“That is not what Trask and Ferguson believe. And I think O’Hara knows where that gold is. He will tell us. We will find it.”
“Not a good reason to die, Chama. For a pile of gold that is only a fairy tale told by white men.”
“As I told you, Cody, this is as far as you go. We are two against one, Carmen and I. You can drop your gun now and I will let you walk away. We will keep your horse.”
“My horse is worth more than any Apache gold,” Zak said softly.
“He is not worth your life, Cody.”
“Chama, let me ask you something before you draw your pistol.”
“Ask,” Chama said, flexing the fingers of his gun hand. “You do not have much time, gringo.”
It was funny, Zak thought, how quickly people could change, how swiftly they could change their colors, like a chameleon. Chama had all these pent-up emotions inside of him that he had been carrying for many miles. Now, in the light of a new day, he had reverted to what he always was, a lying, scheming, shifty sonofabitch with murder on his mind.
“Ever stand on a high cliff and look down, wonder what it would be like to fall about a hundred feet onto the rocks below?” Zak asked.
“No, I never have done that. You ask a strange question. Why? Do you have the fear of falling, Cody?”
“No. I was just thinking to myself about you. And me.”
“There is nothing to think about,” Chama said.
“Chama, I’m that tall cliff, and you’re standing right on the edge of it, about to fall right off. Only in your case, you’re never going to see the ground before you hit it.”
The expression on Chama’s face changed as he realized what Zak had said. In that moment, he knew that Zak had turned the tables on him. Zak was calling him out, not the other way around.
“All right,” Chama said, and went into a crouch. As he did, his right hand stabbed downward for the butt of his pistol.
Zak was facing the sunrise, but he did not look at it. Instead, he kept his gaze focused on Chama, and in the periphery of his vision, on Carmen. He was aware of Chama’s intentions with the first twitch of his hand, which echoed on his face like a tic.
Zak stood straight, his gaze locked on Chama’s flickering eyes. But in one smooth motion his hand snaked down to his pistol, drew it from its holster as if it was oiled, his thumb cocking it before it cleared leather.
Carmen was slow to react, but she saw Chama grab for his pistol and she became galvanized into action. Her hand slid inside her sash, grasped the butt of the pistol Chama had given her and began to slide it upward. She appeared to be moving fast, but in that warped time frame when death dangles by a slender hair, her motion was much too slow, like an inching snail trying to escape a juggernaut.
Zak’s Walker Colt roared just as Chama’s barrel cleared the holster. He shot from just below his hip, the barrel at a thirty-degree angle. Just enough, Zak thought, to put Chama down.
Chama opened his mouth and yelled, “Noooooo,” as Zak’s pistol barked. The bullet caught him just above the belt buckle, driving into him like a twenty-pound maul, smashing through flesh as it mushroomed on its way out his back, nearly doubling the size of its soft lead point.
The air rushed out of Chama’s lungs like the gush from a blacksmith’s bellows and he staggered backward, blood gushing from his abdomen, a crimson fountain. He groaned and went to his knees, the pistol still clutched in his hand. He tried to raise it for a shot at Zak, then his eyes went wide as Zak took careful aim and blasted off another shot that took away Chama’s scream as it ripped through his mouth and blew away three inches of his spine in a paralyzing crunch of bone.
Carmen slid her pistol from the sash and pointed it at Zak, her hand trembling, her arm swaying as she tried to aim.
“Sorry, Carmen,” Zak said, “but you’re standing on the edge of that same cliff.”
She fired and the bullet whistled past Zak’s ear. He stood there, shook his head slightly and pulled the trigger of his Colt. Carmen closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them in disbelief as the bullet spun her halfway around. Blood spurted from her shoulder, but she managed to lift her pistol again and aim it at Zak, her lips pressed together in rage and defiance. She looked like a cornered animal, her brown eyes flickering with flinty sparks. The pistol cracked and the bullet plowed a furrow in the ground between Zak’s legs. He still stood straight, and now his eyes narrowed as he cocked the pistol and held it at arm’s length in a straight line that pointed directly at her heart.
“Sorry, Carmen,” he said as he squeezed the trigger. “But you called the tune.”
The bullet smashed into Carmen’s chest, slightly to the left of her breastbone. Her heart exploded under the impact as the bullet flattened and expanded after smashing through ribs. She dropped like a sash weight, a crimson stain blossoming on her chest. She lay like a broken flower in the dirt, the angry expression wiped from her face as if someone had swiped it with a towel. Her eyes glazed over with the frost of death, staring sightlessly at the sky.
The sound of the last gunshot faded into a deathly silence as Zak ejected the hulls from his pistol and slid fresh cartridges into the empty chambers. The smell of burnt gunpowder lingered in his nostrils as he gazed down at Carmen’s body, shaking his head at another needless and useless death. Whatever scraps life had offered her, he had taken them all away, regretfully.
Zak saw that Chama, too, was stone dead, his bleeding stopped. He had tried to warn him, but Chama’s self- confidence bordered on insane arrogance. The man had followed his own path to the end of the road. The road ended on a high cliff and Chama had taken the fall. The stench from his body, since he had voided himself, was strong, and Zak turned away.
Death was such an ugly thing, he thought. One moment a man, or a woman, was vibrant with energy, brimming with life. The next, after death, they were just carrion, all signs of life and personality gone, their bodies like cast-off rattlesnake skins. In Tibet, he knew, when a person died, the monks took his body to a place in the hills
