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Hell

Bentley Little

The Arizona sun rose early and hard, unfiltered by clouds, stronger than it had been in New Mexico, more unforgiving than it was in Texas, and Perris looked to the west, wondering how much farther he had to go, thinking not for the first time that he should turn back and call it clean.

But no. this wasn’t no regular prey. This was another Ranger. And when one of your own went bad, you didn’t quit until it was quitting time. It wasn’t good enough simply to make the effort. You had to get your man. Honor demanded no less.

He threw the dregs of his coffee at a too-brazen crow, then saddled up, packed his gear and pissed out the campfire. His ass hurt. A week without wiping would do that, and once again he climbed carefully onto the roan and ambled off at a pace that wouldn’t cause him to bounce around unnecessarily.

He reached Tubac by late afternoon, the white-painted fort gleaming at him from across the desert like a beacon. This was godforsaken land, and if it was his to decide, he’d let the Mexicans have it, but he had to admit that it was nice to see buildings again, and people, and after stopping at the river to water his mount, he headed up the slope to the fort.

He could tell that it had been awhile since they’d had visitors. Nearly all of the residents turned out to greet him, and the ecstatic faces of the two women told him all he needed to know about the social life of the community. The general in charge, a man named Starr, practically begged him to stay on as their guest for the next two months, warning him that travel in any direction would be nigh impossible until the advent of the August rains, letting him know that the skeleton of more than one traveler lay bleaching in the burning sands out there. “This is it,” the general said melodramatically. “Last stop before Hell.”

Though Perris didn’t worry about his ability to survive in the wilderness—he was a Ranger after all—he did graciously decide to stay at the fort for the next week and take advantage of Starr’s hospitality, enjoying regular meals, regular baths, a comfortable bed.

And letting his ass heal.

He’d been after Tim Curtis on and off for six years and on this particular sojourn for the past two months. An extra week wasn’t going to make a difference in the outcome—and it might just rejuvenate him enough that his wits and reflexes would be sharpened for the inevitable confrontation. Lords know such an edge would be vital. He wasn’t deal with a novice here. He needed all the advantages he could get.

Starr’s wife Josephine was one of the women who’d greeted him when he’d come up from the river. A broad florid woman with coquettish eyes in a lined parchment face, she made it her business to show him around the compound and introduce him to the owners of the outlying houses. The other, younger woman was a widow whose husband had been murdered by Apaches last fall. She too, was eager to spend time with him and seemed full of questions about what was going on in the towns and cities of the civilized world, although he was not really the man to ask about those sorts of subjects.

A few of the army men stationed at the fort also had wives, but they were squaws or Mexicans and stayed hidden most of the time.

The rhythm of life at the fort was different than on the trail, and Perris had a hard time getting used to it. He was awake at night later than everyone else, up in the morning before anyone, and he spent the daylight hours walking restlessly around, waiting either for something to happen or for the mess bell to ring. He shot a coyote on his third morning there after seeing the scavenger approach the fence, and was promptly dressed down by the general, who told him that it was the buzzards and coyotes that cleared the fort's refuse and kept the surrounding perimeter clean. The general pronounced coyote "ky-o-tay" like the Mexicans did, and not "ky-oat" like they did in Texas, and Perris had never felt farther from home.

After supper that evening, while he was smoking by the fence and staring up at the stars, thinking it was time to press on, Mrs. Starr emerged from the kitchen and stood next to him. She stood too close, but he didn't try to pull away because it might have been an accident that their arms were touching, and he didn't want to offend her. The two of them remained there for a moment, not talking, not acknowledging each other.

The general's wife broke the silence. "You never said. Are you after someone? That why you're out here?”

"Yeah."

"You hunting an outlaw?"

Perris nodded grimly.

"What did he do?”

"Something too vile for your ears to hear."

She shuddered and he felt her body inch closer.

"I aim to bring him back to Texas so he can face punishment. Failing that, 1 will execute the punishment myself as a duly sworn officer of the law."

"Execute?" she said.

He nodded.

Silence greeted that. He sensed her pulling away from him, and was not entirely displeased. They remained like that for awhile longer, him smoking and staring up at the sky, she looking out across the desert, and finally she left, saying she was needed back in the kitchen.

