The Arizona Kid, page 1
The Arizona Kid
By the same author
Canyon of the Dead
Death Wears a Star
Death Song
The Arizona Kid
ANDREW McBRIDE
©Andrew McBride 1998
First published in Great Britain 1998
ISBN 978 0 7198 2381 7
Robert Hale, an imprint of
The Crowood Press Ltd
The Stable Block
Crowood Lane
Ramsbury
Wiltshire SN8 2HR
www.crowood.com
www.bhwesterns.com
This e-book first published in 2017
The right of Andrew McBride to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright. Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Time to thank Michael Andrew; also Messrs Penn, Utley, Metz, Steckmesser, Upson and Garrett.
ONE
Calvin Taylor waited for the Arizona Kid.
He was waiting on the flat top of a mesa that reared a few hundred feet above the surrounding desert. He was sweating. He smelled fear in his sweat. Not surprising, given that he was waiting on a killer. He lifted his arms and saw his wrists were trembling slightly.
Was he getting soft? Were his nerves going? If so, he was a dead man, going up against Nino, the Kid.
Out loud he told himself, ‘You’ve not gone soft, Taylor.’ He hoped he’d convinced himself. After all he was long seasoned and tested in the fire; ten years in this dangerous trade, first as a scout against the Apaches, then as a range detective, a hired gun. A man with a reputation – a mankiller.
He was crouched under a white oak tree, at the edge of a little fire burning the ends of mesquite wands and raising the merest thread of smoke. He reached towards the spider over the fire, glimpsing his face reflected in the dull metal of the coffee pot. Skin weathered brown as an Indian’s, hair moustache and new beard dark, but eyes blue as ice: women seemed to like that combination. A handsome man, but his face had grown hard with too much sun and weather and the tension that was always inside him. Even before he’d grown this beard, he’d looked older than his twenty-eight years.
Turning his head in any direction, Taylor could view the same bleak landscape: mountains, desert, south-eastern New Mexico Territory. Off south was the Mescalero Apache reservation. The Mescaleros had once terrorized this land. Now, in 1881, they were pretty much a beaten people, although a white eye should still watch out for himself, travelling alone through their country.
To the south-west, land gleamed silver in the westering sun. Down there were the White Sands, miles of salt desert. On the surface of the White Sands, Taylor had glimpsed a horseman’s dust: the Arizona Kid’s dust.
As he poured coffee into a tin cup, Taylor kept his eye on his lineback dun horse. When it lifted its fine head and stared off to the east, Taylor gripped with his left hand the fifteen-shot Winchester slanting against a rock beside him. He rested the carbine across his knees. The Kid was due to meet him alone, that was the deal: but what if he showed up with half a dozen of his friends instead?
Taylor’s back was covered by the thick body of the oak, a scatter of rocks giving cover in front of him, and beyond that was open ground with a good field of fire. Open ground behind him too, where he couldn’t be sneaked up on. He wore a Colt pistol, butt forward on his left hip, he had a spare pistol in his saddle-roll, a knife in his boot and enough ammunition to fight off a small army. He ought to feel safe, but.…
The thing was the Kid moved so damn quiet, like a cat; he ought to have been an Apache he was so soft-footed. It was said he’d stolen horses out of Mescalero camps and Taylor could believe it. On top of that there was the damn wind.…
The wind moaned blearily on the desert below, rippling surf waves of dust, thrashing the arms of the few stooped junipers that edged this plateau. The fox ears of the dun slanted eastward. Taylor glanced that way, his grip on the Winchester tightening, but couldn’t see anything, just the trees flailing before the wind … and then there he was. Standing there as if he’d just dropped from the sky.
Taylor said, ‘You take molasses in your coffee, as I recall.’ He tried to hide the fear in his voice; he knew the Kid would see the tension in his face, however hard he tried to think it away.
The Kid approached. He was dressed pretty much Mexican, with a striped serape over his shoulders and a wide-brimmed Chihahueno hat shading his face, tied with a buckskin thong under the chin. He wasn’t carrying a rifle or wearing a belt-gun as far as Taylor could see.
He halted and nodded towards the carbine in Taylor’s hand. ‘You don’t need that, Taylor. I’m not heeled.’
