Navarro

Chapter 14

When Navarro opened his eyes again, he found himself on a cot, his tightly wrapped head on a pillow. It was a flat pillow, but a pillow, just the same—the cover white and crisp and smelling like starch. The last time he’d rested his head on such a pillow, he’d been in the infirmary at Fort Apache, the stone tip of a Coyotero’s arrow buried in his leg.

Squinting against the dull ache just behind his eyes—he imagined a thin but painful fissure running from his right temple down through his right jaw—he looked around the long, sunlit room he found himself in. To his right and left, cots with wool Army blankets and pillows were lined along both sides of the room. Several of the cots were occupied—blurred humps beneath the blankets. At the left end of the room, two men in white jackets and soldiers’ slacks stood talking quietly, in businesslike tones.

A tall black stove stood two cots down to Navarro’s right, in the aisle running the length of the room. Sun glistened off the iron from the sashed, flyspecked windows cut deep into both adobe walls. A table stood beside the stove, draped with a white sheet and piled with silver trays and medical tools. There was an alarm clock on the table, ticking loudly.

Beneath the ticking, the shouted commands and marching feet of close-order drill rose from outside. A horse whinnied. Closer by, a man laughed, and Navarro gave his aching gaze to an open window across the room and ten feet right.

A soldier in a white shirt, suspenders, and a visored forage cap stood just outside the window, smoking and laughing in the arbor shade with another man Navarro couldn’t see. Tom smelled the rich aroma of their cigarettes. He took a deep breath, yearning for one himself.

He lay back against the pillow and stared at the ceiling, trying to remember what had put him here. Then he became aware again of the tight wrap around his head. He lifted his hands to it, felt the gauze strips.

It all came back to him at once, like a half-remembered dream: Karla, the Apaches, Dallas, and Charlie. There was something unreal about the memory. The sun streaming through the windows was too bright, the sky too brassy blue. The world seemed too calm and orderly, for him to have lost not only Karla, but two of his best friends, as well.

Knowing it hadn’t been a dream did nothing to quell the dreamlike quality. At the same time, his heart squeezed with sorrow.

Karla, Dallas, Charlie . . .

“You still kickin’, Mr. Navarro?” The voice came from across the room.

Tom switched his gaze to a man stretched out on a cot on the opposite side of the aisle and two cots down on the left. His vision was still blurred. He blinked hard to clear it, until the round young face swam into focus beneath a bandage like Navarro’s.

The man’s right leg was in a cast and drawn up by wires and pulleys to an iron bar hanging over the end of the man’s bed. The man’s right arm was in a cast, as well, and looped through a sling around his neck.

“Ward?”

The captain offered a wan smile.

“Figured you dead, too,” Navarro said.

The captain lifted a shoulder. His arms were crossed behind his head. His smooth sunburned cheeks were freshly shaved. “You’re at Fort Huachuca.”

“How long I . . . we been here?”

“Three days.”

“Goddamn.”

“This young man saved your life, Mr. Navarro.”

Tom turned to see one of the two men who’d been speaking near the outside door now moving toward him down the center of the room. Fortyish, thick red hair carelessly parted. Beard and mustache. He wore a black tie and a white jacket with captain’s bars, and a stethoscope around his neck. He held a clipboard in one hand, a gnarled quirley in the other. The cuffs of his baggy wool trousers dragged on the floor.

The medico halted near Navarro’s cot. “With a broken arm and leg, he crawled a mile to the main trail, and lay there for three hours, until a patrol happened by. He directed the soldiers to you.”

“Much obliged,” Navarro said to Ward. “Soldiers go up the mountain?”

“Found only a bunch of dead Apaches,” Ward said. “Scalped, left to rot in the sun—even Nan-dash.”

“No girl?”

“No girl.”

“Scalp hunters,” Navarro said, remembering how the Indians had suddenly seemed distracted when he, Karla, and the others were trying to get away. His brain working sluggishly, he thought it over. The soldiers hadn’t found Karla’s body, which meant she’d either escaped on her own, maybe down another side of the mountain, or the scalp hunters had nabbed her. If they’d nabbed her, where had they taken her? Why?

