Navarro

Chapter 1

Stuffing a blue receipt into his shirt pocket, Tom Navarro pushed through the Tucson Mercantile’s main door and paused on the stone loading dock. The Murphy freight wagon was parked before the dock, and three Bar-V boys were loading the dry goods stacked at the dock’s lip. The sun-seared men in high-crowned, wide-brimmed hats and brightly colored bandanas sweated in the midday heat—above a hundred and five, if the rusty thermometer hanging on a porch post was right.

“Doggone, Tom,” Lou Waters complained as he handed a twenty-pound sack of cracked corn to Ky Tryon, “why’d you have to pick the very middle of the day for this back-and-belly job?”

Navarro, the Bar-V segundo, glanced at the brassy sky, dug out his makings sack, and slowly shaped a cigarette. “I thought it’d be good to sweat some o’ last night’s tarantula juice out of your blood, before you headed back to the ranch. You looked a might deep in the pain barrel this mornin’, and I know how a wagon ride over a bumpy desert trace can make you feel like that rat in your guts is pullin’ your tongue down your throat sideways. Might cause you to lose that expensive lunch I bought you.”

“Expensive?” Jorge Amado chuckled. The stocky Mexican standing in the wagon bed took a sack of cornmeal from Tryon and stowed it away with the flour, pinto beans, and coffee beans he’d already stacked neatly against the wagon’s front wall. “It was free with the beer, Senor Tom.”

“Was it? Well, hell. Next time, remind me to buy you boys a proper meal.”

“Dang, Tom, cheap as you are—” The canteen’s batwings squawked. Tryon, lifting another sack from the loading dock, glanced toward the cantina and froze.

The cantina was a flat-roofed adobe, painfully white in the unrelenting sun, with a brush roof and splintery batwings. The doors swung back and forth as a man stepped before them and stood beneath the brush arbor, staring at Navarro, thumbs hooked in his pistol belts.

He was a scrawny little hardcase with a long, horsey face, buck teeth, and a beard that hadn’t seen a barber chair in months. A straw sombrero hung down his back, and his sweat-soaked white shirt was open clear to his belt buckle. Head tilted up, he regarded Navarro with slitted eyes, as though he were sizing up a bronc for riding. Several flies buzzed around his face, attracted to the smell of spilled beer and goat cheese, no doubt, but he paid them no mind. A short-barreled Colt with worn walnut grips rode in his low-slung holster.

Behind him, several faces appeared over the batwings. The grins shuttled between the little gun-slinger and Navarro, who stood on the loading dock, casually smoking his cigarette while regarding the little man dully.

“So you’re Tommy Navarro,” the little man said. He had a high, screechy voice. “ ‘Taos Tommy’ Navarro.”

The three Bar-V drovers had stopped working. They stiffly slid their gazes between Navarro and the little hardcase. Navarro stared down at the man from under the brim of his flat-brimmed black Stetson with a snakeskin band, the brown paper quirley drooping out the right corner of his mouth.

His hard-angled face was wind-seamed and sunburned to the color of a dry-blistered cherry table. He might have passed for Mexican if not for the shell gray eyes set deep in spoked sockets and the prematurely silver hair and sideburns, trimmed weekly by the Bar-V’s German cook.

“Kid,” Navarro said, having sized the little man up for under twenty-five and the short-barreled Colt as a hand-me-down, “go back where you came from.”

The kid swaggered out from under the awning. His bleary eyes said he’d been drinking most of the morning, and the swagger added that he didn’t hold it well. “Taos Tommy Navarro,” he said in his little-dog bark. “Well, well.”

“Go home, kid.”

“They say you’re fast.”

“I ain’t gonna tell you again.”

The kid stopped abruptly and held his hand above his holster. He glanced at the Colt Navy riding high in a soft brown holster on Navarro’s right hip. “I bet you ain’t no faster’n me.”

Navarro scowled around the quirley at the other three drovers, frozen in their work positions, squinting in the brassy light. Navarro looked at the kid again, still holding his hand above his pistol, waiting, challenge in his glassy brown eyes.

He chuffed and turned, giving the kid his back and strolling over to another porch post to his right. He leaned his broad left shoulder against the post and stared northward up Main at a string of freight wagons pulled up before the livery barn.

“Get to work, boys,” the ramrod told his crew. “If we’re gonna make it back to the Bar-V before dark, we gotta start pushin’ soon.”

“Hey, I was talkin’ to you,” the kid behind him said.

Navarro did not respond. He was watching two Mexican boys running around the freight wagons, loosing invisible arrows and calling to each other in Spanish.

“Careful, Tom,” Ky Tryon said as he stiffly picked up a ten-pound keg of molasses. Slowly, he turned to hand the keg to Waters, who reached for it while eyeing the hardcase.

Navarro shrugged and continued staring at the kids and the dog, puffing his cigarette.

“Don’t turn your back on an open challenge, Taos Tommy,” the hardcase warned. “Folks gonna think you’re chicken.”

Navarro heard the clomp and spur-ching of boots on the porch steps behind him. He could smell the kid drawing close, and he’d been right about the stale beer and goat cheese, as well as chili peppers, sweat, and horse piss.