‘It’s all right, Kid.’ Taylor poured coffee for the two of them, ‘It ain’t pointed at you.’
The Kid smiled. He crouched down on the other side of the fire and took the cup Taylor offered him – with his left hand. His shooting hand dawdled on his knee. Taylor realized he was looking for the bulge in the Kid’s sleeve or under the folds of the serape that meant a hideout gun and was surprised at himself, because a hideout gun wasn’t the Kid’s style at all.
Around them the wind ebbed; they wouldn’t need to shout through it. Nino drank his coffee like a thirsty man. ‘I hear you got a new job, Taylor.’
‘That’s right.’
‘But here in Oxford County?’
‘I like it round here.’
The Kid gave his famous grin, showing his buck teeth. You might think those two splayed upper front teeth would spoil his looks, but instead they gave the Kid’s face a jaunty friendliness, like a playful terrier. ‘Well, I don’t see no problems. You need me, Taylor. If it wasn’t for us Regulators, you wouldn’t have nothing to do.’
‘Still calling yourselves “Regulators”, huh?’
‘I suppose your new employers call us something else.’
Taylor nodded. ‘That’s right. They call you stock thieves.’
The Kid studied Taylor’s face. His grin winked out, an instant, before appearing again, a little less easy this time. Taylor went on, ‘And they call you, Kid, a murderer.’
The Kid blinked. ‘I never murdered anybody.’
‘Zar Kelly—’
The other man sneered. ‘That back-shooting, four-flushing … if any sonofabitch ever needed killing, it was him.’
‘Sure. Kelly was rotten, venal, corrupt, a bribetaker, pimp and murderer. He was also the county sheriff.’
‘I don’t make a habit of killing lawmen.’
‘Glad to hear it.’ Taylor smiled. ‘Seeing as I’m county sheriff now.’
The Kid shook his head. ‘I still don’t figure why you took that job.’
‘You know how I’m fixed. Living with Pilar. Nice and easy all the time … but I guess I’m not cut out to live Mexican. I need to be doing something.’
The Kid scraped dust from his forehead with the back of his wrist. Salt dust covered him like hoar frost. Underneath, he had fair skin that burned easily, and medium brown hair; he was attempting to grow a moustache with his usual lack of success. Apart from his prominent teeth his most noticeable features were his green eyes. Nobody would have called the Kid, with his short nose, buck teeth and wisp of moustache, handsome, but the local señoritas didn’t seem to mind, won over by his boyish, easy-laughing ways, his cat-green eyes. A slightly built young man, a little below middle height-Despite his nickname, the Kid looked to be about twenty-four or twenty-five; his real name was Henry McCarthy.
Nino said, ‘We don’t need to crowd each other. This is a big county. You could lose some eastern states in it.’
‘Getting crowded for you.’
Nino was still grinning, although the grin was starting to look a little fixed now. For the first time Taylor thought the Kid looked tired. He was sweating badly. Maybe he was as tense as Taylor himself. Nino said, ‘Maybe I’ll try over in Texas.’
‘Wouldn’t, if I were you. Those ranchers over in the Panhandle, they’re plenty sore at you, all the cattle and horses you’ve stole. They’ve upped the bounty on your head.’
The Kid’s grin vanished. For a moment, as he glared at Taylor, he wasn’t the laughing boy charming the señoritas, the happy-go-lucky cowboy who made friends easily; he was the Arizona Kid, wanted, or implicated in, half-a-dozen murders.
‘I know why you took this job. All that horseshit about how you couldn’t live Mexican. Truth is, you don’t like living poor. You took the job for one reason only: money. And the real money is me. I’ve heard about it. How the governor’s secretly raised the reward on me from five hundred dollars to fifteen hundred: that’s what you’ll get if you bring me in. Or kill me. That’s the truth, isn’t it?’
‘If it is … maybe you should be flattered.’
Nino stood, his hands at his sides, poised like he was going to reach for a weapon … if he had one. ‘That’s all I am to you. A bounty. Like I’m some kind of animal to be hunted.’
