Twisted Hills (12 page)

Sam looked up at him and Dolan and saw them waver in place, as if he was looking at them through a watery veil. He heard one of them lever a round into a rifle. Didn't he . . . ? He drifted, certain the sound came from his own Winchester. He drifted some more, for how long he did not know. But in what could have been a second, or an hour, he was stirred by the sound of another voice.

“Joe? Joe, wake up. We must hurry,” he heard Lilith say in a hushed and harried tone. “They will be coming for you.”

“Lilith . . . ,” he whispered. He managed to open his swollen eyes enough to see a foggy image of a woman kneeled over him.

“Can you hear me, Joe? Can you stand up? Here, let me help you to my wagon.”

“I—I can walk,” Sam said, pushing himself with all his strength, yet still only managing to get onto his knees. He tried again, this time with Lilith looping his arm over her shoulder.

“Quickly, quickly,” she said in a lowered tone. “I have seen what these men are capable of doing. They will kill you, and they will kill me for helping you.”

“Then . . . why?” he asked, staggering to the rear door of the peddler's wagon only a few feet from the water's edge.

Lilith half shoved him inside the wagon and over onto the bunk bed.

“
Why?
you ask,” she said. She quickly placed a pillow under his head and laid a canteen up under his arm. “I help you because you helped me. I saw what they did to you in town, and I followed you here.” She looked off in the direction of the gunmen farther upstream. “Now I must leave you and pull this wagon out of here before they arrive.”

Sam nodded, but her words were already growing farther and farther away.

When Sam awakened again, it was in the long shadows of evening. He had felt leaves and vines brush along the wagon's side the last few yards. Then the wagon had jostled to a halt alongside an ancient and grown-over stone ruins that had pressed itself so long against the mountainside that the two had become one—the mountain having taken in man's orphaned hybrid creation and fostered it to its stony bosom. As the peddler's wagon had stopped, a panther stood up atop a vine-clad wall, spun silently and vanished in a wisp of fur and claw.

Sam stood shakily in the darkness of the wagon, braced against the side frame, when the rear door opened and Lilith stepped up inside.

“Where . . . are we?” Sam asked, feeling cracks in his swollen lips reopen when he spoke.

“Somewhere safe where we will not be found,” Lilith said quietly, as if not to disturb the quietness of the ruins.

“We left tracks,” Sam cautioned her.

Without reply she slung a loaded knapsack to her shoulder, picked up a small lantern and stepped back to the open door.

“Come,” she said, gesturing him down through the open door. “You must lean on me.”

“I can walk . . . I think,” Sam said, everything looking grainy and offset through his swollen eyes.

Yet, when he stepped down to the ground behind Lilith, pain in his ribs and shoulders caused him to falter and almost fall. She grabbed his arm and steadied him.

“We must take Andre and go deep into the mountainside,” she said patiently, drawing him to her side. “Tomorrow or the next day, perhaps you can walk. Tonight you can help us both by doing as I say.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Sam said quietly, allowing his weight to shift a little onto her as they walked to the front of the wagon. When they stopped beside Andre, the wagon horse looked around at Sam and seemed to perk up. He twitched his ears.

“Look, Joe,” Lilith said quietly. “Andre remembers you—he likes you.”

“I like you too, Andre,” Sam managed to say through his pained lips. He reached out a bruised hand and rubbed it down the horse's soft, warm muzzle. “Obliged for the wagon ride, Andre . . . ,” he said.

“Don't thank him just yet, Joe,” Lilith said. “You have a longer ride ahead of you.” She helped him lean against Andre's side as she unhitched the horse from the wagon.

“Are we far from Agua Fría?” Sam asked.

“Yes, far enough anyway,” she said. Then she gestured for him to climb atop the horse's bare back. With her pushing his rump upward, he managed to fall over atop the horse and straighten up some, in spite of the overall pain from being dragged. She hefted the knapsack from her shoulder up behind him and patted it down in place. Sam turned enough to place a hand on the sack to steady it.

She shook her head and smiled a little at his inability to not take part in things.

“Old habits,” he offered in a lowered voice, trying not to disturb his cracked lips.

With a length of leather rein she looped around Andre's muzzle, Lilith led the horse forward through a courtyard of waist-high weeds, of wild grass and ironwood brush and ironwood trees grown up through the petrified limbs and carcasses of its generations past.

Across the courtyard, weaving through embankments of spilled stones and downfall branches, Lilith stopped the horse at a black open mouth in the rocky mountainside. She stopped long enough to strike a match and light the lantern in her hand. She adjusted the globe down on the lantern and blew out the match.

