The Bells of El Diablo (24 page)

“And you…are…?” Salsidio turned from James and walked over to where Vienna stood suspended against the wall, arms above her head. He stood before her, looking her up and down with open, lusty interest.

“Dunn,” James said. “James Dunn. You’re right—we’re from the South. Nasty war goin’ on. Thought we’d come down here, see if we couldn’t find us some good broncs to start a ranch with in Texas. Oh, we’d be buyin’, ya understand. Not stealin’.”

Puffing on his Perfecto, Salsidio walked over to Crosseye, took the cigar in the same hand with which he held his brandy snifter, and lifted Crosseye’s big, blocky head by his hair. Crosseye groaned. James could see him blink his eyes, stretch his lips. “Get your hands off me, you greaser bastard!” he intoned through a burly growl.

Salsidio released his head and stared at him with a repulsed expression. Wiping his hand daintily against his blue wool trousers that had gold stripes running down the outsides of the legs, he sighed, then turned and walked back to study Vienna some more. She stared up at him, jaws hard, meeting his goatish gaze with a defiant one of her own. He turned his cigar over and touched its wet end to the small mustang tattoed above her cleavage, then lightly along the side of her half-exposed breast.

“And who is this delectable creature?”

Vienna shook her hair out of her eyes and said crisply, “Vienna McAllister.” She canted her head toward the big man groaning beside her. “That’s Crosseye Reeves. Yes, we’re from the Confederacy. Now, what Crosseye did to you was wrong, but hardly warranting”—she jerked on her chains, making them clink raucously—“this!” She added, trying to sound contrite but unable to keep the demanding tone from her voice: “Won’t you please let us go?”

“First, a little information.” Salsidio sipped his brandy and walked back over to James. “What are you doing in
Mejico
, amigo?”

“We told you, we’re lookin’ for—”

Salsidio swung around suddenly, smashing the
back of his hand against James’s left cheek. A ring on the man’s little finger caught James just above his eye. He felt the sting of a cut; blood oozed. The hammering in his tender head turned to the explosions of three Napoleon cannons, and he ground his teeth against it, seeing triple. He grabbed the wild dog of his rage before it could get away from him, and caged it.

“No more lies,” the colonel said quietly, taking a sip of his brandy, the Perfecto smoldering between his fingers. “I know you visited Apache Jack, led by the sneaky little Apache urchin, Pablo. I saw you in the arroyo.” He grinned, delighted with his shrewdness. “We waited until you’d left, and then we paid Jack a little visit.”

James’s belly filled with bile as he wondered what condition they’d left Jack in.

“After the proper amount of screaming, just before he died writhing on the floor—along with his most unwise protector, Sister Larena—he told us you were here to help him retrieve the treasure he’d found in the Montanas de la Sombras.”

Vienna expressed the words that James had just started forming, her voice shrill with emotion. “You killed Apache Jack? You
bastard!
” That last came out on a sob.

“I killed him because he’s been lying to me for years,” said Salsidio, walking back over to Vienna. “That became most apparent when the Apaches hauled him back to Cordura with his eyes burned out. Lying about the treasure and hiding behind the skirts of that Irish nun who has no more business here than you do. Now, if you don’t want me to kill you, too,
chiquita
…” He leaned forward until his mouth was only four inches
from Vienna’s. “…You must tell me, or show me on a map, the exact location of Las Campanas del Diablo.”

“Jack just told you what you wanted to hear,” James said. “He likely figured you pestered him long enough. We ain’t here about no treasure. We saw Jack about horses, Colonel. We heard from Pablo that a fellow American was stayin’ around here—one who knew Spanish better than we do, and…”

James let his voice trail off. Salsidio had taken his cigar and his brandy in his left hand. He’d drawn a stout bowie knife with his right, and he now used the nastily upturned tip to cut another button off Vienna’s calico blouse.

“Huh?” Salsidio cut another button off Vienna’s blouse, exposing both breasts heaving behind a thin chemise. She stared at him, jaws taut, stubborn eyes wide with fury. “You want to continue with the lies…at the detriment of the
chiquita
here…?”

Toli was giggling between the barn’s open doors, a chicken rooting around at his feet. The other
rurales
were shifting around and making lusty grunting sounds, a couple shuffling forward to get a better view of Vienna’s torn blouse.

