Dillinger (v5) (16 page)

Far out in the desert the parched earth faded into the sky and the mesquite glowed with a strange incandescence as if at any moment it might burst into flame.

They rounded the point and moved across a wide plain. A high ridge swelled from the ground between them and the ruined
rancheria.
Dillinger glanced casually toward it but no sound disturbed the heavy stillness.

'Now you know what it is like to be a fox,' he told her.

'This could get on my nerves very easily,' Rose said.

At that moment they heard baying. Rose turned to see six of them sweep over the hill and plunge down toward them, in full cry.

Dillinger slammed on his brakes, throwing up a cloud of dust, momentarily concealing them, as he turned the Chevvy, backed up, and then turned back the way they had come, straight at the Apaches pursuing them.

As the bone-dry dust boiled beneath the hooves of the Apaches' horses, they suddenly saw their quarry in the white automobile disappear in a cloud of dust and a moment later emerge heading toward them. They reined in the frightened horses, but the car kept coming right at them, and as the Apaches turned their horses' heads to retreat, they were met by Villa and Chavasse and Rivera firing directly at them.

Dillinger stopped the car sideways across the road. Rose took the first shot at their attackers, hitting one of them, whose riderless horse kept wheeling around. Dillinger was afraid to use the Thompson at that distance, so he gunned up the Chevvy and, his foot all the way down on the gas, ran it straight at the nearest of the Apaches, who lost his balance trying to get his horse out of the way of the charging automobile and slid from the saddle, only to have Villa's bullets thud into him as he hit the ground.

It was all over. Miraculously, none of their group had been hurt. Rivera quickly checked out the dead Indians. None of them was Ortiz.

15

There was no sign of the child at the camp. Rivera was furious. Somehow Nachita had made a mistake. They had followed the wrong group.

Dillinger and Rose left the Chevvy at the side of the road down below and climbed up to the camp in the hollow beside the well. Nachita had lit a fire and squatted before it waiting for coffee to boil. He glanced up and Dillinger walked past him to the crumbling adobe walls.

It was strangely quiet, the heat blanketing all sound, and then a small wind moved across the face of the plain, rustling through the mesquite with a sibilant whispering that touched something inside him.

Was the kid dead? Was all of this useless? He remembered his own childhood, full of hope. When he'd enlisted in the navy, his heart was high, but he'd hated the regimentation. He didn't want to be ordered about by anyone. That's when he went AWOL, got sentenced to solitary for ten days, his first imprisonment. Was all life like that, the smashing of good hope? Or was he just too damned tired now to think sensibly?

Rose came toward him, the Cordoban hat dangling from her neck. Instinctively, she put an arm around him, a bandage around his pain. When she spoke there was a strange poignancy in her voice.

'There's nothing quite so sad as the ruins of a house.'

'Hopes and dreams,' Dillinger said. 'Gone.'

He turned, looking out over the desert again, and she moved beside him. Their shoulders touched. She started to tremble.

There were so many things he could have said as he held her close for a moment.

'Let's go and have a cup of coffee,' he said.

The others were sitting round the fire as they approached and Chavasse and Rivera had obviously been having words.

'What's wrong now?' Dillinger demanded.

'All at once, everything's Nachita's fault,' Chavasse said.

'He's supposed to be able to follow a trail, isn't he?' Rivera said.

Dillinger poured coffee into a cup, gave it to Rose and glanced across to Nachita. The old man smiled faintly. 'We followed the right pony, but the wrong man was riding him. A game Ortiz is playing. He knows that I am leading you. That eventually we must meet. He wishes it to be on his terms in a place of his own choosing. And now six of my brothers are dead.'

Dillinger said quietly to Rose, 'We think of our side, their side. I thought we just won. But for Nachita it means the opposite when Apaches die.'

Rose squeezed Dillinger's hand, but Rivera didn't want to hear any of this. He stood over the squatting Nachita, his voiced raised, saying, 'Where has Ortiz taken my daughter?'

Nachita shrugged. 'Perhaps he will cross the desert to the mountain we call the Spine of the Devil. Near its peak there are the ruins of an ancient city. Men lived there long before my people came from the cold country in the north. In the old days it was an Apache stronghold.'

Villa nodded. 'I have heard of this place. Pueblo - or Aztec. They call it the City of the Dead.'