The kid stopped. “I got a bet goin’ over to the cantina yonder. Ten silver dollars says I can blow two holes in your old chest before you even clear leather. Wanna try provin’ I’m wrong?”

Navarro turned and faced the kid, his broad hat brim shading his dark face and searing gray eyes. “Kid, I got tired of drilling daylight through little punksticks like you a long time ago. Damn tired. I don’t answer the challenge anymore. Never will again. Now go back over to the cantina, buy you and your friends a round on my silver“—he flipped the kid a cartwheel, which bounced off the kid’s shoulder and hit the loading dock with a clang—“and leave me the hell alone.”

The kid’s nostrils flared. He glanced at the coin lying near his right boot. Behind him, laughter rose from the cantina.

He snapped his angry gaze to Navarro, took one step closer, narrowing the gap between them, and lifted his hand above his pistol grips. In a sneering voice, he said, “When I count to three, I’m grabbin’ iron. You suit yourself.”

The kid had just said, “Two,” when Navarro’s left hand leapt forward, grabbed the kid’s gun from its holster, and almost casually tossed it into the street. The Colt Lightning landed in the dust with a plop.

The manuever had taken less than a second.

The kid gave a startled grunt as he clawed at his holster and stumbled back, his right hand coming up empty. “H-hey!” he complained, turning to the gun gleaming up from the gray dust.

Red-faced, cheeks bunching, he returned his gaze to the segundo towering over him. Navarro grinned, his teeth showing white against his tanned skin.

“You son of a bitch!” the kid snapped.

Turning, he walked to the lip of the loading dock. Navarro extended his right boot, tripping the kid, who gave an indignant wail as he stumbled forward and fell head-first off the dock’s lip, into the finely churned dust of the street.

“Ooooh,” Jorge Amado said from the wagon bed, wincing and beetling his bushy black brows.

The kid climbed to his knees, holding his right shoulder. “My arm, damn ye . . .”

Navarro lowered his tall frame from the loading dock. The kid’s right right arm hung at an odd angle.

“Here, let me pop that back into place for you,” Navarro said. He grabbed the kid’s arm and brusquely jerked it back. With an audible crack, the ball of the arm snapped back into its socket.

“Awwww!” the kid screamed.

The kid screamed louder as Navarro grabbed both his arms and dragged him over to the stock trough on the other side of the wagon. The ramrod slammed the kid against the trough. The kid’s screams died, his eyes fluttering, his head wobbling on his shoulders as the pain, heat, and alcohol combined to make him faint.

Navarro took a handful of the kid’s hair and dunked his head in the trough, plunging it deep. He held him down for a good ten seconds, the kid thrashing his arms and legs against Navarro’s iron grip. The ramrod bore down stiff-armed, still puffing the quirley clamped in his teeth.

He pulled the kid’s head up from the stock trough. The kid took a deep, raking breath, water rolling off his face and pasting his hair against his forehead.

“How ’bout if I give you one more long drink so you can think more clearly about your future?” Navarro said.

The kid’s protesting cry turned to bubbles as the ramrod muscled the head back down in the trough, causing water to spill over the sides, making mud around the kid’s knees. Finally, Navarro jerked him out. The kid arched his back as he sucked air into his lungs, then fell forward vomiting water.

Navarro stood over him grimly, sucking the quirley down to little longer than a .44 shell. “I’ve just given you the benefit of the doubt, pip-squeak. I’ve decided you’re just another shit-brained little hot-head out lookin’ to make a name for yourself by blowin’ out my lamp. A minute ago, you didn’t know better. Now you know better. You come around me again, I’m gonna trim your wick so low you’ll never hold another spark.” Navarro stepped forward and kicked the kid’s side with the toe of his boot, throwing him onto his right shoulder with a whimpering groan. “Comprende?”

The kid coughed and finally nodded.

Navarro turned to the cantina, where three wide-eyed faces peered over the batwings. “Davis, Potter, Jurgens—get your asses out here and haul your friend back inside the saloon,” he snarled.

The three Circle-6 riders filed through the batwings, all looking sheepish, brush-scarred chaps flapping around their legs.

“Sorry, Mr. Navarro,” said the tall, long-haired blond named Potter, a flush rising beneath his tan. “We were just funnin’ the kid.”

Arnie Jurgens, whose father Navarro had scouted with out of Fort Bowie some years ago, said, “He was braggin’ all mornin’ about how fast he was. Then we seen you pull up in the wagon”—he shrugged—“and we bet him he wasn’t as fast as you.”

“Thanks for tellin’ him who I was, Arnie. ’Preciate that.”

“Sorry, Tom.”

“Take him inside and keep him there till I’m gone. Then you boys best haul your sorry tails back to the Circle-6.” He looked at the stocky young Jurgens, whose plump face was a pale oval below his gray felt sombrero. “I have a feelin’ your pa had other things for you to do in town besides goading tinhorn gunslicks into lead swaps and putting burrs in my bonnet.”

When the three had hauled the young hardcase back inside the cantina, Navarro retrieved the kid’s gun from the street and tossed it onto the porch roof. He turned to his own three men, who were regarding him grinning.

“What the hell are you boys lookin’ at?” Navarro whipped his dead quirley into the street. “You’re burnin’ daylight!”