Dead Men Don't Lie. Jackson Cain

      PROLOGUE

      A bullet always knows.

      High up in the San Carlos mountains in southern Arizona, a woman with shoulder-length auburn hair sat cross-legged. She was studying the cliff face in front of her. Dressed in a blue close-fitting denim work shirt and Levi’s, she sported an old, worn, light brown, scoop-brimmed work Stetson and hard-used riding boots, which were heeled with large steel rowels. She looked fit, and she was. Her long tresses, full mouth, flaring cheekbones, and expressive green eyes still drew stares—even from men a fraction of her thirty-five years. A pair of saddlebags were casually spread out on her lap; a black-and-white Appaloosa with a mottled rump was rein-standing beside her.

      The woman stared fixedly at the three circular points embedded in the cliff face. Each of them was approximately two inches in diameter—two on top, one below, each approximately eighteen inches from the other. Pale as old ivory, these disks were considered by her godmother and legendary Apache war shaman, Lozen, to be sacred.

      The woman needed something sacred at this moment. True, she and her husband, Frank, owned the largest ranch in the entire Arizona territory as well as several extremely profitable silver mines, but now, it seemed, her wealth no longer mattered. For the past twenty years, the woman’s life had gone from marvelous to monstrous. Her two headstrong children—nineteen-year-old Richard and eighteen-year-old Rachel—were continually running off on “adventures.” Their hair-raising exploits had always frightened the woman out of her wits: Richard’s rock-climbing, high diving, and heavyweight boxing drove Katherine to distraction, and she was convinced that Rachel’s obsession with breaking wild mustangs would be the death of her only daughter.

      But now the two had topped themselves. They had set out on another “adventure” in the dead of night, without warning, leaving only a letter of good-bye. In it, they explained that they were hopping a freight train down to Mexico. Traveling in peon garb, they intended to explore Sonora and Sinaloa—two of Mexico’s most lawless states. Sinaloa was especially frightening. Brutally tyrannical, its titular head was a dimwit named Eduardo. His shockingly psychopathic stepmother—known throughout Mexico as “La Señorita”—really ran it, and she had brought back the torture chambers of the Spanish Inquisition and the sacrificial pyramids of the Aztecs, on one of whose summits her faux-Aztec priests cut the hearts out of anyone who crossed her. In short, her political systems—which Porfirio Díaz privately and wholeheartedly supported—were derived from the worst excesses of the Spanish Inquisition and the Aztec Empire. Since the Señorita was also Díaz’s most generous personal benefactor and political contributor, her power throughout Méjico was surpassed only by that of El Presidente Díaz.

      For the past decade she and Méjico’s vicious dictator, the same Porfirio Díaz, had embarked on a path of conquest and had subjugated almost everything and everyone in Mexico. Only the state of Sonora had fought them off and remained free. But Sinaloa and Chihuahua, under Díaz and the Señorita, had allied themselves against Sonora, and that state’s days seemed to be numbered. The Señorita let everyone know that after Sonora she also planned to come north and reclaim the Arizona Territory for herself and Díaz.

      The Señorita had spouted that theory one too many times, and Katherine’s children decided it was time to stop speculating on Sinaloa and its empire from hell and find out what was really going on. In the letter they had characterized their expedition as “a reconnaissance mission and fact-finding operation.” They quoted Sun-tzu’s dictum: “Know thy enemy.” They believed they would return with “indispensable intelligence, which will determine the survival or the extinction of El Rancho del Cielo.”

      As Frank had once observed, the two young people “suffered the curse of Odysseus—incurable curiosity.”

      “Which will lead only to Cyclopes, sirens, Scylla, Charybdis, and witches who turn people into swine,” Katherine had added.

      “Then why are they doing it?” Frank had asked.

      “They like living close to the bone, on the razor’s edge . . . on the hair trigger’s trembling touch.”

      “In other words, they’re like their mother was when she was their age,” Frank had answered.

      Katherine had been abducted by the Apache as a child and Frank believed the experience had left her with a wild, rebellious streak, and there was some truth to his theory. But contrary to much rumor and false report, Katherine was not made of stone and was not impervious to fear or anxiety.

      And now Katherine was facing something more unbearable: Frank had always been a dynamo of indefatigable energy. Not only was he the foremost surgeon in the entire American Southwest and not only was he running that region’s most modern,

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