar sale, since eight o'clock. Gib figured he was well below the minimum wage now, and smiled sourly to himself. If he still had employees, Schultz would have been forced to lay them off.
It had not always been hard times in Santa Rosa. Years ago, when he and Vi were newlyweds still bursting with their dreams, there had been decent business for a hardware dealer. Farmers needed this and that, a little bit of everything, and other local merchants had relied on Gib and Vi for all their hardware needs. The businessmen of Santa Rosa had been good that way, as far as hanging tight and throwing trade to one another, but the few remaining locals couldn't keep a decent hardware store alive, not when their income had been cut by eighty-five percent within ten years.
Schultz blamed the highway, which had bypassed Santa Rosa with a faster route to Tucson, but he knew that was at best a partial answer to the general malaise that had gripped the town. Where farms and businesses had once prospered, you found For Sale signs and empty acreage, abandoned by the victims of inflation, rising interest rates, declining income. Schultz had hung on more from stubbornness than anything else. He had been born in Pima County, married there, and reared three children, more or less removed from the malignant perils of the city. Robert, their first-born, was a successful tax attorney in Phoenix. Cynthia was teaching high school in Los Angeles, but she was up for an assistant principal's position in the fall. The baby of the family, Amy Lynn, would be a senior in September, and with grades like she brought home, she wouldn't have a bit of trouble getting into the college of her choice.
Provided Gib and Vi could raise the tuition. That was a problem, when the mortgage value on the store that you had worked for thirty years was lower than the 1950s purchase price. He had no doubt that Amy could secure a scholarship, but there was pride involved. It hurt a man to tell the state that he could not provide an education for his children.
They would get by. Somehow, they always did. When Robert had his motorcycle accident in '81, the smart-ass doctors said that he might never walk again, but he had fooled them all. The boy had finished law school leaning on a cane, but he could do without it now, and you would only catch him limping if you made a special point of looking for it. People would survive, no matter what. It was a lesson the bureaucrats in Washington had never seemed to grasp. No matter how you beat a man and pushed his face in the dirt, he would return and get his own back from you one fine day. Unless you killed him.
Gib Schultz had seen his share of killing in Korea, up around the Chosin Reservoir, in early 1951. He and Bud Stancell had called it Frozen Chosin, with the temperature so far below the freezing point you had to dig a hole for your thermometer to catch the falling mercury. Guns froze, trucks froze, and you could lose a hand by touching anything at all without your heavy mittens on. It was a wonder to him that the Chinese soldiers had been able to attack with such ferocity through gusting sheets of ice and snow. It was a wonder to him that he had survived.
He started dusting counters, though the shop was clean enough already, and as always, he began in Sporting Goods. It was an ostentatious label for one tiny corner of his store, but it had always been Gib's favorite. There had not been much call, of late, for fishing gear or hunting knives, but he kept both in stock for old times' sake. The long guns were his first love. Shotguns, rifles, no more than a dozen of them now, and half of those had been on hand for better than a year. But while he had a store, Gib would continue stocking guns and ammunition. In the old days it had been a decent money-maker; recently, he saw the oiled and polished weapons almost as a symbol of resistance to the changing times, one man's refusal to be pushed aside.
He smiled, imagining what Vi would say if he began to spout philosophy and wax poetical around the house. He was a simple man, but that did not diminish his perception of established values, his belief in the traditions of America. Gib didn't buy the argument about a Soviet invasion, all that crap about the farmers and the gun buffs forming a militia to repulse the Reds. You couldn't drop an ICBM with a 12-gauge, but it wasn't foreign enemies that worried Schultz so much these days. He watched the news and read his daily paper out of Tucson, saw enough of life in general to know that something had gone fundamentally, perhaps irrevocably, wrong in modern-day society. Convicted criminals were wandering around in perfect freedom, while their victims lived in cages, bars on windows, triple locks on doors. You couldn't turn on the television or pick up a paper without encountering some judge or politician who was on his way to jail. One federal "jurist" from Nevada had been drawing $75,000 a year from his prison cell, and would have kept on drawing it for life, except that someone in Congress got around to calling for impeachment. Even then, the bum had nerve enough to go on television, blaming prosecutors and the FBI for having nerve enough to double-check his tax returns.