Dillinger - Jack Higgins [40]
Ortiz and his men clambered off the rock, mounted, and with a war cry as of old, galloped off.
As Dillinger drove slowly back to Hermosa, trying for the second time in a month to hatch out an escape plan, he could see that Rojas, sitting in the passenger seat, would much rather find an excuse for drilling him than for turning him over to the authorities as Rivera had ordered.
Suddenly there was the sound of hoofbeats and catching up with the car were Ortiz and his warriors on their ponies. Ortiz's rifle was in his saddle, but he knew it was useless to draw. The hated Rojas would kill the American before Ortiz's bullet would reach Rojas.
'American,' Ortiz yelled. 'Rivera should let you use dynamite. The men in the mine are my people,' the Apache said. He dug his heels into his pony and went over the ridge toward the village in full gallop.
'Catch up with him,' Rojas ordered.
'I don't dare,' Dillinger said. 'The radiator's boiling. Can't you see the steam. We have to add water.'
'You have a water can in the trunk?'
'Only gasoline.'
'Don't get nervous,' Dillinger said to Rojas. And then he did a trick that he'd learned when he was sixteen years old, what they used to do in Indiana if an old car boiled over far from a gas station. He unscrewed the radiator cap, stood on the hood, unbuttoned his trousers, and in full view of Rojas, urinated a stream three feet straight into the steaming radiator.
As they entered the town, Dillinger and Rojas could see a huge milling crowd around Ortiz in the main square.
'He's getting them roused up,' Rojas said. 'Why are you stopping?'
'Too many people.'
'Keep going!' Rojas barked.
'I'll hit somebody,' Dillinger said, the car now going at a snail's pace.
'Faster,' Rojas said. 'Run the vermin down!'
As Dillinger applied his brakes, the crowd turned as if it were one person, and everyone, women, children, some men all came toward the car. These were not a beaten people, but an aroused mob.
Dillinger could hear Ortiz yelling, 'There in the car is Rivera's man Rojas, the murderer's murderer, who will not use dynamite to free our trapped people.'
Rojas knew how to read faces.
'Back this out of here,' Rojas ordered.
'You drive it,' Dillinger said, putting on the hand brake and getting out of the car.
'I don't know how to drive, you idiot!' Rojas yelled. 'Get back in here.'
'Put the gun down in the driver's seat. Gently.'
Rojas was livid, but when he turned to face the mob, he knew that however many he might shoot, before he could reload they would be at him like ants, choking him, stomping on him, then stringing him up. Carefully, he put the gun down in the driver's seat. Dillinger picked up the gun as he slid behind the wheel and slowly backed the car away from the mob, then turned, and sped out of town, holding the wheel with his left hand, the gun aimed at Rojas in his right, and at the top of his voice singing the song that was on the Hit Parade when he left home, 'Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?'
Ortiz rode hard for almost half an hour before reaching an encampment of five wickiups grouped beside a small pool of water in a horseshoe of rock that sheltered them from the wind.
The carcass of a small deer roasted over a fire on an improvised spit and three young Indians squatted beside it smoking cigarettes.
He dismounted and tethered his pony and gazed at them impassively for a moment, then went into his wickiup, lay on his face and closed his eyes.
In the darkness there was only a deep satisfaction and a hate that burned like a white-hot flame, so pure that it was an ecstasy, a mystical reality as great as any the fathers at Nacozari had told him about.
Ortiz decided what he must do. He left the peace of the wickiup and assembled his warriors.
He said, 'I have worn a priest's cassock in the hope that I would one day be received as a man of God. Today, I saw Father Tomas, a man of God, shot in the head by that butcher Rivera. Before everything, I am an Apache,' he said, and with one rent of his powerful hands ripped the cassock from his body