Jacaranda by Cherie Priest Read Free Book Online Page A

the feel of a gunbelt slung around his pelvis, the weight of the firearms and the calluses they’d rub through his trousers, against his hipbones.
    “I don’t believe you. You are a liar, same as me.”
    “There’s nothing here for you. You left me once, so leave me again. The first time, it turned out to be a favor. Do it again, and I’ll remember you well. If you have any friends, they can bury you here in the yard. That’s all I have to offer.”
    “But people pay tithes. They pay their pennies to the church.”
    “Not very many. You could find more beside the road, lost by the stagecoach drivers. Search the place if you want, I don’t really care. I’m telling you the truth. You should try it sometime. I find it…liberating.”
    But Eduardo did not search the chapel. He turned on his heel and left.
     
    He did not return until mass, on the following Sunday.
    He did not return alone.
     
    Eduardo came back noisily this time, with twelve men at his side.
    They burst into the chapel together and fired their pistols into the ceiling, raining adobe and splinters down onto the people who came there to pray and be blessed. They strolled up and down the center aisle, and made sure everyone saw the guns—they pointed them at everyone, darting their aim back and forth, catching every terrified face for a second at a time.
    Old women huddled in their shawls; mothers clutched their children. Babies cried, startled by the sudden noise. Men looked wildly between the bandits and the door, and their wives and sons, and at the padre—who stood behind the altar.
    Juan Rios held a black-beaded rosary tangled in his fingers. He barely breathed.
    “Up,” Eduardo directed him, meaning he should raise his hands.
    Slowly, to demonstrate that he would not resist, he slipped the rosary around his neck and then lifted his hands, as instructed. “You’ve made some friends.”
    “Better friends. Stronger ones.”
    The padre nodded. So these were friends who had been bought, and could not be kept except with gold. He understood. Even if Eduardo had any lingering loyalties or leftover sentiment about the bad old days…his companions had no such softness about them.
    His eyes flickered to Anna Perez, bobbing gently back and forth. Praying. Her hair fallen across her face. She was beautiful, and she did not want these men to see her; she was young, but she understood plenty about how the world worked. In the last row, the Garcia twins—eleven years old, had been sent to pray for their aunt. Both of them radiated panic and a desire to run for the door, but the padre knew they’d never reach it. Down front was the widow Santos, ninety years old. Frail and shaking, wearing a silver locket with a snippet of her husband’s hair. She was also wearing a wedding band worth more than anything else in the church, except perhaps Juan Rios’s fancy guns.
    Which were in the altar.
    They were wrapped in his dead brother’s shirt, still stained with old, dry blood, lying atop a box that held a tooth and a knuckle bone from a man who may have lived a thousand years ago, and may have died for Christ.
    He glanced down at the nook. He masked it by briefly closing his eyes.
    No.
    The guns were not wrapped in the shirt. They were lying naked, back to back. Handle to handle.
    Did he do that? Before the mass? Before the bandits? After Eduardo’s visit, when he knew there was a very good chance they’d see one another again?
    Maybe then, in a half-dreaming state of habit, he had unwrapped the guns and readied them, loaded them. He had been the one to lay them out, and prepare them for service. Hadn’t he?
    Hadn’t he?
    Yes. No. He couldn’t remember.
    While the gunmen postured and preened, Rios lifted his gaze and looked from face to horrified face, along the rows of men and women seated on the rough-cut pews. He saw four families with nine children between them; one old man and three old women past the age of eighty; three maidens; half a dozen