A Morgan horse, a bay, with a BC brand on its right rump.
York smiled to himself and withdrew his .44.
He went over and glanced around front to see if any patron happened at that moment to be heading outside with a señorita in tow (or the other way around), and saw no one. He considered peeking in a front window to check on the card game, or at least establish the continued presence of Pruitt and Hoake, but decided against it.
Why risk being seen?
He started up the rough-wood stairway, taking each step slow and careful, unable to do so silently but not making a racket, anyway. He paused at the landing, helped himself to several slow breaths, in and out, in and out, then stood there taking in the stars for a mite, then went in taking only the star on his chest with him.
The hallway was narrow. Three staggered doors on either side, more yellow pueblo walls, a wooden floor that had been there forever and was still waiting to be swept.
“First door on your left,” Cesar had said.
Did he trust Cesar?
Did he have any choice?
He turned the knob and began to push through, but — though the door, as promised, had no lock — a chair was propped under its knob. York had to back up and shoulder through, aware that he’d been announced far louder than his spurs might have, and he dove in, past the chair he’d dislodged as bullets blasted over him, three shots separated only by the click of cocking, cutting through the shrill immediate female scream that filled the room like a train whistle.
York — down on the filthy floor next to an ancient iron bed, knowing a woman was in the room with Johnson and not wanting to fire blindly — aimed up and then, leaning over him, there the man was, scar through his bearded face and his lips, bare and hairy and sinewy, eyes big, teeth bared, his Colt .45 swinging down at the man on the floor.
But the man on the floor fired just once, and the bullet went in right under the scarred gunman’s nose, adding a ragged red oversized nostril just below and between the other two, and the .44 slug traveled at an angle that cut its passage through the naked man’s head and sprayed the yellow ceiling scarlet with dripping dabs of green and gray. The Colt clunked to the floor, released by unfeeling fingers, and the now blank-eyed bank robber fell back onto the bed, out of York’s sight.
She was still screaming, the live naked woman under the sheet with the dead naked man, looking at her bed mate but not wanting to, frozen but wishing she could move, as if a hole to hell had opened up before her and something in her wanted to dive in even as the rest of her wanted to flee.
This was Gabriella, and as close to Gabriel as Bill Johnson would ever get. She was young, though had just grown much older, a pretty thing with lots of bosom and a general plumpness that would have been more pleasing not flecked with red.
Already on his feet, York went to a second chair, which with a small table with basin represented the only other furnishings in the small room, and plucked a thin pink-and-white floral robe. His gun in one hand, he took the flimsy garment and held it out to her.
“Find another room up here,” he advised her. “One that isn’t being used.”
She stopped screaming, swallowed, nodded, got her limbs working, and climbed off the bed and ran out, grabbing the robe from him and flashing full, dimpled buttocks as she did.
York quickly checked the room.
On the floor, spilled from the chair that had been propped against the door, were the dead man’s clothes. Two hundred dollars, cash money, were in his Levi’s. A closet held only the girl’s red dress and white peasant blouse, plus some underthings and sandals.
He left the room, noting the three pocks in the adobe wall, holes that might have been in him. Out on the landing, in cool air under the stars again, he was about to holster his .44 when he saw them coming around from in front of the cantina, Pruitt and Hoake, their guns in hand, Colt .45s like Johnson’s. Still time for York to get holes punched in him tonight.
They were aiming up at him but by the time they started shooting, standing side by side at the foot of the outdoor steps like a two-man firing squad, he was halfway down the steps, their rounds flying over him, shattering the night but nothing else, his gun raised hip-high but aiming down. He fired four times, hitting them only twice, one each, Pruitt in the left eye and Hoake in the forehead.
Not bad, considering the frantic circumstances.
He paused two-thirds of the way down as the two men staggered on dead feet, then fell together, propping each other up for a moment, almost comically, before tumbling to the ground in an awkward embrace of lifeless arms and legs. A good deal of what had been in their heads had sprayed out the back and onto the dusty ground, like a spilled plate of cantina chow.
He stepped over them and that.
Horses were getting unhitched and patrons were getting the hell out, some on foot, as Cesar came around the corner and took in the carnage with disappointment.
“I guess I close up for the night,” he said.
“Do that,” York said, sliding the hot handgun into its home. “Then go down and wake up Perkins.”
This was the one part of town where the undertaker’s hearing was less than keen.
Cesar sighed and trundled off, swearing softly to himself in Spanish.
York looked down at the dead saddle tramps, who were staring into eternity with dumb expressions, tangled together like lovers, and felt a pang of regret. Not for killing them, or for their loss to the family of man.
No.
But he would rather have taken them into custody and seen what he could get out of them, before turning them over to a judge and, in the case of Johnson anyway, a hangman.
While he waited, he went around to the Morgan horse and checked the saddlebags. They were empty but for one thing: half-a-dozen empty pouches marked FIRST BANK OF TRINIDAD.
Bill Johnson tracked down and dead, but only two hundred to show for it.
And of all places to hide, of every place the robber might go, why double-back to Trinidad?
Chapter Six
Caleb York knew that, no matter what the dime novels might have you believe, bank robberies in the West were not an everyday thing. If anything, they were rare. A bank was usually the most solidly built structure in town, and the redbrick First Bank of Trinidad was no exception.
Like most banks in Western communities, First was right on Main Street, in the center of town. Nighttime robberies almost never happened — blasting through reinforced walls was hard, noisy work. Robbers riding up in daylight, going in with guns out, and coming back with saddlebags full of loot often faced citizens — whose financial lifeblood the robbers had just drained — with guns ready to shoot, not to mention lawmen ready to do the same.
And in the day before yesterday’s robbery, that very thing had happened — citizen Caleb York had shot and killed two of the thieves, and Sheriff Ben Wade had been in the thick of it, too. Only Wade had died, and the bandit with the greenback-stuffed saddlebags had made his escape.
The bank opened at nine A.M., but Caleb at eight-thirty knocked on the glass and was let in one of the double doors by clerk Herbert Upton, a weak-chinned, clean-shaven, bespectacled little man in a dark gray jacket, black tie, and black pants.
The single-room interior of the bank was modest in size but elaborate in appearance, fine wood, brass fittings, marble floor. All this implied wealth on the banker’s part and suggested stability and permanence for his facility... though men with guns had recently challenged that notion. The three brass-barred cashier windows were plenty for Trinidad’s needs, and the big rectangular iron safe against the back wall, by a map of the New Mexico territory, had a formidable heft.