Sam watched through the narrow slits of his eyes as a circling glow rose around Lilith and the horse.

“Watch your head, Joe,” she said. He did. Bowing forward on Andre's back, he cradled the pain in his ribs against the lesser pain in his forearm and rode forward, the clop of the horse's worn metal shoes resounding both before and behind them.

They moved on.

For half an hour the horse plodded farther and farther from the dim, rough-edged opening behind them until the entrance itself fell away behind a turn in the rocky path. The swaying circle of soft lantern light was all that accompanied them deeper into the stone belly of the mountain. Sam let his swollen eyes close for a few minutes until the horse stopped at the mouth of a cave.

“We are here,” the woman said, her voice low yet still carrying the hardpan twang of an echo. Sam opened his eyes enough to see that they were standing beneath a wide, low ceiling supported by thick timbers that time had aged and dried to a consistency of granite.

Sam shoved the pack off into Lilith's arms and slid carefully and painfully down from the horse's back. He let her help him over to a low rock worn slick from where countless humankind had seated themselves for centuries past. He sat dawn and leaned back against a stone wall and looked all around. In the circle of lantern light, he looked at a burned and blackened ring of rocks on the stone floor. He looked at the black-smudged ceiling, where smoke had loomed and seeped upward into the hillside to dissipate as it found its way skyward.

Lilith set the sack on the stone floor, untied a blanket roll from atop it and rolled it out.

“Lie down here,” she said. “Rest while I gather wood for the fire. I will heat some water and wash your cuts. I have some cloth for bandages.” As she spoke, she took out a thick candle, stood it on the floor and lit the wick.

“Gracias,”
Sam said. He scooted down painfully onto the blanket, but looked all around. “Wood . . . ?” he said. Candlelight flickered around him.

Lilith nodded.

“It's not so far away as you think,” she said. “There are other openings farther back that lead out.” She gestured toward the blackness on the other side of the wide stone chamber. “That is what makes this a good place to hide. There is always a way out ahead of anyone who follows you here.”

“What can I do, Lilith?” Sam asked.

“You can lie still and rest,” Lilith said. “The wagon is hidden and we are safe here. Let me build a fire and take care of you,” she said softly.

He lay watching her as she stood and walked to the horse. In a moment she was swallowed up by the darkness. Andre scraped a hoof and chuffed toward her. Then the horse settled and stood as silent as stone, the candlelight flickering shadowy on its flanks and in its dark eyes.

•   •   •

At the bottom of the hill trail, Hazerat and Charlie Ray Hooke reined up on either side of Preston Kelso. The three sat staring out along the meandering trail running out of sight across the desert floor. It had been yesterday afternoon when they met Dolan, Galla and the two Mexicans dragging Sam along the high hill line. After riding on, Kelso had been silent and brooding as they'd ridden throughout the night, stopping only long enough to eat and rest their horses.

“I don't like it,” he said out of nowhere.

The Hooke brothers gave each other a blank look.

“What's that, Preston?” Charlie Ray asked cautiously.

“The short-lipped way he was treating us,” Kelso said, staring straight ahead, where a roadrunner sped out of sight behind a rise of dust.

“This would be Daryl Dolan we're talking about?” Hazerat ventured quietly. The two waited and watched as Kelso only sat in his tense silence.

Finally he spoke toward the wavering desert.

“Segert has got him out here poking his nose around, seeing if I was lying about anything.”

“You mean . . . ?” Hazerat hesitated, glancing at Charlie Ray as if for permission. “You mean like telling him about the Apaches taking all the bank money?” he said.

“Something like that,” Kelso said in little more than a growl. He reached his fingertips up under his oversized sombrero and head bandage and rubbed them around atop his raw head. His hand lowered and reached inside his shirt and grazed his healing arrow wounds.

The Hooke brothers looked at each other again.

“I don't mean to further aggravate an already testy situation, Preston,” Charlie Ray said. “But that
was
a lie. Hell, Hazerat and me backed you up in it.”

“I know that, you damn fool,” Kelso barked harshly. He thought about what Jones had told him, about finding Rudabell scalped and dead alongside the trail. Was there a chance that Rudabell had stuck the saddlebags under a rock? It was something he would have been prone to do, to keep Apaches from getting it—if he'd had time, Kelso thought.

He considered it in silence for a moment longer. The only way to sort things out was to go find Rudabell's body. Then figure out everything from there. Meanwhile, these two believed he had the money buried, so let them keep thinking it for now. He nudged his horse forward onto the desert floor.

