“We have food and supplies, and we don’t have any quarrel with you,” he said. “Take what we have and let us go, and there won’t be any trouble.”
“Trouble?” the leader repeated. “We’re not going to have any trouble. And you’re not going anywhere, gringo. Neither is that beautiful wife of yours…if she really is your wife.”
“Do you know Paco Escalante?” Cierra suddenly asked.
That brought frowns of surprise to the faces of the bandits. “What have you to do with Paco Escalante?” the leader said.
Cierra gave a defiant toss of her head. “Bring me to him, and find out for yourself.”
Several of the men crowded around, and they spoke in low, fast tones that Gabriel couldn’t make out. He leaned closer to Cierra and whispered out the side of his mouth, “Who’s Paco Escalante?”
“The man who murdered my parents,” she replied through gritted teeth.
“Oh.” Gabriel nodded. “I was hoping maybe he was a friend of yours.”
The leader of the bandits stepped forward. “Escalante means nothing. He is an old man. These mountains belong to us now, and we take what we want and do what we please.” The rifle barrel centered itself on Gabriel’s forehead. “And what I want is to kill you and take your woman, gringo.”
In his anger, the bandit had come too close. Gabriel’s hand shot out and grabbed the barrel, wrenched it aside before the man could pull the trigger. A shot blasted from the rifle, but it went harmlessly into the ground. Gabriel hauled hard on the weapon, swinging the bandit around when the man refused to let go of the rifle. It wouldn’t fire again until somebody worked the bolt and threw another round into the breech.
“Get down!” Gabriel shouted to Cierra as he gave a hard shove and sent the bandit spilling off the road and down the slope. The man yelled curses as he tumbled over and over, bouncing off rocks along the way.
But the man was able to yell, “Kill them,” the words drifting up the slope as he kept falling.
The other bandits had hesitated when they saw him fall, and that second of hesitation gave Gabriel time to pull the Colt from his waistband where the old work shirt had hidden it. He went for the men with rifles first, the old revolver roaring and bucking in his fist. One of the bandits doubled over as a .45 slug punched into his belly, and another spun around with a bullet-shattered shoulder.
Gabriel ducked behind the front of the pickup as bullets panged off of it. From the corner of his eye he saw Cierra pick up the rifle the bandit chief had lost hold of before going over the edge. She worked the bolt, and then, lying prone, she fired underneath the pickup. Gabriel heard one of the men scream and figured that Cierra’s shot had busted his ankle.
He saw her wince at the pain in her shoulder from the Springfield’s kick and roll behind the rear tires to use them for cover. Gabriel popped up and fired over the pickup’s hood. The bandits were scattering now as they realized that their intended victims were capable of putting up a fight. Another of them went down as a slug from Gabriel’s Colt tore through his thigh.
A rattle of rocks behind him warned Gabriel that the stocky, bearded leader had finally stopped his tumble down the mountainside and was climbing back up again. The shooting had drowned out the sounds of his efforts until it was almost too late. As Gabriel spun around he saw the man lunging at him, machete held high. The blade swept down in a killing stroke calculated to cleave Gabriel’s head to the shoulders when it landed.
Gabriel didn’t let it land. He fired twice at almost point blank range, the bullets smashing into the bandit’s chest and knocking him backward. He tumbled down the slope again, but probably didn’t feel the bruising impact this time since Gabriel was pretty sure both rounds had gone into the man’s heart.
“Gabriel!” Cierra cried raggedly. “The others!”
Gabriel spun around again. Only four bandits were left, but that was four too many, considering that his Colt was empty now. The men charged, firing as they came. Bullets smacked into the pickup, shattering glass and punching holes in metal.
“Throw me the rifle!” Gabriel yelled to Cierra over the racket, and she tossed it in his direction. He caught it, knowing that they were going to be overrun before he could get off more than a shot or two. He worked the bolt and came up out of his crouch, ready to fire through the broken windows of the pickup’s cab.
Instead he held his fire when he saw the four bandits twisting in mid air as bullets ripped through them. Flesh exploded and blood sprayed in the air. One after another the men flopped into the road before they could reach the pickup. Gabriel saw their bodies continue to jerk for a moment as more bullets thudded into them.
Then the shooting stopped, and as always after a battle, the silence that settled down possessed an eerie quality, as if you might hear departed souls singing their death songs if you listened hard enough.
Cierra still lay on the ground behind the rear tires, her arms crossed over her head. Slowly, as the silence descended over the mountainside, she lowered her arms and lifted her head to look around.
“Gabriel?” she said, as if amazed that they were both still alive. “What…what happened?”
“Somebody else opened fire on those bastards and finished them off,” Gabriel explained.
“But who?”
“Offhand, I’d say it was those guys,” Gabriel replied as he looked up the slope and saw that half a dozen men had emerged from behind some rocks higher up. They were as roughly dressed as the bandits had been, and if anything, their weapons looked even older and more timeworn.
But however old they might be, those rifles and pistols had worked well enough to shoot holes in the bandits who had been about to kill Gabriel and Cierra. And Gabriel was grateful for that…although he had a sneaking suspicion that their situation hadn’t improved much.
His suspicion was confirmed a second later when Cierra stood up, brushed herself off, and looked at the men coming down the slope. A horrified expression appeared on her face. “Dios mio,” she said in a husky whisper.
“You know them?” Gabriel asked.
She nodded. “The big man in the lead…that’s Paco Escalante.”
She swallowed hard and repeated what she had told Gabriel a few minutes earlier, not that he had forgotten.
“The man who murdered my parents.”
Chapter 14
Gabriel didn’t know if the bandit camp was still in Mexico or over the border in Guatemala. Not that it mattered one bit in this wild territory. Borders meant little here, and governments were far away. The only power that mattered was the power of the man next to you holding a gun. In this case, that was Paco Escalante, and what mattered was that he hadn’t ordered his men to kill them…yet.
They’d been taken, at gunpoint, to what looked like a semipermanent camp, with crude, thatch-roofed huts instead of tents. Gabriel and Cierra were stashed in one of the huts until Escalante could decide what he wanted to do with them.
“Do you think he knows who you are?” Gabriel asked.
She shook her head. “He hasn’t seen me for many years. I’ve changed enough since then that I don’t think he recognized me. He, on the other hand, hasn’t changed at all.”
Escalante was a tall, gaunt man with a salt-and-pepper beard and a mat of silvery hair. His face was weathered and lined from years of living mostly outdoors, much as Pancho Guzman’s had been. Escalante’s men were cut from similar cloth, all of them older, still plenty tough but with an air of weariness about them, as if they had been fighting the same fight for too long.
Gabriel and Cierra had been forced to climb into the back of the pickup with the supplies and ride there while one of Escalante’s men drove and another sat with them, his gun aimed casually in their direction. They left the highway, such as it was, and followed what appeared to be little more than a goat track deep into the jungle that covered the lower slopes of the mountains. Clearly the bandit knew where he was going, because even though the goat track disappeared, he found a way through the jungle and was able to keep the pickup moving.