The Last Hard Men - Brian Garfield [5]
He let Menendez lead the way. He waited until they had all crawled past before he fell in at the back of the line. Broken chains rattled on their ankles. Provo hung back a little: better not to let any of them see he was favoring his right foot from, the jump. They kept to a line of approach that interposed the cluster of shacks between them and the town. Nobody was likely to see them, but Menendez moved bent double and the rest followed suit, dodging from greasewood bush to paloverde. Clump to clump.
Menendez stood up against the corner of the weather-blasted gray shack, eeled around the corner and disappeared. Provo tensed, squinting into the morning sun. But after a minute the back shutter flapped open and Menendez waved them in.
Provo came in last and pulled the warped door shut behind him. The nine men made a dense crowd in the little shack; it was barely big enough to accommodate two occupants. He could smell the sweat already, and the day hadn’t started to warm up yet. Under the tarpaper roof it would get up to a hundred and twenty in here by mid-afternoon.
Young Mike Shelby said, “Maybe we ought to split up some. Take a couple more cabins, three men in each one.”
“We stick together,” Provo said.
“Why?”
“I want you all where I can see you.”
Lee Roy Tucker said, ‘“for how long?”
“Until we get rid of these irons and get ourselves into clothes everybody won’t recognize.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Mike Shelby said, and sat down on one of the two cots. There was a rickety table with a lamp and washbasin. Shelves nailed on one wall—a few boxes and cans of food. George Weed, blackskinned and full of disgust, slid his back down the wall in the front corner until he was sitting with his shoulders wedged in. “I don’t suppose anybody’s got a deck of cawds.”
Provo studied them covertly, one at a time, measuring them. He took his time.
Menendez: little, fox-quick, cruel, practical. Mike Shelby: young, level-headed, good-humored, a friendly face and a shaggy head of chestnut hair and big tough hands. Lee Roy Tucker: slat-narrow, buck-toothed, a complainer, but Lee Roy had handled blasting caps, working in a quarry, and knew explosives. Portugee Shiraz: part Portuguese, part Negro, eighteen years into a thirty-year noncommutable sentence for having knifed his wife and two children, one of whom had died; Portugee had the snout of a mountain wolf and he loved knives, all kinds of knives; he had worked in a slaughterhouse. Will Gant: a very big brute with a belly on him, not quite as slow in the head as he seemed. George Weed: black, square-built, his hair like a wire-wool skullcap, lazy eyes; contained and quiet except for occasional bursts of anger. Taco Riva: ex-mountain bandit, ex-vaquero; Taco loved horses, in all possible ways. Joaquim Quesada: a big-nosed brute with thick shoulders and a deep chest, a gray monk’s fringe around his bald head, his face purple with tiny broken blood vessels—an alcoholic, an incorrigible petty criminal, and in spite of his bulk, an expert sneak-burglar.
And the ninth man. Zach Provo. He didn’t need to size up himself.
His attention went back to Cesar Menendez. Menendez had quick spidery hands and a cynical mouth. His face and hands were slightly fire-scarred: he had burned down the Santa Cruz County jail around him in a fit rage, and been sentenced to six years for arson. In a way Menendez was the key. No one man could handle a squad this big by himself; a man had to sleep sometime. There had to be a second-in-command who could be depended on. Shelby might be dependable, as far as it went, but Shelby was too young and too easy-going to command their respect. The rest of them, prison dregs, were born followers.