He didn't watch her go. He felt cramped even with her gone, even looking up at the endless expanse of stars. The closeness of life in a fort was not for him, and while he longed for the comforts and companionship to be found in town, the trail, lonesome as it was, was vastly preferable to being cooped up here. He found himself actually missing those uncomfortable nights on the hard rocky ground, those days of seeing not another living soul.

Behind him, one of the officers started playing a fiddle, a screechy scratchy sound that grated on his nerves. Others started whooping and hollering, and he could tell from the echoing thump that soon began to overpower the voices and song that people were dancing.

Perris crushed out his cigarette on the side of the fence, put the butt in his pocket for tomorrow and walked back to the barracks and his bed.

***

In the morning he awoke early and packed his gear. Several of the men saw him but none said a word, which was just as well. He didn't feel like explaining. His hope was to get away before the general found out, but the smell of frying bacon made his stomach grumble, and he thought it was probably a good idea to wait until the horses had been fed and watered. It would save time later.

Taking the cigarette nub out of his pocket, he lit it and headed toward the gate. He let himself out and was halfway down the sloping trail when he heard the sound of a woman humming somewhere up ahead. The river was near silent and sound carried, so she didn't have to be close or humming loud for him to hear, and he found himself wondering if one of the squaw wives had come down here to wash clothes or bathe. Indian women liked river water and never did seem to get used to bathing indoors.

He had not meant to spy, had only come down to clear his head and get away from the buildings and the fences while he waited for breakfast to be cooked, but Perris crept forward slowly, careful not to snap a twig, crush a leaf or do anything that would alert the woman to his presence. There was movement up ahead and to the right, a flash of white by the water's edge, and he crouched low so as to see through the curtain of leaves.

It was the widow, Mrs. James, and she wasn't doing anything, wasn't washing or bathing or picking berries, was just standing there, looking at the river. He figured she wanted to be alone, like him, and had come out here to get away from the confinement of the fort. He intended to turn back and give her her privacy, but when a man jumped out of the bushes and attacked her, when, as she attempted to cry out, he put his hand over her mouth to silence her, Perris ran forward, knife drawn.

The man was dead before he knew anyone was there. Perris stabbed him with a strong side thrust, slicing upward instead of pulling out. In one smooth motion, he swung Mrs. James away from the spurting blood. She was crying, shaken but not hysterical, and she managed to compose herself in a matter of moments. He shouldn't have been surprised. She'd seen her husband's body after the Apaches had been at him, Perris remembered, so she was constitutionally strong.

She looked down at her attacker's body. Perris recognized him from the fort but didn't know his name. "Is he dead?"

Perris nodded.

"Good," she said fiercely. "Good." She kicked dirt on the dead man's face. Looking up at Perris, she threw her arms around him and kissed him full on the mouth in a manner that made her intentions clear. He did not even pretend to resist. Even as the body lay behind them, she reached down for him, felt him, and he pushed her to the ground and took her hard and fast, like an animal, not knowing if that was how she liked it, not caring, thinking of Annie all the while, guilt and arousal mixed up inside him like mud on the banks of the river.

He left her there afterward and strode quickly up the slope to the fort, where he got his gear, grabbed his horse and rode away, heading west. He didn't want to stay and face an inquest and answer a whole bunch of useless questions, so while he really wanted breakfast and regretted not letting the roan finish eating, he knew it was important to get away from Tubac quickly. Mrs. James could deal with the aftermath. He had the feeling she would have no problem answering any and all questions to Starr's satisfaction.

Still, he kept one eye behind him for the next two days in case someone had been sent to bring him in.

The desert was hot and empty, but it was good to be alone in the wilderness after the restrictions of the fort, and the land was not nearly as inhospitable as Starr had made it out to be.

Besides, Curtis had made it through here.

The truth was that he did not really know where he was going. The west was big. And open. While it was true that strangers tended to be noticed because there were so few people out here and anyone new obviously stood out, it was equally true that there were places a fugitive could hide where no one would ever see him. The last concrete information Perris had was of a sighting in Santa Fe perhaps a year or so back and a conversation where Curtis talked about moving west to ranch sheep. That could have meant anywhere, but careful attention to the recent migration of settlers led him to believe that his quarry was somewhere in Arizona.

