Country of the Bad Wolfes (97 page)

A figure appears at the front door, visible only from the chest up, silhouetted by the firelight within. He stands just inside the door and to the left, as though aware of Pori and staying out of his view but unaware of Dax—who smiles as he shoots him. The man falls forward onto the porch and out of sight. Pori too sees the man fall and has the same thought as Dax—that whoever else comes onto the porch will do it in a crouch. But the fire is gobbling up the porch and the fuckers will have to come off it or be cooked.

Embers fall into Blake's hair and burn into his scalp and he brushes them away. His clothes are smoking, his hands and face blistering. Through the flaming porch steps he watches the dune. The second man behind it has not fired again and Blake guesses he is positioning for a better shot. Maybe he's waiting till I have to move out from under here, he thinks. That's what I'd do. Then sees him on the dune crest, directly in front of the steps, looking at him, rising on his knees and raising a rifle. They both shoot.

Juan Lobo is enraged. He knows he hit the son of a bitch twice—and he's still alive. Maybe Sarmiento hit him too before the fucker cut loose with that shotgun and probably nailed him.
Goddammit!
Shot up and roasting and he still nails the One-Eye! Lobo flings off his hat and slogs through the soft sand along the foot of the dune, moving to a better angle of fire. Right about here, he thinks, and crawls up the slope and peeks over the crest. The underside of the house is roiling with red-yellow fire and the glare of it makes him squint. He scans the flaming stairway. Sees him. Face framed between two of the lower steps and looking right at him like a devil peering out of hell. He rises to his knees as he brings up the rifle and he pulls the trigger at the same instant that the buckshot charge hits him. He feels himself floating rearward. Then is staring up at the whirling starry sky. Whirling and whirling and fading and gone.

Jacky Ríos and Morgan crawl out beside James Sebastian on the porch floor as the gunfire continues on the rear side of the house. The planks under them are crackling and smoking, the fire closing on them from every direction but ahead. A shotgun resounds and the shooting behind the house abruptly ceases. There's two out here, James Sebastian says, wheezing. The one that hit me's somewhere to the right but the other's at ten o'clock. Jacky picks up James Sebastian's Winchester, scorching his hand, and crawls forward to the porch rails and peers between them. He scans the beach slightly to his left. Sees nothing. Wipes at his streaming eyes and looks again. Sees the slight mound and what could be a head peering over it. He aims between the rail slats. Shoots. The head jerks and drops forward. Now Jacky drags James Sebastian down the steps and Morgan James comes tumbling behind them and cries out at the pain of his arm, all of them ready to take a fatal bullet rather than burn to death—as a shotgun and rifle fire together from the back of the house.

“No te mueres, querido! No te mueres!” Blake is hazily aware of being dragged by fits and starts, of gruntings and profanity and crying. He tastes blood, smells burned flesh. Now recognizes Remedios's voice. Pleading with him not to die as she drags him, tug by tug, away from the flaming house.

In the firelight shadows alongside the house, Catalina crawls to Vicki and finds her unconscious but breathing. She searches by feel for a wound and finds it on her left buttock. Entry and exit without hitting bone. Bloody but not bad. Vicki moans at her probe of it and Cat claps a hand over her mouth, shushes her, tells her to be very quiet. She can see the prone form of the shooter on the moonlit beach and
knows he's looking their way but can't make them out among the gyrating shadows. Lock your teeth, she tells Vicki. Then drags her away from the growing heat of the burning house, their gaspings inaudible over the breaking waves. About ten yards from the edge of the house's shadow is a grassy sand dune, but the man is still looking this way. Catalina is sure she will be shot as she runs across that moonlit span but she cannot lie there and do nothing. Stay here and don't move, she tells Vicki. Just then there's riflefire at the house and the man's head turns in that direction, and Cat dashes out of the shadows and over the open ground, expecting a bullet at every stride. But she reaches the dune without drawing fire and keeps on running. There's a rifleshot from the beach and she nearly yells in rage that the man may have shot Vicki. She estimates her position as she runs, and when she's sure she is south of him she starts scrabbling up the dune. A shotgun fires somewhere. She reaches the crest and sees him to her left, a prone stark figure on the moonbright beach. She comes down the dune in a crouch, thinking, Don't turn, don't turn, don't turn. And then she's on the beach and twenty feet behind him and starts closing fast, knife in hand, her footfalls muted by the breakers. At the house a rifle fires, and the man on the beach raises his head slightly, the better to see as three men come stumbling down the porch steps and into the light of the moon. The man lowers his face to take aim.

And Cat plunges onto him and he is dead before he can know his neck is skewered to the rifle stock.

E
ach twin asks about the other and learns he yet lives. As familiar as they are with mortal wounds, they refuse Jacky Ríos's plea to drive them to the hospital in town, not wanting to die in such a place or in a car on the way to it. With broken-armed Morgan following, Jacky and Catalina and Remedios carry Blake Cortéz down to the edge of the beach where his brother sits. They ease him down beside James, facing the moonbright sea.

“Dame un beso, mujer . . . y déjanos,” Blake says. Remedios kisses him and then hurries away with tears coursing.

James beckons Morgan, who says “Yessir” and crouches before him.

“It's on . . . you now,” James says. “See to things. Kiss . . . your momma for me.”

Morgan cannot speak. He grips his father's hand and nods. Then goes.

After a minute, James says, “Who the hell . . . those guys?”

Blake tries to shrug. “Bastards . . . mad about . . .
something
.”

James grins and makes a sound like a small hiccup. “Took it awful . . .
personal
.”

A long minute passes.

“I'd rather . . . firing squad . . . than this,” James says.

Blake chokes on his chuckle. “Puffing . . . cigar.”

“Girls fighting . . . over us.”

“That old . . . Bad Wolfe.”

“Jolly Roger.”

They groan their laughter.

The day breaks. The sky at the end of the gulf graduates from gray to pink, a thin shreds of orange, a welter of reds. The house reduced to a great black rectangle of smoking embers. The tide now rolling to within a few feet of the twins. Morgan
James and Jacky Ríos sit together at the top of the beach slope, watching their fathers. Remedios too, holding Vicki Angel to her, the girl on her side, keeping the weight off her wound. Catalina sits apart. The twins have not moved in almost an hour, but they all know. Not yet.

The sun flares up from the gulf as the
Remerina
comes in sight to the north, its sail white as a seabird.

“So damn …
grand
,” Blackie breathes. And his head descends to his brother's shoulder.

“Yessss. . . .” Jake manages as his head lowers.

And their family—their blood—comes down to collect them.

T
hey find the four horses. The gold and silver in the saddlebags. Find the moldering head, a pair of lensless spectacles affixed to it with a strip of wire, and bury it, bespectacled, by the roadside. Later in the morning they find the horror at Wolfe Landing amid the smoking grove. The roasted bones in the embers. And that afternoon find the staggering heartbreak at the Levee house, where the Wolfe sons weep for the first time since infancy.

They report to the county sheriff and the chief of police the savagery visited on them by a gang of killers. Inform them that the bastards' bodies are in the brush a half mile inland from Playa Blanca. Feeding the scavengers.