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The bluff was about ten feet high. When Mariella reached the top, she flattened on the surface and reached a hand down toward Gabriel. He realized she wanted him to toss the gun up to her. He did so, carefully. If it fell and discharged, the shot would bring Esparza’s men on the run.

Mariella caught the revolver’s barrel, and the ease with which she turned the Peacemaker around and wrapped her fingers around the walnut grips told Gabriel she had handled a gun before. While she covered him, he grabbed the vines and scrambled up the rock face.

He stretched out next to her and they waited. What they did next would depend on how many men were searching for them.

After a few more minutes of crashing through the brush, two men pushed their way into view. Each was carrying a rifle. Gabriel had held a slim hope that the searchers might turn out to be Escalante’s men, but he didn’t waste time being disappointed. He and Mariella held their breath as the men moved past beneath them.

Mariella still had the Colt. They would be a lot better armed, Gabriel reflected, if they could get their hands on those rifles. He tried to communicate by gestures what he planned to do, and was satisfied that Mariella understood. He also pointed to the gun and shook his head, so she’d know not to fire unless it was absolutely necessary.

Silently, Gabriel came up on his hands and knees and then pushed into a crouch at the edge of the bluff. Neither of the men had glanced in this direction yet, but they started to look up just as Gabriel launched himself off the bluff. One man had time to yell, but the shout was cut off as Gabriel crashed into him feetfirst.

Both of the men were bowled over by the impact, the first one knocking over the second. Gabriel landed beside them. One of the men had lost his rifle, but the other had held onto his weapon and tried to swing the barrel toward Gabriel. He grabbed it and twisted it aside, wrenching as hard as he could. The man’s finger, caught in the trigger guard, broke with a sharp snap. He opened his mouth to scream, but Gabriel drove the rifle butt into his face before he could. He collapsed—unconscious or dead, Gabriel didn’t know which.

That took care of one of them, but the other chose this moment to tackle Gabriel. They rolled on the ground as they struggled, smacking forcefully into the bole of one tree after another and getting whipped in the face by the underbrush. Esparza’s man wound up on top, reached back, and slugged Gabriel hard with a right cross to the jaw, then another. Rearing up, the man pulled a machete from a sheath at his waist. The blade hung in the air, poised to come sweeping down in a blow that would chop Gabriel’s head cleanly from his body.

Chapter 18

He threw up his hands to block the other man’s swing, but as he did so, Gabriel heard a whistling sound in the air. Something wrapped around the would-be killer’s hand before the machete could fall, jerking the man’s arm backward as he grunted in surprise. A rustle of leaves, the flicker of sunlight on a blade…

And Gabriel saw the man’s head topple from his shoulders to bounce once and roll a couple of feet away. His expression was still surprised, not pained. There hadn’t been time for that.

The headless corpse swayed on top of him. Gabriel shoved it away. As the body thudded to the ground beside him, Gabriel looked up into the craggy, grinning face of Paco Escalante. The machete in the bandit leader’s hand had cut through the man’s neck so cleanly and swiftly there was hardly a smear of blood on the blade.

“It appears we found you just in time, Gabriel,” Escalante said as he reached down to take Gabriel’s hand and help him to his feet. “Heads must roll, eh?”

Gabriel wiped the back of a hand across his mouth and then nodded. That was about as close a call as he could remember. “Yeah. I appreciate it, Paco. You, too, Tomás,” he added with another nod to the burly bandit who was unwrapping his bullwhip from the wrist of the dead man.

Gabriel looked around. Escalante and Tomás appeared to be alone.

“Is Cierra…?” he asked.

“I’m up here, Gabriel,” she called from the top of the bluff. Relief flooded through him at the sound of her voice. He looked up and saw Cierra standing next to Mariella.

Gabriel turned his attention back to Escalante. “And the rest of your men?”

The bandit leader’s face became grim. “Perhaps some of them on the other side of the river got away. I do not know. But of the ones on this side, we are all that is left.”

“I’m sorry, Paco,” Gabriel said, and meant it. The men had been bandits, had probably been responsible for a great deal of death and suffering over the years. But he wouldn’t be here without their help, and neither would Cierra or Mariella.

“When you live a life such as ours,” Escalante said, “you don’t expect to die in bed with your great-grandchildren around you. At least we accounted for quite a few of them, too. Unfortunately, there were just too many. And they had those devil guns.”

“They have more than one machine gun?”

Escalante nodded. “There was one mounted on each of the three trucks.”

“Podnemovitch came armed for bear.”

“Podnemovitch?” Escalante repeated with a frown.

“The big, broken-nosed son of a bitch who’s in charge of that bunch. Tell me he was one of the ones you took down.”

Escalante shook his head as Cierra and Mariella began climbing down the vines from the top of the bluff. “He lives,” Escalante said. “But he is not the man in charge. I saw him taking orders from another man. Tall, lean, gray hair.”

“Esparza’s with him,” Cierra said as she reached the ground beside them. “I saw him, too, Gabriel.”

“Really? Esparza himself?” Gabriel said. “I wouldn’t have expected him to come down here. It’s pretty far from the world of mansions and cocktail parties.”

“That tells us how important this is to him,” Cierra said.

“Of course it’s important,” Mariella said. “I assure you it’s the most important secret in the world. Any man would come in person to see it. Any man.”

Gabriel ached to find out more about this important secret, starting with just what it was, but with Podnemovitch and the rest of Esparza’s men searching both sides of the river for them, there was no time to stand around and talk. Instead the five of them began working their way through the jungle away from the stream. When they reached a jutting shoulder of the mountain that formed the eastern side of the canyon, Mariella took the lead.

“I know every trail and hiding place in these mountains,” she said. “We must reach Cuchatlán before Esparza and his men, so that we can warn my people.”

It took what was left of the morning to reach a safe place where they could briefly rest. Mariella led them to a pass high on the mountain and then down the far side into an even narrower canyon. Empty stomachs began to remind them that it had been a long time since any of them had eaten. They had taken the two rifles carried by Podnemovitch’s men with them and had several weapons of their own, but they couldn’t risk any shots to bring down game because of the noise. A swift throw of Tomás’s machete caught a brightly plumaged bird in mid flight, though. In a matter of minutes he had dressed out the bird and had it roasting on a sharpened stick over a small fire.

There wasn’t much meat to the bird and it didn’t taste particularly good, but Gabriel ate hungrily anyway as he hunkered on his heels along with the others. In this wild setting, they might well have been members of some prehistoric tribe…except for the rifles and pistols, of course. He and Cierra had cell phones, too, for all the good they did. No signal reached into these remote mountains, and Gabriel’s phone probably hadn’t survived its dunking in the Black River. He didn’t bother digging it out to check.