The Last Hard Men - Brian Garfield [1]
Provo’s dark hatchet face swiveled toward Menendez. “Come on up the hill with me. Let’s take that other gun away from Will Gant before he decides to walk off with it by himself.”
“Orrai,” Menendez agreed.
They walked up the hill past swinging hammers. Provo had his finger inside the trigger guard of the riot gun, the slide balanced across the crook of his elbow. Portugee Shiraz, vulpine faced, grinned through bad teeth and said, “What you gonna do next, Zach? Part the waters?”
“You just stick with me, Portugee.” Provo went on up the line with Menendez.
Will Gant saw them coming. He swung his big-bellied shape around ponderously and thought about picking up Johnson’s riot gun from the ground—he had put it down to use both hands on his sledge.
“Naw,” Menendez said, “I wouldn’t think like that, Will, it ain’t es-smart.”
Gant kept thinking about it, though—measuring the distance, judging the angle of Provo’s gun muzzle. The heavy roll of his lips peeled back nervously. “Yair,” he said, “I guess not. You want the gun, hey, Zach?”
“I’ve already got a gun,” Provo said. “Menendez wants the gun.”
Gant thought about that, visibly. Finally he said, “You waitin’ on me to fight you for it, Menendez?”
“Naw, you lazy turd. I ain’t got time for such truck.”
“Then get yo’ dumb ass on over here and pick it up. I ain’t rightly fixin’ to mess with you.”
“Smart,” Zach Provo commented. “Go ahead, then, Menendez.”
Menendez, with a thin smile, bent down to pick up the gun. He kept his head cocked, kept his eyes on Will Gant looming above him. Gant didn’t stir. Menendez hefted the riot gun and went over to the dead guard to strip the blood-darkened cartridge belt off him.
Provo was counting heads from his vantage point on top of the hill. Will Gant waddled over and ranged himself alongside him. “You takin’ over now, Zach?”
Twenty-seven men, Provo tallied. Too many: too unwieldy. Distracted, he said, “What do you think?” And without awaiting a reply, climbed the steep pitch alongside the road to the summit twenty feet higher. From here he could make out a little bit of the brown glint of the Colorado River, and the bluff where the ruins of Fort Yuma stood on the far side, in California. The flayed hilly landscape was empty of movement. The sun, on this early morning in July, was hard as brass. He had it behind him. He turned a slow circle on his heels surveying the great desert baking pan eastward, the line of stunt trees along the Gila and distant arid mountains. He shaded his eyes with a hand, saw nothing—no stirrings, no dust—and skittered back down to the road.
The hammers were still ringing. He waited for them to finish. Menendez fixed himself to him, at his shoulder. “What now?”
“We get rid of the sheep,” Provo said. His eyes were narrowed in a thoughtful squint.
“And keep the goats?”
“Aeah.”
Menendez picked at his scalp and studied his fingernail. “Then you got a plan in mind.”
“Maybe I do,” Provo said. He filled his chest and bellowed: “All right, everybody up here!”
While they gathered slowly around him, Provo’s eyes dreamily tracked a scorpion under the shade of the rock shelf on the slope beyond the road. Its tail stinger was curled up over its back. Portugee Shiraz and Lee Roy Tucker sat down in the road, hammers across their laps. The rest crowded around, stinking of sweat, staying on their feet, and there was a lot of excited talking until Provo yelled at them to quiet down.
“We’ve got to split this bunch up,” he said when he had their attention. “We’ve got maybe three hours to get shet of this place before the noon water wagon comes. I want them to find tracks going every which direction. Alcorn and Pete Cruz, you take Torres and those two over there and walk north along the river till you get to Quartzsite.”
Tom Alcorn said, “Jesus, that’s eighty-five mile, Zach, we can’t just——”
“You can—or maybe you’d rather end up back in the hole? You can walk it in two days, drink out of the river, keep out of sight if you hear anything, duck into the river if you hear dogs. You find yourselves