Ralph Compton Navarro

Chapter 23

Tom hadn’t spotted Karla on his first glance around the room, because she was dressed in a low-cut, impossibly short yellow satin dress, with black net stockings and purple high-heeled shoes. She wore three purple feathers in her upswept hair and a black choker around her neck.

She sat with three Mexicans on a couch beneath a staircase angling down from the second story. One of the Mexicans had his hand in her dress. Karla gazed off into space, glassy-eyed, as though drugged, quirking a vacant smile when the Mexican whispered in her ear.

The other two Mexicans sat with their high-crowned hats in their laps, feet on the floor, grinning stupidly as they watched the other man’s hands rummaging around in Karla’s dress.

Karla’s indolent gaze slid toward Navarro. He turned away abruptly, hoping she wouldn’t recognize him and call out. His back to the girl, he said softly to Hawkins, managing a smile, as though he were quite taken with the place and thoroughly enjoying himself, “Let’s sit.”

Most of the tables in the place were occupied, but Tom and Hawkins found a small one against the left wall, before a stained-glass window depicting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The men sat down across from each other. It wasn’t long before a pretty Mexican in a dress similar to Karla’s wandered up and took their orders.

This girl’s eyes were not glazed. She appeared to be one of the few willing girls in the room. Most of the half dozen others, sitting on knees or laps or surrounded by admiring miners or rurales in their stitched whipcord slacks and boots, were stoned on something stronger than alcohol.

“That’s your girl over there, ain’t it?” Hawkins asked.

“Any sign of Billie?”

“At the table by the bar. The little hazel-eyed girl sitting on that dandy’s knee.”

Tom swung a glance to the girl with the elfin face sitting on the knee of a fat-faced, blond-mustachioed gent in a panama suit and a planter’s hat. He was playing five-card stud with four other men, lesser lights allowed well-oiled Colts and Remingtons on their hips.

The four wore the white shirts, whipcord trousers, silver-tooled belts, and hats of the border buscadero. Probably body guards. The man in the silk suit was rambling on in an exaggerated British accent while taking frequent sips of sangria from a cut-glass glass decanter and puffing on what appeared from this distance to be a genuine Cuban cigar.

Navarro felt that lightness in the fingers he felt on the rare occasion he wanted to shoot someone. He wanted to shoot this bastard in both arms, both legs, and his belly. . . . Let him die slow. . . .

“Tom, you’re staring,” Hawkins said, smiling across the table at him. “Have some beer.” He raised his mug and sipped, keeping his eyes on Navarro.

“Ettinger?” Tom said.

“I would imagine. I’m glad they took our guns. If I had mine, I’d kill that son of a bitch and probably get Billie and us killed in the process.”

Tom flicked another glance at Ettinger, then quickly raked his eyes across the room. Several men had left, several more had entered, and a beer keg- sized Mex in a red straw sombero had started pounding away on a piano near the confession booth, which had a padlock on its door.

Hawkins took a long pull off his beer, licked the foam from his mustache. He shook his head as he set the beer back down in the ring the glass had left on the table. “This doesn’t look good.”

When Navarro didn’t say anything, Mordecai said, “Tom, I don’t like that look in your eyes. Last time I seen that look in a friend’s eyes, I woke up in a basement jail in Deadwood. . . .”

Navarro tempered the steely determined glint in his gray eyes with a festive quirk of his lips, showing the pearly tips of his teeth. He’d turned in his chair to face the room, his right boot resting on his left knee. Just a drifting horse seller or buyer enjoying the way the church had been redecorated and maybe thinking of counting out some change for a whore.

He had to raise his voice to be heard above the piano. “I thought when we first walked in here without our hardware that this was gonna have to be a scouting mission only.”

“And now . . . ?”

“Now I’m thinkin’ tonight’s as good as any to make our move. Both girls are here in the room with us. It ain’t gonna be any easier to get in or out, and the more time we have to think about it, the more time we have to knot it up.”

Sweat ran in rivulets down Hawkins’ face. “Shit, we don’t even have our guns.”

“Those men over there have hoglegs,” Navarro said, sliding his eyes to the border bucks at Ettinger’s table.

“You’re talkin’ suicide now, my friend.”

“Their tonsils are pretty well oiled.”

“What about the guards outside?”

“They’re up to you, after you’ve fetched Louise and the horses.”

When Tom laid out his plan, which wasn’t really much of a plan, Hawkins finished his beer and looked over the table at him. “You think we can pull it off?”

“I came down here for that girl over there. I ain’t leavin’ without her.”

“I’m thinkin’ the smarter choice might be to head home and report this wasps’ nest to the territorial governor and, hell, to good ole Rutherford B. Hayes himself. The feds won’t have any choice but to take action against Ettinger’s company when they hear what he’s pullin’ down here.”

“Yeah, they’ll close down the mine and free the girls, but how long do you think it’ll be before we see ’em again? And is there any guarantee they’ll still be alive?”

“You’ll grab both girls?”

Navarro nodded.

“What about the others?”

“We’ll have to settle for freeing our girls, and let the so-called authorities free the rest.”

“If we get the girls outta here, Ettinger’s men are gonna be after us like possums after persimmons.”

“Hope the horses are well-rested.”

Hawkins regarded Tom soberly, lifted the mug again to his mouth. Realizing he’d already finished the beer, he set the mug back on the table, stood, and stretched, as though he’d had enough fun for one evening and it was time to locate a mattress sack.

“Good night, amigo.”

Tom watched the bandy-legged old hide hunter saunter through the handful of men dancing with a couple of drugged-looking Mexican girls and the one white girl who seemed to be enjoying her job. Hawkins strode through the double doors and disappeared into the night.

With occasional glances at Karla, who had now been forced to sit on the lap of one of the other miners, Tom finished his beer, ground his teeth, and rubbed his gun hand on his thigh.

