Chapter 19 - The Reckoning on the Ridge
"Morrison!" I shouted, the fury that had simmered in my blood for ten years finally boiling over into the cold mountain air. "Step out from behind your hired killers! Let's settle the debt for my brother right here!"
Morrison didn't answer with words. He pointed his revolver down toward the fallen log where Zora and Taza were hidden.
"Kill the girl first!" he shouted to his remaining gunman. "Don't let her burn the papers!"
The last mercenary—a hulking man with a matted black beard—rose from his nest with a double-barreled shotgun, turning his back on me to charge downhill toward the log.
I stepped out from behind my stump, raised the Winchester to my shoulder, and took two steady breaths.
The front sight settled squarely between the man’s shoulder blades.
I pulled the trigger.
The Winchester kicked. The mercenary stumbled, took two awkward, running steps forward, and collapsed face-down into the soft carpet of pine needles, the shotgun discharging harmlessly into the sky as he fell.
Silas fired again from the rocks, his bullet chipping the granite inches from Morrison’s boot.
Morrison turned, his face twisted in a mask of panic and hatred. He saw his two hired guns dead on the slope; he saw Silas reloading with cold, mechanical precision; and he saw me walking steadily up the hill toward him, levering a fresh cartridge with every step.
He didn't fight. The arrogance that had ruled the valley of Red Creek vanished the moment he stood alone without an army of deputies to protect him. He scrambled back up the rocky crest toward his tethered horse, desperate to escape down the northern trail.
I dropped the empty Winchester, drew my skinning knife from my belt, and climbed the steep slope like a man possessed.
When I crested the ridge, Morrison was struggling to mount his lathered stallion, his boots slipping on the pine needles, his silver revolver shaking violently in his fist.
"Stay back, Adam!" he shrilled, backing his horse against a sheer granite wall. "I'll give you half the valley! I have twenty thousand dollars in gold in the bank at Prescott! It's yours—all of it! Just give me the ledger!"
"My brother didn't want your gold, Captain," I said, walking toward him, my voice dangerously calm. "He just wanted to raise his crops in peace. You took his land, you took his pride, and you left him to die in the gutter."
"That was business!" Morrison screamed, raising the revolver with both hands. "This territory belongs to men who know how to build an empire, not dirt farmers and savages!"
He fired.
The bullet grazed my shoulder, tearing through the meat of my trapezius, but the pain was nothing compared to the cold fire in my chest. I closed the distance before he could cock the hammer again, catching his wrist in an iron grip and slamming it against the granite face until the nickel-plated gun clattered down into the ravine below.
Morrison lunged for my throat, clawing like a wildcat, but he had spent ten years sitting behind mahogany desks while I had spent ten years swinging sledgehammers in railroad camps and cutting timber in the high country.
I caught him by the collar of his fine broadcloth coat, spun him around, and slammed him hard against the rock.
His breath exploded from his lungs. He slid down the stone face, landing heavily on his knees, his expensive silk tie torn, his face smeared with sweat, soot, and mountain dirt.
He looked up at me, gasping for air, the cold certainty of death finally dawning in his eyes.
"Go ahead," he whispered, a bitter, trembling sneer curling his lip. "Shoot me. You'll swing from the gallows at Whipple for murder."
I stood over him, my chest heaving, the blood from my shoulder dripping down my sleeve and falling onto his polished leather boots.
From behind me on the trail came the soft crunch of moccasins on pine needles.
Zora walked up to the crest of the ridge. She was breathing hard, the heavy Colt held loosely in her right hand, her left wrist still bound in white linen. She looked down at the man who had ordered her father killed, who had starved her people in the desert, and who had hunted her brother like a stray dog.
She did not raise the gun.
She pulled the small, battered leather ledger from beneath her shawl and dropped it into Morrison’s lap.
"Look at it, Captain," she said in English, her voice steady and clear as mountain ice.
Morrison looked down at the book with trembling fingers. He opened the cover.
The pages were blank.
Every single leaf had been torn out, leaving only the empty leather binding and the threads of the spine.
Morrison’s jaw dropped, his face turning an ash-gray color. "Where... where are the records?"
"Silas took them out two days ago," I said, stepping back from him. "A cavalry patrol from Fort Whipple met Silas’s courier at the stage station yesterday morning. Right now, a federal marshal is riding into Red Creek with fifty warrants for your arrest, your deputies, and every land deed you ever filed in Yavapai County."
Morrison stared at the empty binding, his whole body shaking as the realization crushed him. He had chased shadows through the Malpais, lost his hired killers, and destroyed his own empire—for a handful of empty leather.
"You're done, Morrison," I told him. "We're leaving you your horse, your canteen, and ten miles of mountain to ride. If the federal marshal doesn't find you first, the Apaches in the lower canyon surely will."
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We turned our backs on him, leaving the tyrant of Red Creek kneeling in the dirt among the scattered pine needles, clutching an empty book to his chest like an old beggar.
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