border, studying the city through his sniper scope. It was evening but the sky was clear. By the full moon, the desert-bright stars and the lights of Nogales’s many cantina/brothels, he could see the main street clearly.
Slater had just exchanged Luis’s gold for $15,000 in hundred-dollar bills, and he now had them in his silk money belts under his shirt and in his canvas saddlebags. He was going to give it to Moreno’s surviving family. Still it was enough make men to want to trail, kill, and rob him.
* * *
Just after dark, he had sneaked out of his hotel room, leaving a dummy made of pillows, trash, and old rolled-up grain sacks filled with dirt and soiled clothes under the blankets. Nogales was a hell town, and Slater was expecting company.
By the time he’d reached his hilltop, four rough-looking men in gray uniforms and sombreros were in front of the El Presidente Hotel. Pulling Winchesters out of their saddle sheaths, they worked the levers and checked their firing chambers. Barrels resting on their shoulders, they entered the El Presidente.
Five minutes later, a half-dozen pistol and rifle shots cracked in the hotel and light flashed in the windows of Slater’s room.
In his mind’s eye, he envisioned his bed dummy, riddled with black, charred, smoking holes. He knew they’d be on his trail now. There had been no way for him to sneak out of Nogales; even now, too many people had seen him ride out of town.
* * *
Crawling forward, Slater worked his way to the rim of the hill and down into his shallow firing pit, the forward edge of which was surmounted by rocks and hard-packed dirt. In the middle of the barricade, he’d opened a groove for his Big Fifty Sharps, which lay beside the firing pit along with a dozen .50 caliber shells. The men were a mere four hundred yards downhill, so Slater was not even bothering with the sniper scope. He had his ladder-style, vernier-scale peep sight adjusted for elevation, distance, and windage. He was ready for them.
Within minutes, the four men reached the base of his hill and were peering up the gradually sloping trail. He could start shooting them now, but the question was: Which way would the survivors flee? If they headed downhill, they could return with more men. If they fled uphill, they’d be out of sight for most of the way. They could dog his trail and blindside him whenever they wanted. He sighted in on a narrow curve a hundred yards farther up the incline from them.
Leaning forward in their saddles, peering up the trail, the men slowly worked their way forward. When their mounts entered the downward-sloping turn in the trail, Slater eared back the Sharps’s hammer. Even if he only winged them, it would be with .50 caliber rounds, designed to kill four-thousand-pound bison at eight hundred yards, so he did not need to nail the men between the eyes—not unless he wanted to. And anyway in times like this, it was usually better to wound your pursuers. The sight of a shot-up compadre tended to slow the other men down, and it typically took at least two of them to look after a wounded friend. Pressing his eye against the peep sight, he bracketed the lead rider’s torso.
Your first look is your best look, Slater reflexively repeated to himself.
He let the hammer down, and the rifle bucked against his shoulder. The booming recoil rocked his head.
Without thinking, he automatically pushed the trigger guard forward and extracted a shell casing. Setting the hammer to half cock, he quickly sleeved in another round and pulled back the trigger guard. He also engaged the rear trigger, which lightened the primary trigger’s touch.
Staring into the peep sight, he lined up a second target. The man was mounted and staring uphill, trying to spot the sniper. Suddenly, he was staring straight at Slater. He might have even spotted the whitish cloud of black powder smoke emanating from Slater’s Sharps. Dispersing the smoke-cloud with his left hand, Slater sighted in on the man’s chest and squeezed off a round. The bullet hit his lower sternum, lifting him off his saddle and dropping him behind his horse.
Slater was working fast. He had to kill the two survivors before they could return for reinforcements. Easing back the hammer to half cock, he slammed the trigger guard forward and extracted the shell casing from the chamber. Slipping in another, he pulled the trigger guard all the way back. The hammer was still on half cock, so he set the primary for the lighter touch. One man’s horse was up on its hind legs, circling, insanely spooked at the sight and scent of blood. Slater went for the rider’s chest, but rushing the shot, he hit him instead in the throat, effectively decapitating him. The man’s head went bouncing down the trail.
The fourth man’s horse was now bucking wildly, so much so Slater couldn’t get a shot at the man, who was whipping up and down in the scope.
Fuck it.
He frantically set the hammer at half cock, slammed the trigger guard forward, ripped out the shell, pulled the lever back, and without bothering with the second trigger, sighted in on the crazed, jumping mount. Shooting the horse in the side of his chest and through his heart, Slater knocked the big bay onto his side, pinning the rider’s leg. Bracing his free leg against the saddle’s cantle, the man pushed frantically to free himself from the fallen animal.
Setting the hammer at half cock and levering the trigger guard, Slater removed the spent, smoking shell casing. Now he had all the time in the world. He inserted a fifth round and pulled the hammer back to full cock. Returning to the peep sight, he was staring straight into the howling man’s face.
As he depressed the trigger, the rifle once more hammered his shoulder, the whitish black-powder smoke mushroomed up, and again his ears rung. Waving away the dense, blinding haze, he again studied the scene below.
The pinned-down man lay twisted on his side, the back of his head blown all over the ground and the dead, bloody bay.
Chapter 26
At night, Mateo brooded. His clubbing of Rachel outside the cantina still haunted him. He hadn’t been ready for the ferocity of her assault. In defending her brother, she had attacked him like a demon straight out of hell, and in a moment of anger and perhaps even panic, he’d laid her out with the weighted buttstock of his cuarta-quirt. He’d felt something crack and then realized he’d hit her too hard.
Why had he hit her in the temple? He now secretly feared he’d killed the girl.
He felt bad enough about it that he’d approached General Ortega one night in his office.
* * *
“The important thing,” the general had said to him, “is that her brother didn’t witness it. He doesn’t know how badly you hurt her. According to the man who took the cantina over, the sister and Eléna, the former owner, took a train north, and that’s all anyone knows. And who knows? Maybe the sister made it. Stranger things have happened. We’ve all seen men who were wounded severely in battle survive. Whether she lives or dies is in the lap of the gods and should be of no concern to you. It’s nothing you can affect. In all probability no one down here will ever know, her brother included.”
“She was just a kid, and I really hurt her. I don’t know what came over me.”
“We’re soldados,” the general said with surprising gentleness. “We aren’t trained to pull our punches.”
Mateo stared at him, silent.
“My friend,” the general said, “it can’t be undone.”
“Still . . .”
