THE PLAT WHERE the settlement had been was akin to a darkened lake that night. Father and son crouched on elbows. Men appeared in slow and hunched silence from the foothills. The father rose three fingers and the son agreed.
They approached low behind their guns, totally unaware their souls might well be swallowed up. A wind sprang from nowhere and sent dust across the broken terrain. The father whispered to the son, "How well do you hear?"
"Why?"
The father touched his ear and held up one finger and pointed toward the rocks beyond the meeting house. The son understood.
"I'll give that one a hello for you." Then Rawbone snaked up the ravine from where they lay in wait till there was only the faint movement of loose shale where he had just been.
John Lourdes now stayed rigid against the earth. He had never killed before and this would be something else altogether. Those figures of the night reached the adobe foundations. They must not be thought of as men. They are just vestments really. Blackish shapes there to extinguish life. They started their slow and deadly trek up that once-upon-atime street. The night had not grown colder, yet John Lourdes was shivering. The wind moved through his clothes like the ghost of something insidious and horrible.
These men will kill without so much as a reckoning. They will fire down till you're not even one whittled breath. One of the men put out a hand for the others to stop. He took a few cautious steps forward and John Lourdes recognized the bowed and partly lame stride as belonging to the gent at the roadhouse with the stiff mustache and cheery smile. He had seen something. John Lourdes hoped it was the bedrolls laid out like sleeping men within the meeting house walls.
They moved ahead again with the steady assurance of those who had imperiled men before. He watched their stalk play out like a ritual. There was a stark grace to their configured tactics, a calm John Lourdes did not possess.
The meeting house stood against the night sky. Its hollowed windows and huge gaping frame that once housed double doors the epitome of emptiness.
John Lourdes scanned that rutted wash where Rawbone had gone. He listened with dire intensity, but there was only the wind through dry brush like flintstrikings. A vein in his temple pulsed vengefully.
When they reached the meeting house door the men fanned out. They pressed in close to the adobe wall and near blended away. The one from the roadhouse raised a hand to make ready and as he did John Lourdes also reached out his hand where it hovered in dead space just above a detonator. He could feel the hand trembling all the way up into the sinew of his neck.
Even though John Lourdes was waiting and ready, their charge into the hollows happened so fast he froze. The walls flashed with the thunder light of their weapons. Arterials of smoke and powdered cloth leapt from the bedrolls. But there was not a cry, not a breath of movement that declared life was being taken.
The bedrolls lay there like the lifeless bait they were. The men understood immediately and scattered. It was only then, at the last, before all advantage had been lost, that John Lourdes found himself. With the flat of his hand he drove down the plunger.
ELEVEN
There was a momentary harnessing of raw power. The front of the building was torn asunder and disappeared in an avalanche of smoke. The concussion echoed far out into the hills. The men were flung like paltry cloth dolls and from the sky a storm of adobe and rock hailed across that plat.
John Lourdes rose now with his rifle ready and started into that smoky destruction, when far to his right there came the rapid action of an automatic. He came about and knelt, the rifle anchored up on his shoulder. Through the settling dust came a man running. He held his back and was calling in desperation to his friends. He stumbled and his boots dragged up a rising trail of dust. He collapsed to his knees and that is where Rawbone ran him down. He came out of the dark leaping from the rocks and put two more shots into the sagging body, which lurched forward at the last.
He sprinted past the son, yelling, "Make sure they're all dead!" He kept on through the haze. "I'll take it to the road and introduce myself to any fool they might have left with the horses."
John Lourdes walked the destruction. It was otherworldly. He could not fathom truly being there. The smell of charred clothes and flesh tainted the air and he worried it might poison him in some unknown way. He came upon the first, who lay on his side. There was nothing below the upper lip but a bloody shirt collar. Then he noted what he thought to be an odd necklace dangling down the man's face before he realized it was an eye loosed of its socket and hanging by a long thread of muscle.
The next man lay on his stomach. John Lourdes knelt and eased the body over. The dark and lifeless face he came to see belonged to the man who'd faced him down in Juarez, the father of the girl Teresa. He stood. He stared down at this stranger on the other side of death. Questions abounded.
Pilings of wood on the meeting house floor had caught fire. The air was singed with windblown ash. John Lourdes had to cover his face as he turned toward the last man, the one from the roadhouse.
He sat against a backdrop of adobe and rotted timber beams. He was not dead, though he should have been as the shape of his head was hideously altered.
From up the cart path came a headway of trampling hooves. Riderless mounts plunged headlong from the shadows hounded by gunshots and the gritty musculature of a motorcycle engine. Rawbone had herded up the horses. He yelled out as he wheeled in the motorcycle, "There was a last one down by the main road."
Cinders from the fire were now a burning rain everywhere and Rawbone took to using his derby to swipe them from his eyes as he joined up with John Lourdes. "We better board up and be on with it. If any of these sparks find their way to-"
The man from the roadhouse sat staring up at them. The father squatted. The man was gibbering away, yet there looked to be in his eyes a degree of consciousness and understanding. In his hand was the flashlight. Rawbone slipped it loose. He switched on the light and put it to the man's face. It mooned out of the dark. Blood seeped from a crack in the skull along the forehead. A bit of brain matter protruded from the wound, looking like the marbled head of a snail.
"He's leaking oil, Mr. Lourdes."
Rawbone stood.
"It's your watch, Mr. Lourdes."
The son understood. It was either finish him or forget him, as he was for the wolves. The father waited. He held his derby against the onslaught of scorched ash and heat.
"The fire, Mr. Lourdes. One spark could send us off."
He saw something pass over John Lourdes's face. A brief moment of the soul perhaps, of what had to be. It was not a look of indecision, but rather something more reflective of true human reluctance, or even a tragic pity. It mattered none. Rawbone had no place for either and hated each equally. He reached for his belted automatic, but John Lourdes grabbed his wrist and restrained him. Now, the father prided himself on strong arms, all the more so for a man his size, and he felt in the son's grip the same pure hard strength.
"Strip each body of everything in their pockets," said John Lourdes. "Wallets, any scrap of paper. Leave nothing. Collect it for me. Saddlebags too."
"Mr. Lourdes ..."
The son ordered him again in no uncertain terms and the father walked off. "Why don't I do that, Mr. Lourdes. That'll give you some time to negotiate the matter at hand with your conscience."
A moment later there was a gunshot that caused the horses to startle and scatter. The father turned. The impact had driven the man to the earth, where charred cinders blew over him. With a streak of pure mean Rawbone mocked what the dead man had said down at the roadhouse. "The way I see you by that truck, looking off to the hills ... you're a real climber, son."