Dillinger - Jack Higgins [26]
Dillinger knew that few men would survive a real brawl to the finish with Rojas. But that in itself was a challenge, something a man like Fallon would never be able to understand. You don't protect yourself from a bully by kissing his ass.
Dillinger leaned back in the seat, the heat of the day enfolding him, narrowing his eyes. Already the mountains were beginning to shimmer in the haze and lose definition. As they progressed higher into the sierras, they passed through the tortured land of mesas and buttes, lava beds and twisted forests of stone, a savage, sterile land that, without its gold, was no place, Dillinger thought, for a good, clean-living bank robber.
'I've got six cans of gas in the trunk,' Dillinger shouted to Rojas over the roar of the engine, 'but it won't last for ever. Where do you get gas out here?'
'You get it from me,' Rivera said. 'There is a tank at the hacienda.'
Dillinger made a mental note to get some of that spare gas secreted somewhere. He didn't want the oats for his horse in Rivera's exclusive control.
'We haven't passed another car,' Dillinger said.
'You miss the traffic back home?' Fallon said.
'The paved roads is what I miss,' Dillinger said, laughing. To Rivera he shouted, 'When's this road going to get paved?'
'When hell freezes over,' Fallon said low enough so that Rivera couldn't hear, and they both laughed.
'What are you two laughing at?' Rivera asked.
They both shrugged their shoulders at the same time. That made them laugh again, and only aggravated Rivera more. As far as he was concerned, all Americans were just grown-up children.
An hour later they came round the shoulder of a mountain and saw an immense valley, a vast golden plain, so bright with heat it hurt the eyes to look at it. At the side was a great hog's back of jagged peaks lifting into the clear air, incredibly beautiful in their savagery.
'The Devil's Spine,' Fallon said, 'is what they call it.'
'Looks more like an impregnable fortress,' Dillinger said.
'That's what it was in the old days. They say there's a ruined Aztec or Pueblo city somewhere on top.'
Then the shot rang out, its sound dying away quickly. Dillinger instinctively jammed on the brakes. Shading his eyes with both hands, he examined the landscape.
Rivera said, 'Probably a hunter.'
'Hunter my ass,' Fallon whispered.
Two Indians came over the hill riding small wiry ponies. They wore red flannel shirts and breech-clouts, almost like a uniform, their long hair held back with bands of red flannel. Both of them carried rifles in the crooks of their arms. One of them held the carcass of a small deer across his blanket saddle.
'I told you it was a hunter,' Rivera said.
'Hunting for him,' Fallon whispered.
The Indians came down the slope. Instead of reining in their ponies, they let the animals crowd the stopped car, as if getting a message across.
Dillinger started to inch the convertible forward. One of the Indians raised the barrel of his rifle slightly.
'We don't want any trouble with these now,' Rivera said, but Dillinger noticed in the rear-view mirror that Rivera had slid his revolver out of his waistband onto the car seat beside him. Dillinger felt naked without his Colt.
Suddenly a voice called out, high and clear in a language Dillinger was not familiar with, and a third rider came over the rim of the hill and moved down towards them fast and the two Indians backed off slightly.
The new arrival reined in beside the Chevrolet and sat looking at Rivera, a fierce Indian with a wedge-shaped face that might have been carved from brown stone. He wore his black hair shoulder length under a shovel hat of the kind affected by some priests, and a faded black cassock, pulled up to his knees, revealed untanned hide boots.
There was a silence, dust rising in small whirls as the ponies danced. Rivera had turned quite pale. He sat there staring back at the man, a muscle twitching in his jaw. The Indian returned the gaze calmly, the sunlight slanting across his slate-coloured eyes and then