“It’s the truth.” Vienna glanced sharply at James. “Don’t worry, James. There’s nothing this pig can do to me that hasn’t been done before.”

Salsidio cut through another button, and then another, and the blouse fell back to the sides of her breasts. “That is what you think,
chiquita
.”

“That’s enough,” James said, grinding his teeth and pulling futilely at the chains. “The game’s yours, Colonel. We’re here for the gold.”

“Shut up, James!” Vienna barked, whipping her face toward his, her blouse falling back and a chemise strap falling to lay one shoulder bare. It glowed like varnished oak in the lamplight.

Salsidio arched a brow at James.

“She has a map with her gear,” James told the man, staring at the knife, the point of which was caught in the top of Vienna’s chemise.

“No, James!” Vienna stared at him, eyes flashing fire. “Think of your home.
Our
home! Think of what the Yankees will do to us if they win that war!”

“It’s too late, Vienna. The war’s all but over. Besides, in case you hadn’t noticed”—he pulled on his chains again with a grunt—“we’re not goin’ anywhere.” He looked at the colonel. With Apache Jack dead, no one was going to find the gold. The map wasn’t detailed enough, though obviously the colonel didn’t know that. James doubted that Jack had told Salsidio about the boy. He’d have taken that secret to his grave, no matter how much pain he’d endured first. “I’ll get you the map, but first you gotta turn me and my friends loose.”

Salsidio tossed back the last of his brandy. He set his cigar in the empty glass with a soft sizzling sound, gently set down the glass on the earthen floor, then quickly cut a notch in the top of Vienna’s chemise.

“
No!
” the girl screamed as Salsidio dropped the knife, then ripped the chemise down the middle with a savage tug of both his hands.

He pressed his face between the jutting orbs of Vienna’s breasts, drew a long, deep breath, as though drawing in the very essence of her, then pulled his head away from her chest and smiled at James. “That’s
not good enough, amigo. If you don’t tell me where I’ll find the map in the next five seconds, I and my men will do something most foul to your precious
chiquita
, and then we’ll throw her and you and your fat friend over there to my hogs!”

Toli had been laughing hysterically, bent forward at the waist, resting his good hand on his knee. But he stopped laughing so suddenly that all eyes in the barn turned toward him. He groaned and stumbled forward, and his lower jaw dropped as he raised an ear-rattling scream to the rafters.

He fell forward, howling and writhing, and the handle of what appeared to be a corn knife to James’s Confederate eyes jutted up from between his bloody butt cheeks.

All the
rurales
including Salsidio jerked toward the shrieking Toli—looking around, tensely incredulous. Salsidio barked orders and the
rurales
glanced around at each other, hesitating. Salsidio barked more loudly, angrier, and the six lower-ranking
rurales
ran out the front of the stable into the street, looking around warily, dropping to a knee, and raising their rifles, some turned one way, others another.

Salsidio walked up in front of Toli, whose wails were growing softer as he writhed belly down on the stable floor, reaching back with both hands as though to dislodge the knife sticking out of his butt. Salsidio shouted something at his men, who merely stared up and down the street, shifting around, rifles jerking.

James glanced at Vienna, who arched a curious brow at him. If she felt self-conscious about having her breasts and the mustang tattoo bared, she didn’t show it. Crosseye spat. “Sure wish that son of a bitch would quit screamin’ so I could hear myself think. Pardon my French, Vienna.”

“Why, when you speak it so well?” she returned
softly, staring out the open doors, where ambient light reflected off the
rurales
’ gray uniforms.

As though on command, Toli stopped screaming, dropped his head to the dirt, and lay still.

The colonel stepped around him, unholstering a pistol, the ratcheting of the hammer being cocked sounding loud in the sudden heavy silence. He moved cautiously, one step at a time, into the street, holding the pistol barrel-up. His boots crunched softly in the dirt and straw.

James stared, waiting, wondering…

Something flashed brightly. It looked like the moon exploding. A quarter second after the first flash, a thunderous rattling sounded. It was like a thousand sticks of dynamite rolling down a rocky cliff, exploding.

Only a Gatling gun could kick up that much racket.

The ground beneath James’s boots shook. He tightened his jaws against the raging cacophony. The
rurales
in the street jerked and screamed, some doing a bizarre dance pirouette, tossing their rifles in the air and jerking as though struck by lightning. Salsidio dropped to a knee and fired his pistol to the right, in the direction from which the flashes came, but then he, too, was stood up and blown back to the left of the doors, his boot heels rising a good two feet above the ground.

