Hell's Angel (22 page)

They were a mean and ornery lot from all over, and their specialty was hunting women for the Mexican slave trade, which now, with Moon coming to the Great Bend country, started at Moon's Well and drifted down into Mexico when Moon was ready to send his culls across the Rio Grande.

Thursday had been in the business for a long time, and he knew his trade very well indeed. He took only the most comely of the Apache and Mexican girls he hunted throughout the southwest, rumbling along with his caravan of phony soldiers and a Gatling gun that Moon knew one of the wagons was armed with . . . in case anyone decided to interfere in his business.

He had several Indian agents in his employ, however, so his operation usually proceeded with few hitches.

“Right this way, sir!” Thursday said as he dropped down the steps ahead of Moon and sauntered to the rear of the first wagon parked in front of the House.

The other slave traders had dismounted and were leading their horses over to the well to draw the water that was part of Moon's and Thursday's business agreement. Free water for the best whores in the country, for which Moon would pay fifty dollars a head.

While Thursday's two lieutenants, whose names Moon had had no interest in remembering, walked up behind the dwarf, so did several of Moon's own gang members who'd been loafing on the gallery. Those who'd survived the hunt for the bitch who'd shot Moon, that was.

Thursday untied the rear pucker and opened the flaps. He then dropped to one knee and indicated the other one with his gloved hand.

“May I, Mr. Moon?”

Moon took the man's hand and allowed himself to be helped up to a standing position on Thursday's knee. Wrapping his good hand over the top of the wagon's tailgate, he stared into the back of the wagon, at the eight cherry-skinned, dark-headed girls crouched there with their hands and feet tied, heads bowed as if in prayer. Long, black hair hung down over their faces.

The wagon box was hot. It reeked of sweat and the burning hay odor of hot burlap.

“Well, I can't see much, but they all look young, as we agreed. And that one back there looks plump enough. Any idea what she weighs?”

“I didn't weigh her, Mr. Moon,” said Thursday. “But I'd bet Henry rifles to slingshots she come in at a good one-seventy.”

“Ha!” Moon laughed. “You like your beans and tortillas, eh, senorita?”

He looked at Thursday. “Any Mescins? Some of my customers won't lay with an Apache. They think they're all witches. Don't mind Mescins, though.”

“Ah, hell, who can tell,” Thursday said. “Where I go they're all so inbred you can't tell an Apache from a Mex or vicey-versy.”

The dwarf chuckled as he stared in at the girls. “Ain't that the truth. Pretty much the same as you got here in the other wagon?” He glanced at the wagon flanking the first one, behind the sweat-lathered, four-mule hitch.

“Same back there, Mr. Moon. Prime young whore flesh. Eight of 'em. Sixteen total.”

“Well, they don't look like much now, but Griselda'll get 'em cleaned up, decked out, and presentable right quick.” Moon glanced at his skinny, brown-haired lover standing on the gallery steps, looking vaguely sheepish. The Rio Bravo Kid was nowhere in sight.

Moon grinned, showing all his crooked teeth and flashing his eyes. “Won't you, my sweet pickle?”

“You bet, Mordecai!” Griselda smiled as though relieved by the dwarf's apparent warm feelings toward her and leaped down off the side of the steps. As she strode toward the wagon, Thursday's men lowered the tailgate and began jerking the slave girls out.

Thursday tapped Moon's shoulder, and they walked off together. “You got your herd culled, Mr. Moon?”

“Not yet, but I'll get you as many as you got here first thing tomorrow, and you'll be on your way to Mexico.”

“All right. I best be pullin' out soon.” Thursday stared back in the direction from which he'd come, an owly look in his cobalt blues above his thick, tangled, dust-caked beard.

“You can't stay awhile?” Moon was miffed. He usually counted on Thursday's slave traders staying for a mid-trip blowout. That always brought moon an extra two, three hundred dollars in whiskey and beer sales alone.

“Best push on,” Thursday said. “Colonel Campa'll be waitin' on me in San Simon. Besides, the boys got careless. We had an intruder in camp last night. Doubt it was anything to be concerned about—prob'ly just some old desert rat skulkin' around—but I haven't stayed in business this long lettin' grass grow under my feet.”

“Intruder, eh?” Moon frowned, looking off cautiously.

The bounty hunter and Mrs. Rose, perhaps? Likely, not. What would their little gang want with slave traders?

Thursday chuckled as he scrubbed dust and sweat from his beard with one hand. “Mr. Moon, I sure could use a drink!”

“Well, you come to the right place, Luke. You come to the right place. Intruder, huh? Yeah, well, I had a little problem like that my own self. It'll all get cleared up soon, though. I'm right confident of that. Hell, I got a small army in my employ!”

The dwarf ambled toward the gallery steps behind Thursday, cradling his tender hand and glancing around shrewdly, hopefully.

