Karla turned back to Billie standing beside her. The girl regarded her fearfully, lips trembling. Billie clutched Karla’s hand. “What are we gonna do?”
Saying nothing, Karla gently led Billie over to the fainting couch, and pulled the girl down beside her. She wrapped her arm around Billie’s shoulders, drew the girl to her breast, and held her as she sobbed.
“I don’t know,” Karla said, staring at the floor. “I’ll think of something.”
A few minutes later, several Chinese boys in dungarees and rope sandals hauled water to the four rooms occupied by the captive girls. The copper tubs were filled. Sister Mary Francis supervised the baths, letting no girl leave the tub before the death smell had been scrubbed away.
The smirking guards were allowed to watch from the open doorways.
Later, when Karla and Billie were in bed, the lock clicked. The door opened. Karla lifted her head. Five shadowy figures entered, silhouetted by the hall light behind them.
Two grabbed her and held her down. Her heart pounded; she gasped for air against her fear. Two other men grabbed Billie, who squealed against their grips.
The third man leaned over Billie. Light from the hall reflected on the syringe in his hands.
“You sons of bitches!” Karla spat.
When Billie had collapsed, the man walked around the bed to Karla. She tried to fight them, but they held her fast to the bed.
“Bastard!” she cried as the needle moved toward her.
The needle stabbed her flesh, burned as the liquid spurted into a vein. The men held her down until her muscles relaxed. Her head spun once. She had a falling sensation.
Her head hit the pillow, and everything went black.
Chapter 21
In the late afternoon, Tom Navarro descended the ridge of a deep canyon about a mile or so wide, with a creek running down the middle and sheathed by ironwood, paloverde, and desert hackberry shrubs.
It was dry country he was traversing, heading generally southeast, and he hadn’t run across a water source since early yesterday afternoon.
Near the canyon’s bottom, he found a game path. He followed the trace around several rocky scarps and cedar snags, gradually descending the slope as he headed for the cottonwoods lined out along the cutbank. Rounding a hillock and hearing water, he turned to the creek on his left.
He looked away, then turned back quickly, jerking the dun’s reins taut, his right hand dropping automatically to the butt of his .44.
He left the gun in its holster as he peered over the cutbank. In the dark water dappled with sunlight filtering through the dusty cottonwoods, just this side of a low beaver dam, stood a naked woman. A medium-height, slender woman—tanned and full-breasted, with long red hair dripping wet and falling down her shoulders. Crouching, she was scooping water over her breasts.
Tom wasn’t a man to ogle naked women he happened upon out in the wild. But he hadn’t expected to see her here, and since she was only about fifteen yards away, it was really too late to turn his horses around and disappear without being seen or heard.
He’d opened his mouth to address the woman, but before he could get any words out, she glanced up. When she saw him, her eyes snapped wide. With a shocked exclamation, she straightened, crossed her arms over her chest, and stumbled back in the water, nearly falling.
“Didn’t mean to intrude,” Navarro grumbled, throwing up his right hand and turning his eyes discreetly away. “I didn’t know—”
A gun hammer clicked.
He slanted his gaze back to the woman. She’d grabbed a pistol from the clothes and the blue-striped Indian blanket piled atop the embankment on her left, and was aiming it now at Tom while covering her chest with a red plaid shirt.
“Who are you and what in the hell do you want?”
Before Tom could answer, the woman glanced over her right shoulder and called, “Mr. Hawkins!”
When she turned back to Navarro, she raised the pistol—an octagonal-barreled Thomas .45 revolver— even higher, aimed at Tom’s head. Presently, a man appeared, jogging around a bluff on the other side of the stream. He was ten or fifteen years older than Tom. Bearded, stoop-shouldered, and bandy-legged, with a weathered hide vest over a smoke-blackened buckskin shirt, duck pants, and an ancient pistol belt. Holding a revolver up near his shoulder, he halted on the lip of the bank, frowning across the creek at Navarro.
“This man’s been watching me bathe,” the woman said. “A bandit, no doubt. Or worse.”
“Some would say worse,” Tom said, “but I didn’t see you until it was too late to do much but apologize and turn around. Since you haven’t seen fit to let me do either, why don’t you put away that blunderbuss and let me introduce myself?”
The woman’s eyes softened ever so slightly and she lowered the pistol while still keeping it aimed in Navarro’s direction.
“I’m Tom Navarro,” he said. “Segundo for the Vannorsdell Bar-V brand, northeast of Tucson.”
“Hell, I knew it was you!” said the oldster on the bank. He glanced at the woman and lowered his own revolver to his side, pointing with his other hand. “Why, that’s ‘Taos Tommy,’ the gunslick and Army tracker!”
“A gunslick?”
“It’s okay, ma’am,” the old man assured her. “He’s never been known to shoot a man in cold blood.”
Tom glanced at the oldster. “Have we met?”
“No, I don’t reckon we ever have. But I was in Taos, muleskinnin’ for a freight outfit, that day you acquired the name. Those two deputies had it comin’, though, I’ll give ye that. They’d been raisin’ hob with the locals for months and it weren’t gettin’ no better.” He paused, smiling with admiration. “Where you headed? If you don’t mind me askin’.”
“Perhaps we could continue this conversation elsewhere . . .” said the woman, sliding sarcastic glances between the two men. The light glowed crimson in her wet red hair as she hunkered low in the water and held the shirt to her chest.
“You’re welcome to join us fer coffee,” the man said. Jerking a thumb over his right shoulder, he added, “Our camp’s back here, under the cottonwoods, well hidden from both ridges, good water and grass for the horses.”
It was only about four thirty, with several hours of good light left. Tom hadn’t planned to hole up until sunset. A cup of coffee wouldn’t hurt, however. The horses were also ready for a rest. Besides, the woman was handsome, and he couldn’t help wonder what she and the codger were doing out here.
The old man said, “There’s a ford up yonder, on the other side of the dam.”
With an acknowledging grunt, Tom gigged the bay forward along the game path, the dun packhorse and the Arabian following, swishing their tails at the blackflies milling about the water. He tried to keep his eyes off the woman, but when he’d passed her still standing in the creek, he glanced back over his left shoulder.
Yes, a handsome woman, in her mid- to late-thirties, he figured. Still covering herself with the shirt and the gun, she’d quarter-turned to face him, offering as little bare flesh as possible, in water reaching only to her thighs. Flushing, Navarro turned back around.
When he’d crossed the creek and staked his horses in the grass along the bank, he walked over to the strangers’ fire and accepted a cup of coffee from the old man.
“Mordecai Hawkins is my handle.” He poured a cup of the oily, black brew for himself. “Hostler for the Butterfield station at Benson. Mrs. Talon, she runs the place.”