Taylor drank coffee a moment, then said, ‘This is a big country, Kid. Oxford County’s only a little bit of it. You could always go back to Arizona. Or.…’
‘Like you said: I like it around here.’
Taylor sighed. He flung the grounds from his cup to the earth. That’s it, then.’
Nino started to turn away, then halted, as if he’d remembered one more thing. He said, ‘I figured we was friends, Taylor.’
Taylor thought he heard real hurt in the Kid’s voice, almost a child’s hurt: the pain of trust betrayed. Taylor began to shape a cigarette.
That brought a silence. The Kid said, ‘Maybe you ought to settle it right now while you have the chance. Might save us both a lot of grief.’
‘Maybe.’
The Kid stood a moment more, waiting for Taylor to kill him. When the lawman didn’t move Nino turned away and began to descend the slope on the east face of the mesa. Taylor sat and smoked his cigarette, letting tension ease out of him. He was still a little bit afraid. And tired. He and the Kid were in about the same shape, he thought; worn down to the ends of their nerves. He felt something else, too: a curious sense of sadness, as if he’d just lost something important.
He stood and moved towards his horse. It was perhaps a hour to sunset. He had a long ride ahead of him, north to Agua Frio. He wanted to be through Dog Canyon before dusk; that was no place to be in darkness.
There were three of them waiting in Dog Canyon. They were in the cover of boulders on the slopes on both sides of the canyon, where they could take the man they were after in a triangular ambush. As the sun sank in the west and the shadows lengthened on the canyon floor, they checked their rifles, their handguns, their ammunition. They were taking no chances; they couldn’t afford to, even with three-to-one odds. After all, they were going up against a notorious assassin: a shootist, a mankiller. They were going up against Calvin Taylor.
TWO
Just outside rifle shot of the entrance to Dog Canyon, Taylor reined in his horse. He studied the black jaws of the pass. A place with a grim reputation; from the Apache Wars and since, a good place for an ambush. Maybe that was why the Kid had come to the meeting unarmed: why take on Taylor face to face when some of his compadres could bushwhack him later? Make sure the new sheriff never collected on that $1,500. There’d still be enough shooting light in Dog Canyon to get the job done.
But going around the pass would put hours on to Taylor’s journey and, anyway, the canyon might be empty, a place of shadow and ghosts.
He rode into the canyon. There was an eerie quiet in the place that gnawed at his guts, and a brooding quality in the shadows under the canyon walls, but he decided that was imagination too. He tried to think of something else. He thought about Pilar waiting for him in Agua Frio and his thoughts came back to the Kid and he wondered which one of them was the steadiest, the least nerve-worn, because that one would walk away from this. Taylor gazed at the ground ahead of him, studying the rocks and shadows on the slopes under the canyon walls, seeing nothing amiss. Then he felt the hairs prickle on the back of his neck and arms; it was only instinct, but it told him that his enemies were behind him. His back felt wide as a barn door. He turned in the saddle and the shot came.
The bullet whined past his ear.
His instinct had been right, the shot had come from behind. He glimpsed over his right shoulder, a dark wisp of powdersmoke!
Taylor yelled. A yell with a lot of fear in it. He spurred the dun and ducked low as the horse broke into a run.
Another rifle cracked. Off the slope above him, to the left. His instinct had only been half right, he was caught in a crossfire!
Taylor veered his dun up the slope, going at the rifleman there head on. The man fired again, missing again, by which time Taylor had worked his Winchester free of the saddle scabbard, laying the carbine across his arm, firing in reply. Then he swung one leg over the saddle and came down on the near side of the dun, landing on a slope of sand that shifted under him, almost went sprawling, then lunged upslope; almost running head on into a third man who reared from behind a boulder, a rifle in his hands. Taylor glimpsed the man’s startled face, mouth wide to yell. He barely had time to swing his rifle about before Taylor was on him. He fired and Taylor felt the bullet snatch at his shirt front; then Taylor drove the barrel of his Winchester into the man’s stomach and the other doubled forward. Taylor followed through with the riflebutt, catching his enemy alongside the jaw and spinning him backwards. Then Taylor was past him, running upslope.