He had some unexpected luck in Prescott. At a cowboy bar on the row, he heard tell of a nearby valley where several sheep ranchers had been putting down stakes over the past few years. Curtis wasn't there, but one of the hands knew where he was. Perris had to beat the information out of him-being a Ranger didn't carry much weight in these parts, not with these people-but the man finally admitted that he'd worked with Curtis back in Santa Fe and had helped him buy the sheep for his new place up on the Mogollon Rim.

Perris cursed and spat. The Mogollon was east toward New Mexico, at least two days' ride from here. Not long, really, in the scheme of things, but any backtracking felt to him like a waste of time and only rubbed in the fact that he had missed his man the first time through.

Only, he consoled himself, that wasn't exactly the case. He'd come into Arizona from the south. The Mogollon was a good two hundred miles north of that, and it wasn't reasonable to have expected him to canvas the whole eastern border of the territory. Still, he couldn't help second ­guessing himself and thinking that if he'd just headed west from Santa Fe instead of taking that Tucson trail, this whole ordeal would be over with by now.

How would it be over, though? He'd imagined all the different outcomes many times in his head, had played out the scenarios so often that he knew them by heart, yet he still didn't know how it was going to end. Not really. He knew how he wanted it to end, but that was so at odds with his duty as a Ranger that it tied his stomach up in knots just thinking about it.

For two days, he followed a trail that turned out not to be a trail, that faded away into nothing on a grassy ridgecrest above a deep rocky canyon. He was sure that he'd been steered wrong by the ranch hand on purpose-and had half a mind to go back there and beat the man within an inch of his life-but Perris could see the Mogollon from here and knew he could reach it by tomorrow, and as long as that information turned out straight, he could forgive such a trespass.

He slept that night on a flat rock in a forest of pines, using his saddlebag as a pillow. Smoking, staring up at the sky, he thought about all of the men he'd brought in, all of the outlaws he'd captured. He felt good about what he'd done and was proud of his work. Once the Curtis problem was solved he'd feel even better. No one else seemed to give a damn anymore, but he considered it a black mark on his record, and he wouldn't rest easy until the man was brought to justice.

An owl hooted, flew above his head. He watched it tree in a ponderosa. He remembered the very first manhunt he'd been on, searching the bottom lands for a coward who'd killed a little girl to shut her up after the unspeakable things he'd done to her. There'd been a team of Rangers looking for the man, but it was Perris who'd found him huddled at the base of a cottonwood, cradled in the tree's massive exposed roots like a baby. He'd wanted nothing more than to shoot the killer where he lay, but he'd restrained himself and taken him to jail instead.

Would he make the same decision now?

He didn't know.

He thought not.

In the morning, he awoke with the animals, before the sun. Supplies were running low, so he had some hard biscuit softened with water and a few pinyones he'd gathered the night before. He had the makings for coffee, but he was alert enough as it was and didn't want to waste time. Today was the day, and he was anxious to be off. By tonight it will be over, he thought, and the realization sent an unfamiliar tingle down his spine.

It took him most of the morning to cross the series of small hills that led up to the base of the Rim, but from the last one, the tallest one, he spotted a telltale plume of chimney smoke a short ways up ahead. It could be campfire smoke, he told himself. Or it could be someone else.

But he knew that wasn't the case.

It was Curtis.

Now that his prey was finally in his sights, Perris approached slowly, carefully, not taking a straight tack through the trees but riding south, then east, then north. A man like Curtis was dangerous when cornered. And he was a Ranger, too, so he knew all the tricks of the trade. Perris would have to be at his best in order to maintain the element of surprise that would be his best weapon. It had been a long time, and if he was lucky the man would be unprepared, but in his experience a fugitive was never completely relaxed and even while sleeping kept one eye open. It would be hard to get to the man without him knowing.

Perris had hoped to find Curtis living in a cabin in a clearing, but of course as a sheep rancher he needed more room than that. So Perris was disappointed but not surprised to find that the forest ended and a long plain stretched east along the base of the Mogollon. In the center stood a house, a barn, a corral.