James didn’t see him drop, but he heard the dull thud and the clipped groan.

And then, as fast it had started, the rattling stopped.

A
rurale
lying twisted in the street groaned. The Gatling gun went
rat-tat-tat!
and the
rurale
was rolled over and silenced. Smoke wafted like mist, faintly obscuring the stars. James stared, riveted, heart thudding anxiously.

Boots lifted a rataplan in the street. A silhouetted figure in white slacks ran toward him from the street’s other side—a hobbling, shuffling figure in what appeared a long serape and a steeple-crowned, straw sombrero.

James’s gut tightened apprehensively as the figure half dragged one awkward, lumpy foot around a dead
rurale
, then disappeared behind the stable’s wall to the left of the doors. When he reappeared a moment later, crouching, he was holding a bloody bowie knife in his right hand. Blood dribbled down from the red-coated steel. The light revealed the rawboned, sweating face of the clubfooted friend of Apache Jack whom Sister Larena had berated for bringing Jack a bottle of forty-rod in his room at the mission church.

Clubfoot’s open serape revealed two more knives wedged behind a burlap sash, another jutting from a sheath sewn inside the poncho’s left flap. He had an oddly shaped, apish face with a single black brow. He looked around quickly, eyes wide, as though expecting more
rurales
to descend on him from the shadows.

James heard the hoof thuds and the clatter of a wagon rising somewhere out in the dark night. A man yelled, “Free the Rebs, Vincente!”

The command caused James’s heart to leap, and, jerking on his chains, he looked at the clubfooted gent, whose eyes had now caught on the bare-breasted Vienna. “Check Salsidio for the key!” James yelled, jerking on the chains once more, unable to restrain himself.

Their knife-wielding benefactor limped back behind the front wall of the stable once more. In the meantime, two mules appeared, angling toward the barn’s open doorway. The mules pulled a stout-wheeled, spruce-green
wagon with a Gatling gun jutting like a giant mosquito above the box. Driving the wagon was a hulking form in what appeared to be a short bearskin vest and a low-crowned black sombrero trimmed with silver talismans. James blinked at the man riding to the left of the hombre in the bearskin vest, eyes riveted on the bloodstained white bandage wrapped around the old, wizened fellow’s eyes, beneath a red bandanna wrapped over the top of his head and knotted on the left side, the knot hanging over his ear.

“Jack?” James blurted.

“Dunn? That you, boy?” Apache Jack stood uncertainly up in the driver’s boot as the hulking creature in the bearskin vest reined the mules to a stop just outside the stable. The big man had long, drooping black mustaches, coal black eyes beneath the black sombrero’s brim. A long, thin cheroot drooped from a corner of his broad mouth, the coal glowing as he drew on it.

Vienna leaned forward, smiling with relief. “Salsidio said he’d killed you!”

“Is that that purty Vienna—belle of the ball?”

“Yes!” the girl cried as the clubfoot, Vincente, moved as quickly as he could toward her, ignoring James, who was chained nearest the door.

“Come on, Vincente, get them folks loose. There’s another
rurale
outpost about a mile out in the desert, and the night’s so damn quiet they might’ve heard my friend Chulo’s Gatlin’ fire!” He turned his head this way and that, listening. “Where’s Pablo? I told him to fetch your horses.”

The boy’s voice rose on the night somewhere to the left of the open doors.

“Pablo, you little scudder!” Jack intoned, cackling like an ancient witch and nearly falling out of the driver’s boot. He placed a hand on the shoulder of the big man in the bear vest to his left and looked over his right shoulder. “You got the Rebels’ mounts?” He repeated the query in Spanish.

“
Sí, sí!
” came the excited, high-pitched reply.

A horse whinnied. James heard hooves thudding, sandals slapping. Vicente openly ogled Vienna’s breasts between the flaps of her torn blouse as he unlocked her shackles, then stepped back with a ragged sigh, glancing at her once more and then turning away, sweat dribbling down his broad, oddly shaped face.

Vienna shook back her hair, grabbed the key out of Vincente’s hand, and quickly unlocked James’s shackles. He drew his arms down, rubbing his wrists.