He had another twenty minutes before Hawkins and Mrs. Talon would show with the horses. He ordered another beer, and when one of the bright-eyed Mexican whores came around, smiling coquettishly, he pulled the girl onto his knee. He made a show of being interested, running his hands down her bare thighs and nuzzling her neck, keeping one eye on the room.

The girl’s attention was drawn to the front door, her expression turning suddenly sour. Following her gaze, Navarro saw Edgar Bontemps and a tall Mexican enter the “church.” Bontemps wore his dusty trail garb, ratty wool poncho, and torn moccasins, with a brace of .45s on his hips.

The tall Mexican wore the braid-encrusted sombrero and stitched boots of a rurale officer, probably a captain or a major, judging by the quality of his clothes. His jet-black mustache was carefully waxed and upswept to frame his pitted nostrils. The two big Dragoons on his pistol belt were pearl-butted and custom-engraved; the sawed-off shotgun hanging down his back was silver-plated, the stock inlaid with colored glass. Over a white silk shirt he wore a short charro-style jacket of gray-green brocade.

He and Bontemps shouldered through the crowd to Ettinger’s table. Ettinger stood, smiling broadly and shaking the rurale’s hand, as if he couldn’t be happier to see the man.

As Ettinger and the rurale conversed standing up, Bontemps tapped the shoulder of one of the buscaderos, who reluctantly set his cards down, stood, and strolled up to the bar. Grinning, the slaver adjusted his pistols, doffed his bowler, and sat down, taking over the bodyguard’s hand.

A minute later, Ettinger and the rurale walked away from the gambling table. Tom’s heart started beating irregularly when the two men stopped at the couch where Karla sat with the three Mexican miners. Ettinger lifted her chin, giving the rurale a look at her face. The rurale nodded and grinned.

Smiling like a proud horse trader, Ettinger pulled Karla off the miner’s lap. The rurale held his arm out formally. Karla looped her own arm through his, and the man led her through the crowd toward the stairs at the room’s rear.

Behind them, Bontemps grinned and, cupping a hand to his mouth, told the man to enjoy himself and that he’d have a bottle of his best mescal sent to his room.

Navarro watched the rurale and Karla disappear up the staircase. His ire must have been written on his face, because the Mexican dove had stopped squirming. Regarding him cautiously, she stood, muttering under her breath, then sidled off to be swept away by a knob-nosed, bull-necked miner in a cloth cap and denim jacket.

Standing, Navarro manufactured a neutral expression, and strode toward the right end of the bar at the front of the church. Tending the altar bar was a fat, middle-aged brunette in a silly pink dress with white ruffles, and a tall, sallow-faced American gent with pomaded hair and a stained green shirt buttoned to his throat. As the woman drew beers, sloshed liquor into shot glasses, and swept change from the bar with her pudgy white hands, she kept up a running harangue against the sallow-faced gent’s inability to move faster “than an April calf in a mud creek.”

Angrily, she turned to Navarro and shrieked, “Name your poison—I ain’t got all night!”

When Navarro’s tequila shot was plunked down before him on the plank bar winging out from the altar, he watched the woman bustle away to fill another order. He tossed back the shot, slid his eyes right and left. Sure no one was watching him, he took three steps straight back and crouched at the foot of the stairs. Turning and staying below the wainscoted railing shielding him from the rest of the room, gritting his teeth as he hoped against hope no one had seen his crazy move, he crawled on hands and knees to the top.

As he gained the shag runner in the second-floor hall, he took a deep breath and stood. Hearing the near-deafening roar from below—the piano player was banging out a rousing Mexican festival tune while others clapped and stomped to the beat—he moved quickly along the hall lit with a wavering umber glow.

Several doors were open, revealing empty, tidy rooms. Through several others he heard heated murmurs and squeaking bedsprings, the soft thuds of a headboard hitting the wall.

Navarro had no idea which room Karla and the rurale were in. He began sweating in earnest, his chest squeezing, when he heard the deep rumble of Spanish-uttered curses. Karla groaned a protest.

Navarro reached for the doorknob. Locked. Taking two steps back, he whipped his right boot back, then forward, connecting soundly with the door. It snapped wide, slammed against the wall. On the bed before him, the naked rurale lay sprawled atop Karla, who was still dressed, her gown pulled down around her waist. The rurale was on his knees, tying Karla’s wrists to the bedframe with his pistol belt.

The man had just whipped his head toward Navarro when, bolting forward, Tom punched him soundly across the jaw. Several bones in the man’s face broke with a dull crack. With a clipped scream, he flew off the other side of the bed.

Tom grabbed one of the big Dragoons from the man’s pistol belt, leapt upon the bed, and plucked a pillow from beside Karla. He stepped off the bed, knelt over the groaning rurale, and slapped the pillow over the man’s face. He cocked the Dragoon, jammed the barrel into the pillow, and fired one belching round. Black smoke wafted, and feathers flew.

The rurale’s arms fell to the floor, and his body relaxed.

Leaving the smoking pillow over the man’s head, Navarro leapt onto the bed, and untangled the pistol belt from the headboard, freeing Karla’s wrists.

Pulling her dress up, she stared groggily at him, tears veiling her eyes. “Tommy?”

“I’m gettin’ you outta here, kid.” Navarro shook her harshly. “Can you follow me, run when I tell you?”

She blinked and nodded, tears flowing over her eyes and down her pale cheeks.

Navarro grabbed the rurale’s double-barreled shotgun off the dresser, broke it open to make sure it was loaded, snapped it closed, and looped the lanyard over his neck and right shoulder.

He grabbed the second Dragoon from the pistol belt, shoved both behind his waistband, and pulled Karla off the bed.

“Let’s go!”