There was nothing for it. He would have to approach head-on, and he drew his pistol as he spurred the horse to a gallop.

The sound carried, bounced off the rock walls of the Rim, and it brought out two figures: a man and a woman. Perris' heart thudded in his chest as the hooves of his horse thundered over the hardpacked earth. He expected to see the man raise a shotgun he'd been hiding or dash for the house or barn to get one, but instead he remained standing, watching, protectively putting his arm around the woman as Perris drew closer.

A look of recognition and contempt crossed the man's features when he finally saw who it was.

Perris pulled on the reins, brought the horse to a dancing stop. He was still holding the pistol, and he dismounted, leveling it at his quarry. "Tim Curtis," he said with all the gravity of the Rangers behind him.

Curtis shook his head. "Frank," he said. It was almost an admonition.

He motioned with the gun. "Move away from her."

"No."

"Now. "

Annie glared at him, and Perris tried to ignore her. "You know what you've done. Don't make it worse."

"We're married," Curtis said. "Why won't you leave us alone? We've been married five years now. We have children. We have a life."

"Father and mother gave their blessing," Annie spat out. "The whole family carne to the wedding except you. Now you tracked us down all the way to the wilds of Arizona? You're... you're crazy!"

Something hardened within him at those words. Not only had Curtis stolen his sister, but he'd turned her against him, her own brother. "A Ranger..." he began.

"I'm not a Ranger," Curtis said. "1 quit that life. I'm a rancher now. I raise sheep."

"You can't quit being-"

"Leave us alone!" Annie screamed. Her face turned red with the effort, the muscles in her neck bulging, veins visible in her forehead. She looked crazy, he thought.

Perris kept the gun level. "He has to pay for what he's done," he told his sister. "He has to be brought to justice."

"What has he done? Huh? Tell me what he's done!"

"Tell me, too," Curtis said. "Then we'll all know."

Perris moved closer, keeping his eyes on his sister. Anger had distorted her features. It reminded him of how she had looked in the throes of passion, when he had come upon them back in Laredo and Curtis had been on top of her. In his mind, he saw her face, sweating, contorted, her eyes rolled upward, her mouth open and screaming but not with pain. As at the time, he was filled with rage, a red hot anger that caused him to quiver all over and filled him with the desire to kill.

"I know what you really want!" Annie shouted. "You think I don't? You think we all don't? Even father told me you-"

He slapped her then, just to shut her up, and it felt good. Her cheek was warm against his hand, and he could see an imprint of his palm on her soft white skin.

He heard crying off to his left and turned to see two young girls huddled in the open doorway of the house. They looked so much like Annie when she was a child that he thought his heart might break.

"Go inside, girls," Curtis said firmly. "Play with your dolls. Don't come out or even look out here until I tell you you can."

"Daddy? one of them said.

"Go inside, filly."

Perris backed up.

Annie was scowling at him, but Curtis held out his hands, trying to appeal to his better nature. "Look, Frank. We don't want no trouble. Why don't you stay with us a few days, we'll all have a nice time, and then you can go back to Texas..."

"He's crazy!" Annie shouted.

He shot them both. Him first, two slugs in the chest that spun him around until he fell backward where he stood, then her, straight through the stomach, red blossoming on the white linen like a rose.

The girls screamed from the doorway of the house, twin cries of hopeless anguish that pierced the air and seemed to grow out of the last fading echoes of gunshot. He'd been through this often enough that he knew what to expect, but no fists came to beat on his back, no one threw themselves on the bodies. The two stayed inside like their daddy had told them.

Good girls, he thought.

Perris holstered his pistol, turned toward the house. In the doorway, a face backed into blackness rabbit fast. He almost ordered them out, but they'd been through a lot today, and he took pity on them. He walked into the small log structure and found them huddled in the far corner. They both flinched when he approached, but he crouched down next to them and gave them his warmest smile. "I'm your uncle Frank," he said. "I'll be taking care of you now."

Both of them burst into tears.

They looked just like Annie, he thought again.

Something stirred within him.

He picked up the crying girls and hugged them tight. Come on," he said. "Let's go home."

Copyright(c) 2006 by Bentley Little

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