realized her initial surveillance of the emptiness had failed to pick out one man partially shielded by a couple bales of hay. He left his spot and headed in their direction. He had been so positioned as to have Alyssa wonder if he’d been strategically placed to keep people out of the barn, or to keep one particular person in.
Ramón made perfunctory introductions. Luís looked uneasy, almost to the point of embarrassment. Alyssa kept her greeting to a slight nod of her head in his direction.
“Quiet?” Ramón asked Luís.
“Sí,” Luís replied.
“Good.” Ramón continued forward, drawing Alyssa and Luís in his wake. He stopped beside the barn door and turned to Alyssa.
“They were angry with him, you understand?”
“I don’t care who he is,” she said. “He shouldn’t have been killing my bulls, should he?”
“Exactly,” Ramón agreed, hopefully beginning to realize that his new boss did understand, even if she was a woman easily misconstrued to be less likely to comprehend things like loyalty to the land, and to the bulls, and.…
“Shall we go in and see Mr. Montego, then?” she suggested. She was curious to meet the son to whom Lalo Montego had left so little.
They entered the shadows of the barn. It took her several seconds to adjust her vision to where she could even make out shadows within shadows.
The place smelled as only a barn could smell: a not totally unpleasant mingling of hay and straw, of animal and animal dung. There were no animals in immediate evidence, though. Alyssa assumed the horses were kept in the separate stable complex. Whatever animals lived here on a permanent basis (cows?), were obviously now out to pasture.
“Over here,” Ramón guided.
She wasn’t sure of her coordination in strange surroundings and followed slowly. Luís took up the rear.
Ramón led the way to a far stall. At first, Alyssa couldn’t see Adriano Montego at all.
“My God!” she exclaimed when she finally did see him curled up in a battered ball on a compressed pile of hay against the wall.
Ramón and Luís exchanged nervous glances of which Alyssa was intuitively aware.
“But, then, if he was killing bulls, he undoubtedly deserves his present condition, doesn’t he?” she ventured in an attempt to put Ramón and Luís more at ease. In actuality, she wasn’t at all sure that killing a few dumb animals should have really warranted beating Adriano quite so badly. “Still, I suppose the most humane thing would be to get him a doctor.” She turned to Ramón. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Of course,” he said. The last thing he wanted was a dead Adriano Montego in the hacienda barn.
“You know of a doctor who would be discreet?” Alyssa continued, trying to assuage whatever her foreman’s continuing obvious fears. She had knelt by Adriano’s body, afraid he was already dead. Her immediate fears had been somewhat lessened by the pulse evident at the base of his throat seen without her even having to touch it.
“Luís, go get Leandro!” Ramón commanded. He turned to Alyssa and explained, “Leandro isn’t a real doctor, but he knows enough to tell us if we’ll need Dr. Santos from town.”
Alyssa wasn’t at all sure she was willing to risk Adriano’s diagnosis to someone medically unqualified. Still, she had asked for someone discreet, hadn’t she? She didn’t want trouble to come from this, if it could, in any way, be prevented.
“Mr. Montego can’t stay here,” she said, thinking of very little else to say under the circumstances. Luís had already left the barn, en route to fetch Leandro—wherever it was Leandro might be that he hadn’t been summoned already. “Shall we take him to a bedroom in the house?”
“I think it would be best to wait,” Ramón said. He didn’t know how badly Adriano was hurt, but he didn’t want to take any chance of making him worse by moving him. If only he had gotten back to the hacienda earlier, he might well have stopped things from having gone this far.
Damn—Adriano should have known he was playing with dynamite when he killed those bulls! If he knew nothing else, he had to know how these men idolized those animals. Bulls were these men’s lives. To kill one of the bulls, let alone five of them, before even one of them could meet its natural end amid the pomp and circumstance of the corrida de toros, was sacrilege. Adriano Montego was lucky he wasn’t dead. He might well have been if Ramón hadn’t arrived when he did.
“Yes, of course, you’re right. We mustn’t move him,” Alyssa said, wondering whatever had possessed her even to suggest doing so. How many first-aid courses had she taken in her life wherein it had constantly been drilled into her as to just how dangerous it could be to move any victim before qualified medical help arrived on the scene?
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