Читать книгу Dead Men Don't Lie - Jackson Cain - Страница 24

Chapter 13

Slater and Moreno sat under the lean-to over the front of the mine. The year before Moreno had buried a cache of mining tools and fishing gear near it. This time they’d buried the money they’d stolen—almost $150,000.

Twenty miles away was a Yaqui village, where Moreno could purchase provisions with no questions asked. On the way up, they’d bought bags of beans, dried tortillas, chili peppers, and a dozen quarts of tequila. They’d used their old pesos.

The first week they spent chopping wood until they had stacks of shoring timbers and firewood near the opening to the mine. They had also killed a deer and an antelope, and one of the venison quarters was now hanging in a makeshift smokehouse. Made out of a pole tripod wrapped with deerskins, it looked like a crude tepee. The green-wood fire at its base was smoking the haunch that hung above it.

A large slab of antelope was hanging on a green-wood spit over the fire. Periodically Slater or Moreno turned it over. Off to the side, a pot of corn, beans, rabbit, wild turkey, and venison, tomatoes, and red chilis boiled, as did a fire-blackened pot filled with coffee. Mostly, however, the two men focused on the mess cups of tequila.

“Well, amigo,” Moreno asked. “Is this place not the paradise I promised?”

“The game, the fishing, the indias chiquitas if we want them,” Slater said. “It’s everything you said.”

“So why are you grim? What is so malo [so bad]?”

“That damn mine you’re so obsessed with. It’s snakebit.”

Moreno stared at Slater, silent.

“The rock is too brittle to tunnel through,” Slater explained. “Shoring timbers don’t help. Look what happened to los indios help we hired. They died under cave-ins.”

“We can always find more indios,” Moreno said. “Méjico’s got plenty of indios.”

“Not at the rate that mine is killing them.”

“Torn, we get some gold, we can take all the time in the world figurin’ what to do with that bank’s money.”

“Remember what happened when Ojo Serpiente [Snake Eye] went in two weeks ago. He died in a cave-in, buried alive.”

“One accident.”

“Then, El Mustang. The methane got him. When that damn gas isn’t poisoning us, it’s catching fire and incinerating everything in its path. How many mine fires have we had?”

“But we got a fortune in gold in that mine. I saw the main vein—oro puro [100 percent gold]—the real thing.”

“Tell that to Cuervo Rojo [Red Crow].”

“Fuck him.”

“And what happened to him?” Slater asked, grimacing.

Luis looked away, silent.

“Trapped under a ton of deadfall, a whole mountain’s worth of rock.”

Slater even shuddered at the thought.

Still Moreno leaned forward and fixed his friend with a tight stare.

“But you ain’t listenin’, amigo. I just told you I seen the vein. A drift of solid gold a foot thick and running only God knows how far and long. Enough oro to buy Sinaloa and Sonora. We could own Méjico!”

“We already got seventy-five thousand dollars apiece. We don’t need any more.”

“And if we spend one centavo of that money, we get all the armies of Méjico and Norteamérica coming down on us like rockslides. That’s Díaz’s money we stole.”

“That ain’t a mine, Moreno. It’s an open grave. You go in it, it’s your grave.”

“I’m going back in. I’m not walkin’ away from a fortune in gold.”

“Then you’re goin’ in alone. I tell you that hole is cursed, and I’m takin’ off. I’m not hangin’ around here to watch you die.”

“Then adiós—vaya con Dios, old friend.”

“Y diablo [and the devil],” Slater said.

Luis Moreno turned his back on Slater, picked up his pick, and headed into the mine.

Without looking back.