'Boy,' he said quietly but with great firmness, 'this is no game. We shall kill these men tonight. Or they shall kill us. It is not play. Put your weapon away until it is needed. Until blood is the only outcome…'
Miguel hoisted his own rifle, his much-loved Winchester, and held it in front of the boy.
'I have leveled this gun at five men. They are all dead now. Do you understand? Do not wave your weapon around. It is not a toy.'
Not only the overexcited lad fell still, but all the men around him.
'Good,' said Miguel. 'Then we can prepare.' Miguel heard the lowing of the cattle, well before the stench of the animals reached him, and then the wind changed and the familiar bovine reek was in his nostrils, at the back of his throat, everywhere, thick as fresh shit on the heel of a new boot. He smiled thinly. He did not imagine for a moment that the road agents guarding the stolen livestock would be savvy enough to detect his particular smell on the night breeze. To get stuck with a job like this when there was a party to be had, they would be the bottom feeders of the crew, the new recruits with nothing to leverage. Still, he would pay them the heed due to men who would kill without a qualm, given the chance.
That was why they would never get the chance.
Two hours he had been watching them as they made their rounds of the football field that butted up against the big loop road that swung around the southwestern reaches of the town. The sporting field was fenced, and the fence line had not deteriorated too badly in three years without maintenance, providing the agents with a convenient area to pen their newly stolen herd within a reasonable distance of the Hy Top Club. It was, he estimated, no more than a ten-minute walk through the darkness, depending on whether you risked turning an ankle or even breaking a leg by cutting across the overgrown gardens that lay in between.
The sounds of revelry had died away in the last twenty minutes. No more music or laughter drifted through the newly grown forest that was quickly reclaiming the outskirts of Crockett. The occasional scream did so, however, and Miguel could only hope that the Mormons would be able to contain themselves until the moment was right. Before they could move on the main body of the agents, he had to dispose of these two quietly. Even two men, well armed, arriving at the wrong moment could be enough to turn the tide against them.
Miguel settled himself against the rough, sticky trunk of a pine tree and brought the night vision goggles up to his eyes again. There were two of them, both young, as he had thought. One was taller, however, and, unusually for these times, quite fat. A prodigious belly spilled over his belt buckle, and as Miguel watched, he appeared to be shoving some sort of long bread roll into his face. They were both dressed in a ridiculous mishmash of Hollywood outfits he would have thought of as cowboy biker: jeans with chaps, buckskin shirts, studded black leather vests, and wide-brimmed hats. The shorter and thinner of the two was also wrapped in what looked like a full-length black leather coat. They each carried pistols in hip holsters, but Miguel assumed they were modern semiautomatics, not revolvers. They were for show at any rate, because each was also armed with an assault rifle. Some sort of M16 variants if he was not wrong.
The smaller one was smoking and occasionally drinking from a flask he would take from inside his full-length coat. That was good, the vaquero thought. Drink up, my little friend. Drink up. They shivered and stomped around a small campfire they'd lit near the northern end of the running track that ran around the football field.
Or did they call it a gridiron field here? he wondered. True football was a game played with a round ball between civilized people.
Miguel waited another five minutes, until total silence had fallen over the empty wastes of suburban Crockett. When he was certain the main body of partygoers had exhausted themselves with debauchery, he made his move.
First he removed his shoes and dropped his pants-took them right off-before putting his boots back on.
Then he donned a leather motorcycle jacket salvaged by Ben Randall from an auto shop in Leona two days earlier, thankfully, not from the remains of its former owner. After his scare in the general store, that would have been too much. Miguel was certain he would have felt the dead man creeping all over him within a few minutes of pulling it on. But the jacket had been hung cleanly on a hook in the workshop of the town's garage. It matched the clothing of one or two of the road agents he had spied back at the club. They had also sought out other equipment, but without luck. Thus, he had no silenced pistol or hunting bow with which he might quietly send these two worthless chochas into the next world to account for themselves.
But he did have a plan.
And so, without pants but leather jacketed, with a bright yellow Caterpillar baseball cap pulled down over his face, he emerged from his hiding spot and began a long, staggering walk across open ground, waving a half-empty bottle of bourbon around.
He was praying that with the night being so dark and the agents partly blinded by the small campfire, his bizarre approach would disarm their suspicions. If it did not, he was dead and the Mormon women almost certainly, too.
Miguel kept his head down as best he could, allowing himself only brief glimpses of his quarry as he staggered theatrically every few yards or so. The guards noticed him when he was about fifty yards out, the shorter of the two pointing and laughing.
'Hey. Is that James? Jimmy James Jefferson? Y'all brought us some bourbon but none o' that tight Mormon pussy, you dumbass?'
A few of the nearest cattle bellowed and snorted, but they moved away and resumed dozing, chewing their cud, or swatting flies with their tails.
Well before Miguel entered the full glow of the campfire where he would have been identified as an impostor, he deliberately stumbled facedown into the dirt, where he stayed, groaning, with his ass pointed squarely at the road agents.
He hoped they would not be so familiar with the ass of this Jimmy James Jefferson that they would be alerted to his ruse.
From their braying laughter, they did not seem much perturbed.
Typical, thought Miguel, that men of this ilk would do nothing to help a fallen comrade with neither pants nor dignity to his name. They seemed content to chat to each other while he lay in the dirt.
He groaned loudly again and pushed himself up on one his elbows before throwing one arm out and crashing down again, this time with the bottle of bourbon where they might see it draining away.
'Hey!' cried one of them, the smaller man, he was certain. 'Don't spill it all.'
Miguel dragged the bottle back toward himself and waited.
He forced himself to go completely limp as he heard both sets of feet approaching. He had his right hand tucked away inside the leather jacket, his fingers wrapped around the handle of the footlong Bowie knife. A cattleman, he had worked with knives all his life and knew what speed, strength, and a finely honed blade could do to living flesh when driven with enough force and skill and merciless intent.
When he felt the men's hands grab for him roughly, he rolled over and struck out in one, two, three flashing movements. He whipped the knife through a short vicious arc that took the killing edge of the blade deep into the throat of the smaller man, who could not even scream, so quickly was his trachea sliced in two. As he continued to sweep around, launching himself like a coiled rattler, he switched to a backhanded stabbing grip and drove the evil- looking steel shaft deep into the temple of the second man, whose eyes seemed almost to pop out of their sockets at the very moment the last spark of life died in them. He reversed the flow of his attack, ripping the blade out, bringing huge gobbets of flesh and slivers of bone chip with it. With a final lunge he drove the Bowie up under the floating rib of the first man he had cut, making sure of his end by ramming four inches of hardened steel into his heart.
A few cattle bellowed in protest but stayed where they were.
Grimacing with disgust, Miguel stood and stripped off the leather jacket. He was bathed in hot, dark blood, but there was no time to clean up.
He hurried back to where he'd left his pants and his guns.
There would be more such work before he was done for the night.
27