'But to get there Ortiz must stay on the old pack trail across the Sierras,' Nachita said. 'The well at Agua Verde is the only water before the desert. If he camps on the trail tonight he should reach there by noon tomorrow.'

'Then what are we sitting here for?' Rivera demanded.

Chavasse helped himself to more coffee. 'It would take us two days to catch up with him now.'

'Not if we go over the mountains.' Nachita pointed to the great peak that towered above them. 'Agua Verde is on the other side. Perhaps twenty miles.'

Dillinger looked up, shading his eyes. 'Can it be done?'

'As a young man, I rode with Geronimo over the same trail to escape from the horse soldiers who chased us across the Rio Grande.'

'A long time ago.'

'It was a great ride.' Nachita turned and looked up at the mountain again. 'There is a place near the peak where we could spend the night. It is even possible that we could reach Agua Verde before Ortiz.'

Dillinger looked at Villa. 'What do you think?'

Villa nodded. 'The well at Agua Verde is inside the chapel. By the time Ortiz and his men arrive they will need water badly.'

'Perhaps even enough to bargain for my child,' Rivera said.

'If we are going we must go now,' Nachita said. 'We have perhaps four hours left until sunset.'

Dillinger nodded. 'There's no way I can get the Chevrolet over there.'

'I show you.' Nachita took a stick and drew in the sand. 'Ortiz comes from the west. We go straight over and cut across his path in front of him, if we are lucky. You, my friend, take your automobile out into the desert to the north, skirting the base of the mountain. The long way round. A hundred miles at least, but in the cool of the night.' He shrugged. 'And your automobile can travel faster than the wind, is it not so?'

'And what if it breaks down out there in the desert?'

Rose said. 'The sun in the heat of the day can fry a man's brains. Or a woman's.'

'A horse could break a leg going over the mountain,' Nachita said. 'Or a man. This way, we have two chances of reaching Agua Verde before Ortiz.'

'That settles it,' Dillinger said. 'Anyone want to chaperone Rose and me?'

'I will come, senor,' Villa said. 'I know this country, you don't.'

Dillinger said to the girl, 'Rose? You want to take Villa's horse and go with the others?'

She glanced at her uncle. 'I will come with you.'

'OK, let's get moving.'

He and Villa put the top up on the convertible. Dillinger got behind the wheel and pressed the starter as Villa scrambled into the rear seat. 'Lead my horse,' he shouted to Chavasse.

Dillinger waved. 'See you at Agua Verde,' he yelled and drove down into the vast desert.

Nachita led them up the slope of the mountain without hesitation, zigzagging between the mesquite and cacti. After an hour they went over a ridge and faced a shelving bank of shale and thin soil held together by a few shrubs.

Rivera, who had been bringing up the rear, now joined them, his face lined with fatigue, 'Why have we stopped?'

Nachita had ridden to a point where the ledge turned the corner of the bluff, and now he came back and dismounted. 'From here it will be necessary to blindfold the horses. Use strips from your blankets.'

Nachita went first and they followed at spaced intervals. When the ledge turned the corner Chavasse sucked in his breath. At this point the trail narrowed to a width of perhaps five or six feet. On his right hand there was nothing, only clear air to the valley floor below.

The ledge lifted steeply, following the curve of the wall, and he climbed after Nachita, holding his horse as close to the wall as possible.

And then the ledge narrowed until there hardly seemed room for man and animal together. He pushed forward frantically and came out on a small plateau. Beyond was a bank of shale and he led his mount up and over the edge of a gentle slope thinly scattered with pine trees to where Nachita waited.

Rivera came over the edge after them and the Frenchman leaned against his mount, wiping sweat from his face. 'Something to remember till my dying day.' He turned to Nachita. 'Can we rest here?'

The old man shook his head. 'From now on it is easy and we can ride. There is a good camp site in the forest on the far side of the summit.'

He mounted and they rode after him. The desert was purple and grey, turning black at the edges, and in the desolate light of evening the peaks were touched with fire.

It was cooler at this height, the air pleasant with the scent of pines, and the climb already seemed remote and impossible.

The ultimate ridge lifted to meet the dark arch of the sky where already a single star shone and they went over and a little way down the other side to a clearing in the pine trees. Nachita held up his hand and they dismounted.

Chavasse felt the weariness strike through him. It had been a long day. He carried the saddlebags across to where Nachita was already building a small fire of twigs and pine cones in a deep hollow between three boulders.

