“Don’t matter,” Manuel insisted. “Just terminate him and it don’t matter.”
“Yeah.”
Bivar took off his elegant panama hat in a generous, sweeping gesture, half bowing toward the lone man, bringing it back across his body.
“Soon,” J.B. breathed.
“This run too long. You give me two choices. I give you one choice, my one-eyed friend. Mebbe you like to know what that one choice is?”
“Not particularly,” Ryan replied. Though he stood behind the wall, looking calm and relaxed, every muscle of his body was taut and tense.
“I tell you.” Now the hat was over Bivar’s lap, covering his right hand and the butt of the Smith amp; Wesson 66. “Bring your people and every one of these shit-suckin’ natives out here before I count to ten, or you all die. That’s the choice of Rodrigo Bivar. One, two, three, four”
At the count of four his hand moved quickly under the cover of the panama and emerged with the big blaster, and he started shooting at Ryan.
Chapter Thirty-One
At the first fraction of a movement from the slavers’ leader, Ryan was already in motion, his honed reflexes saving his life yet again.
He hadn’t needed the warning from J.B. Anyone who took off his hat when you were facing him down was going to use it as cover or as a distraction.
So eager was he to blast the cool smile off the face of the tall, powerful gringo that he actually blew a hole the size of a .357 round clear through the elegant rim of his ribboned panama.
The bullet went close, striking the top of the wall within inches of where Ryan had been standing, blasting a hole in the adobelike mixture, sending splinters of stone whining through the morning air.
The firefight lasted less than fifteen minutes from that explosive moment.
The first of the defenders to open fire on the slavers was a tall native whose name was Carrying Moon. He had an arrow notched to his long hunting bow and aimed at the leader of the attackers. But Bivar’s horse shifted nervously at the sound of its master’s shot, and the arrow missed its mark.
However, it buried itself in the neck of the man beyond Bivar. The arrow was loosed with such ferocious force that it entered just above the right shoulder, the barbed point continuing on to protrude several inches through the left side of the slaver’s throat. After that first death, there were so many others.
THE UZI CHATTERED, ripping into men and horses, sending them all down in the trampled dirt in a kicking, screaming maelstrom of blood.
Mildred had appeared at a window of one of the huts, standing in the classic pose of the professional shootist, side on, right arm extended, sighting with both eyes open along the barrel of the Czech ZKR 551 6-shot target revolver. She pumped the Smith amp; Wesson .38s into the heart of the gang, picking her victims with patient calm, making sure that every shot counted.
Six bullets and six men dead, all taken through the head, skulls exploding in a mist of gray-pink brains and fragments of bone and matted hair.
The other members of the group of friends were all playing their part in the carnage. Krysty stood on the other side of Ryan, with Dean next to her. Doc was on the far end of the line, having fired off the scattergun round of the engraved Le Mat, muttering under his breath as he fiddled about changing the position of the firing hammer. Jak, hair blazing like a distress flare, stood with legs apart, pumping lead into the slavers from his own Colt Python.
And the natives had appeared from their hiding places, using arrows and darts.
It was a perfect ambush.
BIVAR WAS LOST in a turbulence of mindless horror.
All around him men were dying, their horses screaming in fear and falling. Old Pedro had been alongside him, leaning from the saddle and yelling out a question. Then his face had blown up like a watermelon under a jackhammer, and Rodrigo’s own head and shoulders had been soaked in a hot, salty brew of blood and brains.