Rivera nodded. “This time he’s played right into our hands.”
“It’s too easy,” Dillinger said.
“You give Ortiz too much credit,” Rivera said.
Chavasse shook his head. “I agree. It does sound too easy.” He turned to Nachita. “Ortiz knows we’re following. How can we hope to surprise him?”
The old Apache permitted himself one of his rare smiles. “There are ways, but we must wait and see. First I shall scout the trail.” He mounted his pony and rode away.
Dillinger got the canteen from the back seat and offered it to Rose. She drank, then he did. As he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, he noticed that she was looking at him in a different way.
“Johnny,” she said. “Your friend Fallon knew who you really are. Now the only one is Rivera. If your enemy knows, shouldn’t a friend know?”
Dillinger looked at her eyes, the feature that had first attracted him to her. Would the truth blow everything up?
“Come on, Rose,” he said matter-of-factly, “you know who I am.”
“I know you robbed banks up North. I know you are too familiar with guns. The Federalistas are looking for this car, but who are you?”
Women always find out, sooner or later. He knew that. “If Johnny is the first part,” she said, “is Dillinger the second?”
“You win the big prize.”
“If I had to fall in love with a thief, why not the best?”
“The best are the bankers. They steal from the people every day and get away with it.
When I unload them once in a while, all it does is raise their insurance rates a bit. It doesn’t stop them from stealing.”
“You are justifying breaking the law because others break the law, too?”
“That’s the whole point, Rose. Those bastards don’t break the law, they steal legally. We break the law taking it away from them. Is your uncle any different from a bank robber?”
“Yes,” she said.
Was she challenging him? “How?”
“He’s worse. To him, killing is a normal part of business, of getting what he wants.”
“Yet you talk to him like there was nothing ever bad between you.”
“Only until Juanita is found.”
“And then?”
“I must see if I have caught a thief.”
It was perhaps half an hour later that Dillinger saw the old man galloping toward him, and he braked to a halt. Nachita pulled up alongside.
“I have found them,” Nachita said. “Follow me slowly.”
There was a place in the distance where a narrow spine of rock ran out into the desert like a causeway. As they approached, the old man led the way to the shelter of a narrow ravine. Dillinger killed the engine.
Nachita dismounted from his horse and started up the steep slope. Dillinger and Rose followed.
It was hard going, and the old man pulled him down just before they reached the top.
“Careful, now.”
They stayed in the cover of a dead pine, and Dillinger peered over. Several hundred yards away a ridge lifted out of the ground, dipping in toward the mountain.
Nachita said, “The ruins and the well are on the other side in a hollow.”
“You’re sure they are there?”
“There is a sentry posted in the hillside in a mesquite thicket below the first gully. An open attack would be useless.”
Rose said, “Why attack, anyway? Can’t we just negotiate whatever it is Ortiz wants for the child?”
Nachita paused before answering. “It is possible,” he said, “that I can approach their camp openly. I can cry out to the sentry from cover, say I am Nachita come to powwow with Ortiz.”
“What would happen?” Dillinger asked.
“Ortiz would either kill me or powwow.”
“We can’t take that chance,” Rose said.
“Even if we were to talk,” Nachita said, “Ortiz is likely to ask for something we cannot give him.”
“Like what?” Dillinger asked.
“Rivera’s life.” Nachita sighed. “We will wait for the others.
Dillinger, sitting on the running board of the Chevy next to Rose, could see them coming for quite some distance. For the moment there was only the heat and the desert. A small green lizard appeared from the bush a few feet away, life in a dead world. He watched it for a while. It disappeared with extraordinary rapidity as the others rode up.