29

“SENOR MORTIMER—COME QUICKLY,
por favor
! It is Wanda!”

Mortimer swung around from his table in Moon's raucous saloon, where the customers were getting to know the new cavvy of Indian whores. There was still a general excitement in the air, mainly from Moon's own men and the local Mexicans, about Moon's having risen like Lazarus of Bethany from the dead.

Mortimer dropped an instinctive hand to the walnut grips of his right-side Colt but left the gun in its holster when he saw his neighbor, Bienvenida, stumbling toward him through the crowd, breathless, her big bosoms bouncing beneath her gaudily stitched sackcloth dress. She wore a thin cape, also made of hemp, around her head and shoulders.

“It is Wanda, Senor Mortimer,” the woman said, grabbing Mortimer's arm and tugging. “
Por favor
—you must come quickly. She is not feeling well and she has a
gun
!”

“A gun?” Mortimer rose a little unsteadily, for he'd been drinking all day, after the dwarf had bestowed his reinstatement on him, though ostensibly he was here to keep a cork on the slave traders and other transient customers, so they didn't get drunk and raze the place in their frenzy over the new girls. “What the hell is she doing with a gun?”

“Vamos!”

Mortimer doffed his hat and followed Bienvenida back through the crowd and billowing tobacco smoke to the front door and out onto the gallery. The big woman fairly dragged him down the gallery steps through the crowd of burly men milling with a couple of loud, professional whores from Fort Worth.

“Got you an old Mex tonight—eh, Sheriff?” said one of the dwarf's men, laughing. “What—you get tired o' the gringa you rode into Moon's Well with?”

Mortimer would have taken the time to belt the man if Bienvenida hadn't been jerking him by his wrist up the street in the direction of his office, and if the words
Wanda
and
gun
hadn't been careening through his head in large red letters.

“What's this about a gun?” Mortimer asked the woman, striding ahead of her now.

“A
gun
!” Bienvenida trilled. “A
gun
, Senor Mortimer!”

The sheriff swung into the break between the adobe hovel that housed his office and the brick-and-wood barbershop. Despite the darkness, he broke into a jog down the break and then across the wash flanking the jailhouse. He saw his and Wanda's shack just ahead and on his right, on the other side of a narrow wash and sheathed in cacti and spindly mesquites.

It looked like a stone ruin, which it had been before they had moved in.

Dim yellow lamplight emanated from both front windows, one on either side of the open front door.

“Wanda!” Mortimer called, his heart thumping.

This anxiety was new and strange to him. Downright off-putting. He wasn't normally a man who allowed himself to get his blood up, but the thought of what Wanda might do with that gun caused his old venom to jet like acid through his veins, and his mouth to dry up like the very desert he and the ex–saloon girl wanted so much to escape.

He burst through the back door and into the casa. “Wanda!”

Her bed was empty, the covers thrown back. A lamp flickered on a shelf above the cold monkey stove in the wall opposite the door. The back door stood open.

As Mortimer heard Bienvenida's quick, heavy footsteps behind him and the old Mexican woman's rasping breaths, he ran across the casa and out the back door. He ran into the desert south of the house, looking around wildly, trying in vain to prepare himself for the crack of a pistol.

He passed several ruined shacks—hunching, pale shapes in the near darkness sprinkled with starlight—and the cemetery-like ruins of ancient gardens. He ran across another wash and between two dead sotol cacti and stopped suddenly.

A figured crouched before him, facing the darkness of a deep arroyo carved long ago by some long-defunct stream. A pale, slender figure in the darkness.

Red hair fell nearly to the small of Wanda's back. She wore the pale night wrap Mortimer had given her before they'd left Kansas. She sat on her knees, rump resting against her heels. She also wore the delicate silk slippers that Mortimer had given her during that time when they'd first fallen in love and which seemed so long ago in a way, but also only yesterday.

The slippers looked especially pale and thin in the darkness, sheathing her small feet, snugged down beneath her rump, toes curled against the dark ground.

Mortimer stopped. She knelt there so motionlessly that he wondered with a tightness in his lungs if she'd already done it and he just hadn't heard the shot.

“Wanda.”

A gasp. Wanda whipped her head to one side and glanced at him over her shoulder. “Oh, Lee! No!” She set a hand down on the ground and rose heavily, weakly. “I didn't want you to come!”

In her other hand was an old .30-caliber Warner rimfire pocket pistol with a long, curved handle that a saloon owner had given her, because she'd been beautiful and had needed to protect herself against men who wanted to take her upstairs. But she'd never done that. At least, she'd said she hadn't. It didn't much matter to Mortimer either way.

“I didn't want Bienvenida to fetch you. She promised she wouldn't!”

