Elmore Leonard: Valdez Is Coming

The segundo said, “You think he doesn’t want to sleep? Man, he has to stay awake, doesn’t he? He got to watch the woman, he got to watch for us. Man, ask him what it’s like to be tired.”

Two of the riders were American and one Mexican, the Mexican a young man who had been hired only a few months before by the segundo.

One of the Americans said it was none of their business. And the segundo said maybe not, but look, the sooner they caught this crazy man the sooner they could ride to Mexico and have a good time.

“You want some fresh water, uh?” the segundo said. “Don’t you think he want some fresh water?”

“If he know where it was,” one of the Americans said.

“Listen, when are you going to understand what kind of man he is?” the segundo said. “Sure he’s crazy, but he knows what he’s doing. You think he come down this way if he don’t know there’s water? Where it is? He’s not that crazy.”

“Well, him knowing doesn’t help us,” the other American said.

The segundo took his hat off and wiped his forehead with his sleeve and set the Sonora hat over his eyes again. He shook his head and said to the man, “Where do I get people like you? You think I work around here six years I don’t know where the goddam water is? What kind of segundo doesn’t know where the water is?”

“Well, let’s go get it,” the rider said.

Emilio Avilar, the segundo, smiled. “Sure, I thought that was what you want.”

A little later that morning, watering their horses at the pool, the cliffs and sloping canyon walls reflected in the still water, the three riders looked at the segundo and the segundo smiled again. God, there were fresh tracks all over the place close to the bank, two horses and two people: no doubt about it, a man and a woman. They filled their canteens and wiped down their horses and at this moment were willing to follow the segundo anyplace he wanted to go. Hell, let’s get him!

“Which way would you go?” the segundo asked.

“Follow their tracks.”

“But that take too long,” the segundo said. “What if we know where they going?”

“How could you figure that?”

“Two days ago,” the segundo said, “he told Senor Tanner to approach the two peaks. You remember?” He lifted his gaze. “We come from a different way now, but there are the two peaks. Why should he change his mind and not go there? The only difference is now he don’t have so much time.”

The two American riders thought about it and nodded and one of them said, “What’s up there?”

The segundo answered, “We find out.”

This is all, he thought, watching the three men move out, slouched in their saddles, heads bobbing, sweat staining a column down their spines. No more. He watched them another moment before calling out, “Hey, Tomas!” The riders looked around and the young Mexican he had hired a few months before reined in to wait for him.

In Spanish the segundo said, “You have a ride the other way. Bring Senor Tanner.”

The young Mexican picked up his reins, getting ready. “How will I know where to bring him?”

“You’ll hear us,” the segundo said.

The twin peaks reached above them, beyond the slope that was swept with owl clover and cholla brush, beyond the scrub oak and dark mass of timber, stone pinnacles against the sky, close enough to touch in the clean, clear air.

“Up there,” Valdez said. “We go through the trees and come out in a canyon. At the end of the canyon is a little trail that goes up through the rocks and passes between the two peaks and down the other side. You stand in there and look straight up and the peaks look like they’re moving in the wind.”

The Erin woman’s eyes were half closed in the glare; she shielded her eyes with her hand.

“Once we go through there, we see if we can make a slide to block the trail,” Valdez said. “Then we don’t hurry anymore. We take our time because it takes them a few days to find a way around.”

Her gaze lowered and she looked at him now. “A few days. Is that all we’ll have?”

“It’s up to us,” Valdez said. “Or it’s up to him. We can go to Mexico. We can go to China if there’s a way to go there. Or we can go to Lanoria.”

“Where do you want to go?” she asked him.

“To Lanoria.”

“He’ll come for us.”

“If he wants to,” Valdez said. “I run today, but not forever. Today is enough.”

“Whatever you want to do,” the Erin woman said, “I want to do.”

Valdez looked at her and wanted to reach over to touch her hair and feel the skin of her sun-darkened cheek and move the tips of his fingers gently over her cracked lips. But he kept his hand in his lap, around the slender neck of the Remington.

He said, “If you want to go back now, you can. I let you go, you’re free. Go wherever you want. Tell him you got away from me.”

Next to him, sitting in their saddles, their legs almost touching, she said again, “Whatever you want to do.”

“We’ll go,” he said, reaching back and flicking the rope that trailed from his saddle to R. L. Davis’s sorrel horse.

They left the trail and started up across the slope on an angle, moving through the owl clover and around the cholla bushes that were like dwarf trees, Valdez leading, aware of the woman behind him, wanting to turn to look at her, but only glancing at her as his gaze swept the hillside and back the way they had come.

Roberto Valdez kept watch up the slope and Bob Valdez, inside him, pictured the woman coming out of an adobe into the front yard: a place like Diego Luz’s, alone in the high country, but larger than Diego’s, with glass in the windows and a plank front porch beneath the ramada. The woman in a white dress open at the throat and her hair hanging below her shoulders, her hair shining in the sunlight. He would be coming up from the horse pasture and see her and she would raise her arm to wave. God, he would like to ride up to her, twisting out of the saddle, and take hold of her with her arm still raised, his hands moving under her arms and around her and hold her as tightly as a man can hold a woman without injuring her. But he would stop at the pump and have a drink of water and wash himself and then go to the yard, walking his horse, because he would have the rest of his life to do this.

As Bob Valdez pictured this, finally reaching the yard and the woman, Roberto Valdez saw the riders far below them starting across the slope in single file. Six of them and three horses in a string.

Valdez took the field glasses from his saddlebag. He picked out Frank Tanner and R. L. Davis. He saw them looking up this way and saw one of the men pointing, saying something.

Come on, Valdez thought, as they spread apart now and spurred their horses up through the brush. When you get here we’ll be gone. But still watching them, counting them again, he thought, If Tanner is here, where is his segundo?

Emilio Avilar watched from above, from the shadowed edge of the timber.

They had the man almost in their sights, Valdez coming across the slope through the scrub oak, leading the horse and the woman behind him, coming at a walk and angling directly toward them, walking into their guns, and now Tanner the Almighty, the white barbarian, had ruined the ambush and was running him again.

God, the man would have been dead in a moment, shot out of his saddle, but now with the woman behind him, kicking their mounts straight up the grade, Valdez had reached the top of the slope and was entering the timber. Not here, where the segundo had waited with his two Americans for almost an hour, but more than a hundred yards away: a last glimpse of Valdez and the woman disappearing into the trees.