The Last Hard Men - Brian Garfield [19]
“I’ll pass the ordnance around when I’m good and ready, Lee Roy.”
“Shee-yit.”
Provo said to Menendez, “You scout the livery barn?”
“No good, Zach. Too much law around there. But there’s ten, twelve horses in the ranch stable half a mile north of town, across the tracks. That’s where I es-stole this one.”
“Then that’s where we go now. Lead the way.”
Slow and easy. He let Taco go into the stable alone and saddle up eight horses; Taco was good enough with horses not to raise a ruckus. When he came out of the dark maw of the stable he crouched down by Provo and whispered, “Mos’ly tired old horses, Zach. Tame and slow—but what you expect on a dairy ranch?”
“They’ll do. All set?”
They rode out, swinging wide around Gila Bend; rode south all night, into the Saucedas, and at dawn raised the smoke of a country store’s cookfire. The place squatted in’ a little nest of spring-fed trees in the barren rock mountains. Provo went in at gunpoint, surprised the old store-keeper and his two hired hands, and called the men in. They tied up the locals and ate a huge meal. Provo ate by himself in the kitchen, reading the newspaper Menendez had picked up in Gila Bend last night. His face changed as he read.
They took what they wanted and made off with all the money in the place—ninety dollars—and drove off all the horses and mules, to set the locals afoot and insure it would take two or three days for word to get out that they had passed this way. Provo led them out southward, toward Ajo, and kept to that course until they had gone well beyond sight of the country store. Then he turned east along a hardpan flat where hoofmarks would be hard to track. Sooner or later the pursuit would get to the country store back there; Provo wanted the law left with the impression the fugitives had struck due south for the Mexican border.
They nooned somewhere on the northern quadrant of the Papago Reservation with Tabletop Mountain in sight to the northeast. It was all rock and scrub here, worthless land beaten by the furious sun. Provo’s eyes were gritty from lack of sleep; he’d been up fifty-odd hours. They slept the rest of the day, Provo trading off sentry hours with Menendez. The rest of the crowd seemed too bone-tired to complain about anything.
Toward sundown, he got up and stretched, hearing the ligaments crack, and walked off a piece with Menendez. He showed him the three-column story on the front page. Menendez read it laboriously, his lips moving. Finally he said, “Oh, sure. Sure.”
“Yeah,” Provo said. “Eighty thousand dollars with Sam Burgade guarding it.”
“Ain’t no co-een-cidence, Zach. You know it’s a focking trap.”
“Sure. That’s the way the old bastard’s mind works.”
“They can’t catch us so they want to draw us into Tucson.” Menendez pronounced it the Spanish way, Tooksohn. “They’ll be waiting with every gon in town.”
“Be a shame to disappoint old Sam Burgade, wouldn’t it?”
Menendez blinked at him. “You ain’t seriously thinking about goeen in there, Zach.”
“Not into Burgade’s trap, no. But we’re going into Tucson.”
“You got your brains op your ass or what? They’re waiting for us with everything they got.”
“They’re waiting for us to hit that so-called money shipment. Friday morning when Burgade picks it up at the train depot and trucks it over to the bank. What’ll you bet there ain’t no real money at all? Just an empty box for them to lug along to make it look good.”
“Sure. So why you talking about Tucson?”
“Because come Friday morning, every gun in town will be lined up at the depot and along Congress Street and at the bank. They’ll have every inch of that street covered. You know what that’s got to mean. It means they’ve got to pull deputies and bank guards off every other cash vault in town. Off the express office, off