“She did.” Mortimer walked slowly forward. “What're you doing out here with that peashooter, anyway? Give it to me.”

Wanda took one step back toward the ravine behind her, holding the little pistol against her side, the barrel angled over her heart. “Stop, Lee!”

Mortimer stopped.

“Please go back to the house, Lee,” Wanda said, sobbing now, her shoulders jerking, her wavy hair in her eyes. “It's better this way. You'll be free now. And so will I. It's the only way we can both ever be free of this wretched hellhole!”

She was drunk. Even in his own half-inebriated state, he could smell it on her, mixed with the sick, coppery smell of her.

“Oh, Wanda, you didn't,” he said, making a face. “You know the forty-rod's no good for you.”

“I haven't felt this good in a long time.” She laughed drunkenly at that. The tears rolling down her cheeks were touched with silvery starlight. “Go away, Lee. Ride on out of here. Head to Mexico. Right now. Tonight!”

“That's not gonna happen, sweetheart.”

“You have to, Lee. On your own. I can't travel. I'm too weak. This is the only way.”

She lowered her chin and sobbed. The gun dropped from her chest to hang down by her side in her pale hand. Mortimer started walking toward her again.

“No, Lee!” she warned, raising the gun to her chest once more. Her voice was brittle. “It has to be this way, don't you see? We were such fools, you and I. Who did we think we were kidding?”

“What're you talking about?”

“Us . . . hitchin' our stars together. Why, you're nothing but an old killer, Lee. I'm sorry, but you know it's true. You're an outlaw. Why, you're little better than Mordecai Moon. In some ways, you know, Lee, he's even better than you because he's not pretending he's anything other than what he is. A mangy old killer. Thinks about one thing. Money. Well, two things—money and power.”

Wanda laughed caustically, and Mortimer knew he wasn't really hearing the girl he'd tumbled for anymore, but some weird, corrupted version of her welling up from beneath the whiskey and illness. “Actually, three things—money, power, and a good tumble in the old mattress sack!”

She laughed at that, but it more resembled a screech. It wasn't genuine. It was sad and desperate. She was merely trying to repulse him, to get him to leave.

And it was breaking his heart. Because that's how much she loved him.

“And I'm just as phony as you are, Lee. You know how I said I merely dealt cards and slung drinks? Never went upstairs? Hogwash. I just said that because I was too old to do it anymore when I met you, and when I saw you, I saw a man who might be able to get me out of that saloon I was working in. And I was right. But you were a fool to believe me, Lee. A fool!

“I'm as much of a whore as any of those girls working against their will over at Moon's place—only I fucked my jakes
willingly.
And I was damn good at it, too. I was some of the best pussy around. And when I could get away with it, I kept the largest percentage. The men who owned my ass got the short end of the stick!”

She laughed that choking laugh once more and brushed tears from her cheek with the back of her free hand.

Mortimer just stared at her. He felt as though a blacksmith's tongs had a pinching grip on his heart.

“That's who we are, Lee. And if we were really any more than that, we wouldn't have stopped here in Moon's Well. And you wouldn't have taken a job with that disgusting little demon.”

“We had to stop here, Wanda. You couldn't ride any farther.”

“No, but you can, Lee. Prove to me you're more than who you say you are . . . or
think
you are . . . and ride the hell out of here. Start that new life we've dreamed about for so long in Mexico!”

Mortimer shook his head. “Not without you, Wanda.”

“You're a stupid man, Lee. A sucker for a lying, cheating old whore! Why, I don't even love you. In fact, when we got to Mexico I intended to steal whatever money you had and drift to some jake who could turn a coin!” She laughed again, her torso wobbling drunkenly on her hips. “What do you think of that, Lee Mortimer?”

“Not without you, Wanda.”

“Sucker!” she shouted as loudly as her brittle voice would allow.

Mortimer continued forward, shaking his head, holding his right hand out, palm up. “Not without you . . .”

Suddenly, all the weirdly screwed-up muscles in her face slackened, and her mouth corners fell. She regarded him through the slack wings of her hair falling down both sides of her gaunt, ghostly pale face. “You're going to have to, Lee.”

She rammed the pistol against her chest over her heart. Mortimer leaped forward, closing his right hand over the top of the gun. He winced as the hammer chewed into the weblike skin between his thumb and index finger.

“No!”
she screamed as he pulled the revolver out of her hand.

He wrapped his arms around her. As she leaned against him and sobbed into his shoulder, he looked down her hair-draped back at the pistol in his hand, the hammer still biting into his skin, which was all that had kept it from igniting the cartridge.

“Why, Lee?” she bawled as he held her more tightly than he'd ever held anyone before. “Why in the world did this have to happen to us?”

“Just doomed, I reckon, Wanda,” Mortimer said, rocking her gently. “Just doomed.”