They must’ve been the bunch the late Cheatam and Gomez had been riding to meet. If only Tom had probed the horse thieves a little deeper, found out where they were selling the scalps. Probably the same place they were taking Karla . . .

Tom, suddenly realizing the medico was talking to him, looked up at the potbellied, stoop-shouldered man.

“I’m Dr. Sullivan, post surgeon,” the man repeated louder and more slowly, as though talking to a dim-wit. “How are you feeling?”

“I got a helluva headache, my lower leg feels bee-stung, I’m hungry, and I have to piss like a plowhorse. Other than that, I think I’m ready to ride.”

Chuckles echoed off the adobe walls. Navarro glanced around the room. Two of the other three patients regarded him from their cots, grinning. The two soldiers who’d been talking outside now stood shoulder to shoulder at an open window, grinning at him.

“Your reputation precedes you, Mr. Navarro,” the doctor said, jerking his head around to indicate the onlookers. “You’re legendary. I had to post a guard on the building to keep the enlisted men from strolling through to get a peek at the famous—” He frowned thoughtfully. “What do they call you?”

“ ‘Taos Tommy’ Navarro,” said one of the near-toothless men peering through the window, with a jubilant air.

“Famed Injun tracker and gunslick,” Ward added with a pensive smile. “I must be the only soldier in the Territory that hadn’t heard of you.”

Embarrassed by the foofaraw, Navarro returned his gaze to the doctor. “When can I get out of here?”

“You have a fractured skull,” the doctor said. “For that alone, I recommend bedrest for the next two weeks. The bullet that plowed through your leg missed the bone, but I’m going to need to keep draining it to avoid infection.”

“Shit!” Navarro brought his right fist down against his cot, then winced against the searing pain in his skull. If Karla was still alive in three weeks, would he be able to find her? The tracks the scalp hunters had made leaving Gray Rock would have long since disappeared.

He looked at the doctor, who was drawing deep on his quirley stub. “I need to talk to the post commander pronto.”

No sooner had the words left his mouth than heavy footsteps pounded the floorboards. Looking around the doctor, Navarro saw a tall heavyset man enter the infirmary, doffing a big tan hat with half the brim pinned to the crown.

“I ain’t used to takin’ orders from civilians,” the man said in a deep, burly voice echoing around the narrow room. “But you’re in luck, Tom. I came just to get a look at ye with your eyes open.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Navarro said as the big man approached. He was nearly as tall as Navarro’s six-three, but his torso was round as a whiskey keg, his double chin wobbled around on his neck, and he had half as much hair as when Tom had seen him last. “Phil Bryson?”

“Don’t look so damn surprised. Since they weren’t promoting you rebels, I was bound to make major eventually.”

Bryson held out his hand, and Navarro shook it, remembering a Lieutenant Bryson, tall and gallant, with muttonchop whiskers and a full head of hair. He’d been a junior officer most of the years Navarro had scouted off and on out of Forts Apache and Bowie. A hereditary addiction to alcohol—his father had died with a liver the size of a boar’s head—had kept Bryson at the rank he’d assumed upon graduation from West Point, but despite his off-duty predilection for spiritous liquids, he’d been one of the most levelheaded officers Navarro had known. His lack of ego and his gallows humor had made him a favorite among the enlisted men and the noncoms, and a sport to carouse with.

Smelling the liquor rolling off the man now, and seeing the syphilitic white around his eyes and mouth, Navarro knew that Bryson’s promotion had probably been less the result of the soldier’s change of character than of the Army’s lowered standards. Too many officers had simply died in the field, and as Bryson had said, the War Department Act of 1866 excluded ex-Confederates from holding commissions.

“Couldn’t have happened to a better man,” Navarro said, as Bryson pulled a Windsor chair out from the wall. The doctor had crossed the aisle to check on Ward.

“Ah, bullshit,” Bryson said, the chair squawking as he lowered his considerable girth to it. “You and I both know they promoted me because they’re short-handed, but what do I care? I’m gettin’ on in years, they make the pillows softer for majors, and I get first pick at the new batches of whiskey and whores from Las Cruces. Hell with ’em if they can’t take a joke.” Plucking two stogies from inside his tunic and glancing at the doctor, he said, “Doc, can he have a cigar?”

