Baum dug his thumb under the flap and burst the envelope apart. It contained a wad of ten-dollar bills, the total contents amounting to five hundred dollars.
‘All right,’ said Baum. ‘Who is he?’
‘Understand something first,’ said the hidden man. ‘If you back out, I’ll hire people to find you. Maybe this Ryker. I want to find the man I’m hiring you to bring in. I want him alive, so I can kill him. Not you: me.’
The husky voice got so intense it choked up in a fit of coughing. Baum thumbed through the notes and nodded. ‘All right,’ said Baum. ‘Who is he?’
‘A half-breed,’ said the man inside the coach. ‘Part white, part Apache. He’s got three names. The Apache call him Azul, but he was christened Matthew Gunn. Around the Border they call him Breed.’
‘What’s he look like?’ asked Baum. ‘Where’s he hang out?’
‘He’s around six feet,’ husked the voice. ‘Got blond hair and blue eyes. Looks like he could be either white or injun. He mostly wears buckskin pants and Chiricahua moccasins, with a white shirt and a leather vest. Carries a Colt’s Frontier and a Bowie knife on his belt. A throwing knife on his right leg. He works the Border, mostly. New Mexico and Arizona. Sometimes Texas.’
‘That’s not a lot to go on,’ said Baum. ‘He could be anywhere. Could be anyone.’
‘That’s a lot of money,’ said the voice from inside the coach. ‘You want it, or not?’
Baum looked at the notes he held in his hand and shrugged.
‘Yeah. I guess so. Where do I start looking?’
‘Try the Border towns first.’ The voice was gloating now. ‘Then the Mogollons. He’ll come back there.’
‘Why?’ asked Baum. ‘Why should he?’
‘He lived there,’ said the voice. ‘He always comes back. It’s where his parents lived. You want to find him, just shoot up a Chiricahua village.’
‘Who are you?’ Baum said. ‘What’s your name?’
The voice husked into laughter. ‘It doesn’t matter. You’ve been paid and you know your target. You’ve taken seven hundred dollars, so now you’ve only got three hundred to earn. Find him. Take him alive and bring him back to me. So I can kill him.’
‘Where?’ asked Baum. ‘Where do I bring him back?’
‘Like I said: I’ll wait in Cinqua.’ The gloved hand folded the shutter tight so that the next part of the statement was muffled behind the leather drapes. ‘I’ll be waiting.’
The driver got back on the seat and lashed the horses to a gallop down the trail. Fritz Baum-watched the dust curl up from behind the wheels and went back into the trees to find his own horse.
He wondered about the man inside the coach and the man he had been hired to find. It could be difficult, bringing him in alive. As hard as it might be to find him. But Baum had taken money for the job now, and that meant he had an unwritten contract: in his line of work, backing down on a contract meant a man was finished.
Fritz Baum climbed up on his horse and rode north in search of the man called Breed.
Chapter Two
AZUL OPENED HIS eyes and wondered why the light hurt. He closed them and winced at the pounding inside his head. It didn’t go away, so he sat up, running a furred tongue around the sandpaper of his mouth. Beside him in the wide bed, a mass of auburn curls shifted on the pillow and a pale arm reached down to drag the sheets over the unseen face.
For a moment, Azul wondered who the woman was. Wondered, too, where he was. Remembrance made him groan, reaching for the jug on the washstand. He filled an empty glass with the cold water and drank it down in one long swallow. Drank three more glasses before ducking his head over the bowl and spilling the remaining water over his skull and neck.
He was in a saloon called The Golden Goose, in a town called San Jacinto in northern New Mexico. And he was badly hung over.
He dried his face, piecing together the fragmented recollections of the previous night. He had come into the town after fifteen days on the trail and decided to stop over a spell to rest his horse and enjoy himself some. It had been a long time since he just lay around and drank, longer since he had had a woman. And with two thousand dollars in his saddlebags and no particular place to go, San Jacinto had seemed as good as anywhere to rest up and ease the saddle kinks from his body. He had checked his horse into the stable and gotten himself a room and a bath. Then he had eaten a meal and wandered into the main part of the saloon. He vaguely recalled working his way through half a bottle of whiskey before the red-head joined him, but after that it got difficult.
He rubbed his eyes, cursing his own stupidity. He was used to drink — most Apache warriors indulged in the home-brewed liquor they called tiswin when they got the chance, and there were some who favored whiskey but he had never drunk in such quantity before. He had never had so much money before.
The thought prompted him to action, concern and the natural resilience of his body overcoming the fuggy aftermath of the alcohol. He checked the Colt’s Frontier draped over the rail of the bedhead and then the Winchester propped against the wall. That was automatic, a reflex born of living long with the imminence of death. His next move was prompted by an emotion unfamiliar to him: pride of ownership. An Apache - and the man called Azul had been raised as a Chiricahua brave cared little for material possessions. His horses, his weapons, his wife, they were important to him, but little else. There was no need to own things when all was provided by whatever power ruled the world, the white man’s God or the Great Spirit of the Indians. There were buffalo on the plains and deer in the hills; rabbits in the meadows and fish in the streams. A man could build himself a shelter from branches and grass, or from animal hides, or even turves. He could fashion weapons from wood and bone and rock. Everything was there, and all a man need do was look around him and use what was given.
Unless he lived in the world of the pinda-lick-oyi – the whites – where everything was labelled and owned and bought with money. And Azul – half white and half Apache – had brought two thousand dollars of the white man’s money with him from Wyomingi.
He climbed off the mattress and got down on his knees to check the twin leather bags dumped under the bed. They were both there, and the cobwebs he had spread across the flaps were undisturbed. He stood up, gritting his teeth against the sudden elevation and clutching at the bedhead as his brain seemed to explode in blaze of light.
‘What’s the matter, honey?’
The auburn curls emerged from under the sheet and got pushed back by a long-fingered hand. The nails were painted a vivid red that matched what little was left of the lipstick. The face beneath was pert, not beautiful, but attractive even after a night’s drinking and a longer time in bed. Her eyes were green and large, the pupils distending as they focused on his naked body, and her mouth was full enough to offset the small, tip-tilted nose. She sat up, letting the sheet fall away so that firm breasts, tipped with dark nipples that erected in the early chill, were exposed. Her waist was trim, spreading into wide hips that looked, from the angling of the sheets, to give way to long legs.
She smiled when he grunted and shook his head, regretting the movement even as he began it.
‘You need some coffee, darling. Black coffee and a good breakfast. Then a long bath. You got the money?’
‘Sure.’ Azul sat down on the bed and closed his eyes. ‘What’s your name?’
He’d have seen the woman pout if his eves had been open, but instead he just heard her reply: ‘Colleen, honey. Colleen Murray. Don’t you remember?’
Images flashed swiftly through Azul’s mind. They had finished the bottle he had bought and then ordered another. Most of that had gone down his throat before the woman suggested they go to his room. They had taken what was left with them, and emptied it stretched over the wide bed. He remembered a fusion of bodies, limbs entwined, a tongue probing his mouth before drifting over his body; the spread of her thighs and the soft, welcoming warmth of her.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I guess I drank too much.’
‘You didn’t act drunk,’ she smiled. ‘Why don’t I go fetch you breakfast and we try it again sober?’
‘Don’t forget the bath,’ moaned the half-breed. ‘I need that.’
