The Last Hard Men - Brian Garfield [3]
Mike Shelby said, “You’ve got it all worked out.”
“I’ve had twenty-eight years for it.” He looked them over with icy contempt. “Everybody hear me the first time?”
Lee Roy’s jaw was set. “You got short brains, Zach. They bound to get aholt of us.”
“Like hell they are. Don’t be a farmer.”
Lee Roy was rubbing his arm where Provo had squeezed it. Provo said, “You can do this with your teeth or without them. Which way you want, Lee Roy?”
Lee Roy licked his upper lip. “I don’t know. Maybe I’d just as soon go it alone, you don’t mind.”
“I mind,” Provo said, flat. “Nobody busts loose now, Lee Roy. Not after you’ve heard the plan. We go in together and we stick together—like flies on flypaper.”
“Why? One less man, make it that much easier for you, Zach.”
“I can’t have you wandering into a posse and yapping to the law what we’re doing. Understand? Now you go ahead and walk away from here if you’re still a mind to, Lee Roy. But it’ll take you all the rest of your life to walk two steps. Hear?”
Lee Roy scuffed his feet and scowled and didn’t argue.
With a tongue dipped in vitriol, Provo snapped at them all: “I was born a few minutes ahead of the rest of you fools—just remember that. Come on, Menendez.” He turned on his heel and walked west, toward the river. The loose ends of the chains whacked him around the ankles but he didn’t slow down.
When he looked back the rest of them were following. Menendez, with the riot gun, was herding them.
It was stinking hot in the arrowweed rushes. The late afternoon sun beat down on the muddy surface of the river. They could still hear the dogs baying, going away upriver on the far bank, probably tracking the Alcorn bunch on the trail to Quartzsite. He had planned it like that.
Menendez said, “Sonoma bitch, it’s gonna work.”
“We’re not out yet.”
“Bot it’s gonna work. Seguro que sí.” The cruel fox-thin face smiled. “What’s that song you humming?”
“Owl Song.”
“Hey?”
“They sing it on the Reservation in hard times,” Provo said. “Owl’s a tough bird.”
“You ain’t a fullblood Navajo, are you?”
“Half,” Provo said.
“Me, I’m half Messican and half es-Spanish and half Yaqui and half Texano and half focking rattlesnake, I guess. Listen, Zach, what we gon do after we get horses?”
“I don’t know about the rest of you. I know what I’m going to do.”
“Ahjess?”
“I want Sam Burgade,” Provo said. He slapped a mosquito. “I want Sam Burgade’s cocksucking hide on a spit.”
“Hell, ain’t you got nawthing better’n that to aim for, Zach?”
Deep hate was a fervor that got stronger with time. Provo shook his head. “I want him, Menendez. I want to peel the tough old bastard down to a whimper.”
“Hell, he’s got to be a real old man by now.”
Provo didn’t say anything. After a while Menendez said, “Sam Burgade ain’t nawthing but a tired old man, Zach. You’ll suit yourself, I guess, but it ain’t es-smart, what you fixin’ to do. You want to get your hands on Burgade, you gonna have to show your efface right in the middle of Tucson. Tucson’s a big town. They got a lot of law there.”
Provo grunted.
Menendez said, “And it ain’t as if he was some old mestizo nobody cared nawthing about. Burgade, he’s an important es-sonomabitch. Maybe he don’t tote a badge no more but he’s got a lot of important frands. They hang you sure.”
“If he’s riding high that’s fine,” Provo said. “The ground will hit him a lot harder when he falls.”
“Shit, whatever he done must’ve been a focking long time ago, Zach.