Everyone looked worn down to the bone. Rivera gazed into the fire vacantly, lines of fatigue etched into his face.

For the first few miles out into the desert, the going wasn't too bad, a flat, sun-baked plain over which the Chevrolet moved fast. At one stage Dillinger pushed the car up to sixty and Villa tapped his shoulder laughing like a kid.

'This is better than riding, amigo,' he shouted.

Dillinger had to slow down as they came to a flat brown plain that was fissured and broken.

It was like driving your way through a maze, turning from one ancient dried-out water course into another, travelling at no more than ten or fifteen miles an hour. They ran into one dead end after another, frequently having to turn back and try again, progress was painfully slow and darkness was falling before they finally emerged onto salt flats.

The heat and the dust was unbelievable. They stopped beside a clump of organ cactus and Villa gathered a few dry sticks for a small fire and made coffee while Dillinger topped up the Chevvy's tank with gas from the cans in the trunk. Then he checked the radiator and groaned.

'We must have been boiling away more water than I thought.' He got out the jerrycan. 'I was saving this in case the canteen ran dry and we had to drink this.' He poured what was left in the jerrycan into the radiator carefully, not wanting to spill a drop.

He and Villa sat with Rose on the running board and drank coffee as darkness descended. Dillinger said, 'Good to give the old car a chance to rest.'

'Just like horses, eh?' Villa said.

Dillinger patted the side of the Chevrolet. 'If she lets us down, I wouldn't give much for our chances when the sun comes up tomorrow.'

'Death, my friend, comes to all of us. The dice were thrown a long time ago. The result is already known, but then, you know this, I think, Mr Dillinger.'

Dillinger looked at him calmly. 'Rose knows, but how did you find out?'

'I saw your picture in the paper in Durango a couple of months back. I recognized you on the train, in spite of your new moustache. When we spoke, privately. When you let me go.'

'You told nobody?'

'I owed you, my friend, and besides, we are, after all, in the same line of business. Life is a pretty wild poker game.'

Villa tilted his hat and closed his eyes, turning his back so that Dillinger and Rose could lie side by side through the dark night.

It was in the middle of the night that Dillinger awoke because he felt a hand on his shoulder. He was about to leap up, ready to draw or fight, when he realized it was Rose's hand.

'You are a restless sleeper,' she whispered. 'I only wanted to say I love you.'

Dillinger turned over on his back. The sky was full of unexpected stars.

They got a good start early, the Chevvy making time, when there was a sudden loud bang as the left front tyre burst. The Chevrolet slewed wildly and Dillinger fought with the wheel as the car spun around and finally came to a stop.

They sat for a moment in silence. Dillinger said, 'Anybody hurt?'

Villa said, 'I think I just spat out my heart, a saying we have, but never mind.'

'I'm OK,' said Rose.

'Let's inspect the damage.'

The tyre was in shreds, but the worst was the fact that the rear axle was jammed across a sizeable rock.

'Jesus!' Villa said. 'The horse is dead.'

'Not so fast,' Dillinger said, getting down on his hands and knees and inspecting the situation. He glanced up. 'It seems to me that if we raise her off the rock with the jack and give her a good push she should roll clear soon enough.'

It was a solution so ludicrously simple that Rose laughed out loud in relief.

Dillinger got the jack from the trunk and positioned it under the part of the axle that was free. Villa started to pump. Gradually the Chevrolet lifted.

'OK,' Dillinger said. 'Let's try.'

It took both of them and Rose all their strength. For a moment, it looked as if it wasn't going to work and then the jack tilted forward and the Chevrolet ran free.

Dillinger had a spare and the changeover took only minutes.

'OK, let's push on.'

Villa said, 'One thing, my friend. I know Rivera of old. Even if we succeed in this matter, he will send me back to prison to face a firing squad.'

'And me?' Dillinger said.

'My observation tells me that it would be unwise to turn your back on him.'

They got back into the car. Dillinger said, 'So why don't you make a break for it while the going's good.'

'Because there is the child to consider. Because I am a man and Rivera is not,' Villa said simply. 'The same for you, I think.'

Dillinger smiled. Knowing Rose was listening to their exchange, he said, 'It's what we think of ourselves that's important.'

He pressed the starter and drove away, singing another of the Hit Parade tunes that reminded him of home, 'Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?'