Dead Men Don't Lie. Jackson Cain

hulking novitiates appeared at the pyramid’s base with the terrified wretch in hand. Partially flayed by the Grand Inquisitor, he was almost too weakened to resist. But one glimpse of the priests—their knives, the stone—and he was a raving madman with the strength of the demented.

      The Señorita had chosen her spot on the pyramid well. Her ex-lover was about to be dragged, kicking and screaming, past her on his way up the terraced steps to the sacrificial stone. In fact, he was so close she could discern his whip welts, burns, knife slashes, his missing teeth and fingernails, to say nothing of large swaths of stripped-away skin. From the way his right arm was bent and pressed against his chest, she inferred that her Inquisitor had dislocated that shoulder, probably on the strappado or the rack.

      There. They were dragging him up the first step less than ten feet from her.

      “Ey, hombre!” she yelled at him.

      Recognizing her voice, he abruptly turned his head and stared straight into her eyes. The shock of recognition shook him to his core.

      “Why are you doing this to me?” he shouted at her. “What did I do to you?”

      She quickly crossed the short distance between them. The priests, sensing who she was, quickly stopped on the fourth step. Mounting that step, she leaned toward the captain, her mouth and eyes bursting into a blazing sunburst of a smile. When the two of them were nose to nose, eyes locked, she said:

      “You were a truly terrible fuck.” The Lady Dolorosa spoke softly, her smile still grand and glorious. Looking back at her new major—a man whose name she also could not, did not, remember and would never remember—and staring him straight in the eye, she grinned condescendingly and said: “Got the picture, puto? You comprende? That’s what happens to hombres who can’t cut it between the sheets.”

      Chapter 3

      The big man in the black Plainsman hat with the flat crown and broad uncreased brim stared into the campfire. Dropping to one knee, he fed several dried-out cottonwood branches into the blaze, warmed his hands, and then drank some more mezcal out of the neck of the bottle.

      “We gonna take that bank, Torn?” the man on his right said.

      Slater passed the bottle to his friend and nodded slowly. He’d done time with Moreno in the Sonoran Pit—arguably the worst of Méjico’s many despicable slave-labor prison mines—for three long years, and he trusted him. They’d been through hell together, and Luis did every minute of it standing straight up. If he couldn’t rely on the man here on the outside, he couldn’t rely on anyone, and Slater couldn’t take down major banks and payroll trains all by himself. Even worse, since Slater was wanted in thirteen states and territories, as well as the states of Sonora, Sinaloa, and Chihuahua, and had the same $20,000 price on his head in both the U.S. and Méjico, trust was a luxury he couldn’t usually afford.

      But for three years, he and Moreno had survived that prison hellhole together, and afterward they’d robbed banks and trains together. Yes, Moreno was a man you could ride the river with.

      Their third man, Alberto Segundo, sitting on his saddle blanket by the staked-out horses and finishing his dinner, was another story. His older brother, Roberto, had been Moreno’s oldest friend, and that man had proven himself in the Sonoran Pit as well. He’d finally died there—trapped in a cave-in. Before he’d died, however, he’d convinced Moreno to take his little brother on a job, if they ever got out.

      And it turned out they needed Alberto. They were short a man, time was running out, the payroll was about to arrive at the bank, and so they’d taken him on. None of which meant they could rely on him. His appearance alone reeked of lifelong failure and bad mistakes: He was missing half his teeth and one eye. There was nothing anyone could do about that, but he was also a drunk, and he stank. They had to force him to wash himself, his clothes, and his long, straggly, stinking hair in the occasional stream. He couldn’t stop his almost insane boasting about how tough he was—how many federales he’d killed, how many banks he’d knocked over, and how many trains he’d robbed. Any man who bragged about such stuff to Outlaw Torn Slater was clearly . . . muy ignorante y muy maníaco.

      But they didn’t have time to find anyone else.

      “Think Alberto’ll hold up his end?” Slater asked.

      “All he has to do is guard those remounts for us up the trail.”

      “I wouldn’t trust him to carry a dozen tamales across the street.”

      “He’ll do it,” Luis said. “He’ll be there. If he isn’t there, he won’t get his end.”

      Slater stared at him, silent.

      “If he’s not there, Torn, we’ll hunt him down and kill him.”

      Torn Slater was still silent.

      “You want me to kill him, amigo? Now. Just say the word.”

      “Not yet. Maybe he’ll do his job.”

      “Stranger things have happened,” Moreno said, nodding his head.

      Slater looked away.

      “Ey, compadre,” Moreno said, smiling, hoping to lighten Slater’s mood. “What you want to do with your end?”

      Slater shrugged. “Same as always.”

      “What’s that?” Moreno said, genuinely curious.

      “Hard liquor, fast women, slow horses.”

      “And waste the rest?” Moreno said, finishing the rest.

      “Verdad.”

      “Then what?”

      “Rob every bank, fuck every woman, and kill every swingin’-dick, lawin’ sonofabitch that gets in my way.”

      “You left out trains,” Moreno said. “We blow them también.”

      “Trains too,” Slater said.

      Moreno shook his head sadly.

      “What’s wrong?” Slater asked.

      “Is that all you think about? ¿Pesos, gatito y muerta?” [“Money, pussy, and death?”]

      “What else is there?” Slater said. “We rob banks and trains for a living. We don’t live lives of fine distinction.”

      “But blood and putas, pesos and death, that ain’t no life for us—not siempre [forever] .”

      Slater allowed him a not-unfriendly smile. “We got tequila too.”

      Now Moreno looked away, shaking his head, unamused.

      “So what you wanna do with all this money?” Slater asked. “Invest it with El Presidente Porfirio or J. Pierpont Morgan? The Señorita? Try that and she’ll put us in one of her prison mines.”

      “I got nothing against mines. I got a mine up in the Sierra Madres—very remote. We take that bank money and head on up there. We pick up provisions along the way, and, when we get there, we bury the money nearby. We work the mine, sluice the streams, and when we get bored, we hunt game and we fish. They got deer, antelope, trout, and bass like you ain’t never seen in your life. In the nearby indios villages, they got muchas buenas indias puras if we want chiquitas. And who knows? Maybe we also take a fortune in oro puro [pure gold] out of that mine. Main thing is we don’t come down off that mountain till the federales forget who we are, forget what we did, and forget we’d ever been. Then we get ourselves a real life—one with no more banks to hit, no more trains to rob, and no more lawmen dogging our trail.”

      Slater stared at his amigo, silent.

      “Verdad? ” Moreno finally asked.

      “Verdad, but, amigo, we got one more bank to rob—tomorrow morning.”

      “But still, think about that mine, amigo, the hunting and fishing, the chiquitas?