“This must mean we're leaving,” Hazerat said to Charlie Ray under his breath, with a sarcastic snap, seeing Kelso moving forward.

Charlie Ray shook his head.

“We're too far in to back out now, Hazerat,” he said quietly. “We lied to Crazy Ray Segert for him. If there's any money out there, I damn sure want a big taste of it.” He nudged his horse forward behind Kelso, Hazerat doing the same right beside him.

“Yeah, damn it,” said Hazerat, “in for a penny, in for a pound, I reckon.”

They rode on.

Knowing the desert better than the Hooke brothers, Kelso led them three miles out, parallel to the trail. It was in the full bore of the blistering afternoon sun when he knew they had ridden long past the place where he'd hightailed it away from Rudabell. Now he could pick up the trail with the hoofprints he and Rudabell had left no matter how faded he found those prints to be.

Following those prints, Kelso knew, would take them past the place where he'd left Rudabell all alone to face the lawman who'd been dogging them since Nogales. Somewhere between there and where the Apache had skinned him like a rabbit, he thought bitterly, he'd find Rudabell's body, the way Jones said he would. He only hoped that Jones hadn't told Dolan the same thing before they'd killed him.

That damn bull's bag . . . ,
he cursed to himself. Who would ever have thought something like that could trip him up like this?

“Just where the hell are you taking us, Preston?” Hazerat finally blurted out. He'd been forcing himself to keep quiet all day. “Are you lost?”

Kelso stopped his horse suddenly, swung it around in the sand and stared harshly at Hazerat.

“I'm not lost, you damn fool!” he shouted. “There's the trail within spitting distance.” He pointed off in the distance to their left. The three looked out through the wavering heat.

“Easy, Preston,” Charlie Ray said, seeing how close Kelso was to going for the new Colt on his hip. “We know it's over there.” He tried to humor the irate gunman staring at them both from under the brim of the oversized sombrero. “Don't we, Hazerat?” he said.

“Yes,
hell yes
, we know it's over there,” said Hazerat. He pointed toward the distant trail. “What we don't know is why the hell the trail's over there and we're riding all the way out here. My horse is ready to quit on me soon, if I don't get him some solid footing!”

Kelso took a deep, calming breath and withdrew his hand from the butt of the Colt.

“All right,” he said. “We've been riding out here off the trail because I figured neither of you wanted to end up like this.” He reached up and patted his large sombrero. “Don't you suppose the damn
'paches
ain't still scouring that trail like hawks, just looking for the next ones passing by?”

That stopped Hazerat cold.

“Jesus . . . ,” he said, looking toward the trail with a whole different expression.

“Yeah, that's what I thought,” said Kelso.

Charlie Ray just stared, wondering how much safer it really was here, three miles to the left of the trail. But he kept the thought to himself.

“Just so happens,” said Kelso, “I was turning somewhere along about here anyway—going back along the trail, seeing who's riding along there watching us from afar.” He looked back and forth between the two. “If that's all the same with the Hooke brothers,” he added sarcastically. “These know-everything sons a' bitches,” he growled, jerking his horse toward the trail three miles away.

“Let's go, Haze,” Charlie Ray said quietly as Kelso rode away through the sand.

•   •   •

Moments later, on the trail, the three looked all around, but found no fresh sign of Apaches—no recent prints made by unshod horses. They did pick up some older prints with edges that were worn down from the night winds and now appeared to be hoofprints left by some passing ghosts.

“Here we are,” Kelso said, stopping, looking down at the jumbled wind-worn prints, nothing to tell even an experienced tracker which tracks might have been his and Rudabell's or which ones might have been those of the lawman following them.

Hazerat and Charlie Ray looked skeptically at each other, then nudged their horses over alongside him.

“What makes you so sure, Preston?” Charlie Ray asked.

Kelso just glared at him and swung his horse off along the trail. The two followed, looking down at the trail and off across the desert on either side. When Kelso stopped again, they circled and stopped too as he slipped down from his saddle and picked up a spent rifle shell. He pitched the shell up to Charlie Ray without saying a word, then stepped back up and rode forward.

A mile farther along, Kelso stopped again, this time pointing off to the right where all but a single set of prints veered off along a thinner, narrower path leading upward across a ride of sand. He pointed at the single set of prints and ran his finger along the trail following them.

“There I go,” he said. Then he pointed off along the thin path up the sand ride. “And there goes Rudabell and the lawman.”

“So,” said Hazerat, looking along the set of tracks on the main trail, “we go this way, we'll find the money you hid, eh?”