There was another shot from behind him, then the man ahead yelled, ‘Vincente!’ A man in a red shirt lifted to fire. Taylor plunged down behind a circle of boulders, scrambling up to fire himself, looking for a target, but his enemy was back in cover.
The sheriff found he was gasping for air. He was pouring sweat and his arms shook quite violently; he was dizzy too. He tried to slow his breathing and get his trembling arms under control. After a time he decided he hadn’t been hit. When he inspected his shirt he saw a ragged hole where a button had been whisked away. He said, ‘Christ!’ And then firing started again, from above and from the other side of the canyon.
Taylor decided there was no point trying to shoot two ways at once. He’d ignore the man behind him, unless he made a move across the canyon floor, concentrate on redshirt, the man ahead. Redshirt tried a couple of wide shots and then Taylor realized he was trying to angle richochets into his enemy’s hiding place. Well, two could play at that game. There was a flat-faced boulder on the slope above redshirt’s place of concealment. Taylor calculated angles and trajectories a moment. He fired at the boulder and heard the yowl of the richochet. He repeated the shot and redshirt yelled. He sprang upright, one hand behind him, pressed to his back. Taylor shot him. The man fell clear of the rocks, struck the slope and started to roll. Taylor shot him again and the body fetched up in a tangle of shale and brush, jackknifed around a small boulder. The rifle in his hand skittered downslope.
Taylor’s arms started shaking again; he spent a minute getting himself back under control. While that was happening, he heard hoofbeats; the surviving ambusher making his way out of the canyon. The hoofbeats faded into silence.
Taylor could see the man he’d shot clearly, his red shirt now a darker colour, not much left of his face because a bullet had wiped it away, leaving just a bloody maw. Taylor stared at the dead man, feeling angry, then sick, then nothing. He studied the ground below him, looking for the man he’d felled with the riflebutt, not seeing him. Then there was a groan. Taylor trained his rifle on the sound; a man sat up, jerking up out of the shadow.
Taylor walked over to him, halted, keeping the rifle pointing at the man’s chest. A young Mexican in nondescript clothing, shaking the dizziness out of his head. His mouth, chin and shirtfront were bloody, Taylor had maybe knocked out some teeth with the riflebutt. Taylor recognized him.
‘Vincente Chavez.’
He was shocked. Vincente was a friendly kid he knew from Agua Frio; Taylor had liked him. Liked him and his brother.
Taylor scooped up Vincente’s rifle. In Spanish he asked the Mexican boy, ‘Who was the other one, Vincente? The one run out on you?’
Vincente was feeling in his mouth, trying to stem the flow of blood; then he stared. ‘Quirino—’
Taylor gestured up slope. Vincente turned his head slowly. When he saw the body snagged around the rock, he gave a cry of pain.
Taylor told him, ‘Your brother’s dead, Vincente.’
The prisoner hung his head a moment, then he glared at the lawman in hatred. Tears had already started in his eyes. ‘Butcher!’
‘What you expect? You and Quirino was lyin’ up to butcher me. Get rid of any other weapons you got.’
‘Not got any.’
‘Get up.’
Vincente pushed himself off the ground. As he did so, he whipped a long-bladed knife from his boot and made a cut at Taylor’s ribs. Taylor was ready for that; he cracked Vincente across the forearm with the barrel of the carbine and saw the knife spill from his hand. For good measure, Taylor hit Vincente in the stomach with the butt of the carbine. Vincente folded forward, sinking to his knees with his arms wrapped around his belly.
Taylor waited until Vincente got some air back inside him. He asked, ‘Who put you up to this? Was it the Kid?’ When Vincente didn’t answer, Taylor said, ‘You damn fool!’
Taylor rode through Dog Canyon, Vincente going ahead of him, tied to his horse, Quirino following, tied head down over his. Beyond the canyon, Taylor found a place to roost where he couldn’t be easily jumped, and cat-napped through the night. Vincente spent an even more uncomfortable night in the same place, bound hand and foot. In the morning, the sheriff ate a frugal breakfast and fed his prisoner the same. When dust showed on the northern horizon he kicked out his breakfast fire and took his prisoner into the cover of high ground overlooking the trail. He waited with his Winchester in his hand.