“No,” Sullivan said curtly as he unwrapped the bandage around Ward’s head.

Bryson extended the two cigars to Navarro, who took one and bit off the end. “What in the hell were you doin’ atop Gray Rock, anyway? Thought you gave up chasin’ ’Paches.”

“I was looking for a girl,” Navarro said as Bryson lit Tom’s cigar. Puffing smoke, the match flame leaping as he drew, Navarro said, “Daughter of the rancher I ride for. Nan-dash had her. Now the scalp hunters have her.” He raised his eyes to Bryson. “I’d appreciate your help, Phil.”

When Navarro’s cigar was lit, the major dropped the match on the floor and stomped it out with his boot. “No chance, Tommy,” he said regretfully, reaching for another match.

“What are you talkin’ about? You’re out here to protect civilians, aren’t you?”

“From Apaches. At the moment, I’m stretched too thin to go after scalp hunters and slave traders.”

“Slave traders?”

“If the men who have your girl are who I think they are, they’re led by Edgar Bontemps. Scalp hunter and slave trader. Ex-Army man. He and his men—mostly deserters like himself—hole up somewhere in Mexico. They raid up here for Apache scalps and young Yanqui women.”

“Where do they take the women?”

Bryson scowled and puffed his cigar. “I’ve followed him as far as the border. Had to stop there. You know as well as I do that going any farther might be viewed as an act of war by the Mexicans, with whom our government has a very precarious relationship.”

“So what you’re telling me, then, Phil, is that nothing’s being done about the slave trading.”

“Even if I had the men, I couldn’t track Bontemps into Mexico, Tommy.”

“So lay for him on this side of the border.” Navarro’s voice rose tightly. “Capture the son of a bitch and force him to tell you what he’s done with the girls!”

“I told you, I’m stretched too thin. Half my men patrol the mining country east and west of here, rounding up reservation-jumping Mescaleros and Chiricahuas when they can find them, and the others ride shotgun on ore shipments.”

“Ore shipments?”

“There’s an American- and British-owned gold mine in Sonora. The company has a special agreement with the Sonoran province. The rurales escort the bars to the border. My troops take it from there, have it smelted, then haul the bars to the federal shipping depot in Lordsburg. Ties up twenty men, a full third of my garrison, fourteen days out of every month. With the others out on patrols, I don’t have enough men for latrine duty. The privies can get mighty smelly around here.”

“Goddamn it, Phil.” Drawing angrily on the cigar, Navarro lay back on the pillow and stared hard at the ceiling.

“You know how it is, Tom,” Bryson said, struggling up from his chair, breathing hard. “You know how it’s always been. We do the best we can with a smattering of green recruits. But, frankly, I’m not sure a full battalion of seasoned fighters backed up with Howitzers and a brace of Injun trackers could do anything for your girl.” He squeezed Navarro’s shoulder. “You rest. I’ll check on you again tomorrow.”

With that, Bryson turned and, boots thumping and creaking across the rough puncheons, headed for the door.

“Who’s this Edgar Bontemps?” Tom asked.

Bryson turned, frowning. “Why?”

Navarro turned his head on the pillow, cigar in his teeth, and stared at Bryson.

The major sighed. “Ex-Confederate guerrilla. Rode with Mosby. After the War, he joined the frontier Army, came west to fight the Indians. Decided he didn’t like galvanization, after all, so he deserted, took several other ex-Confederates with him, and began riding the owlhoot trail.”

The major returned Navarro’s dark stare and growled with an air of warning, “He’s a killer, Tommy. Worse than the worst Apache, they say. Crazier than a tree full of owls. He’s armed with stolen Army munitions, and his gang numbers in the twenties, sometimes thirties.”

Navarro turned back to the ceiling, folded his arms behind his head, and thoughtfully turned the cigar in his mouth with his tongue.

“Doubtful even ‘Taos Tommy’ Navarro can bring this one down,” Bryson warned. He turned and went out.

Navarro puffed the cigar. “We’ll see.”