Valdez Is Coming by Elmore Leonard Page B

said. “I’m careful. I wonder when I see a man crawl in half dead.”
    Valdez handed the cup to the girl. “Have you got some whiskey?”
    “Mescal.”
    “Mescal then.”
    “You haven’t eaten yet.”
    “I want to sleep, not eat,” Valdez said. “In the back of your wagon when you take me to Lanoria.”
    “Stay here, you be better.”
    “No,” Valdez said. “You said they come by here. Maybe they come by again.”
    “Maybe they know where you live too.”
    “I’m not going where I live.” He motioned Diego Luz closer and whispered to him as his children and his wife and his wife’s mother watched.
    Diego Luz straightened, shaking his head. “Half dead and you want to go to that place.”
    “Half alive,” Valdez said. “There is a difference.”
     
     
    Diego Luz brought him in through the kitchen at almost four in the morning. Valdez had passed out in the wagon, his wound beginning to bleed again. But as they dragged him up the stairs and along the dark hallway, Diego Luz and the large woman, Inez, supporting him between them, he hissed at them. “God dam , put my arms down!”
    “We carry you and you swear at us,” Inez hissed back.
    “God and St. Francis, put me down!”
    “Now he prays,” Inez said. She opened a door, and inside they lowered him gently to the bed, settling him on his stomach and hearing him let out his breath. Inez bent over him, lifting his shirt to look at the bloodstained bandage.
    “In the back,” she said. “The only way you could kill this one.” She looked at Diego Luz. “Who shot him? I didn’t hear anything.”
    “A tree,” Diego Luz said. “Listen, get something to clean him and talk after.”
    Valdez heard the woman close the door. He was comfortable and he knew he would be asleep again in a moment. He said, “Hey,” bringing Diego Luz close to the side of the bed. “I’m going to leave you everything I have when I die.”
    “You’re not going to die. You got a little cut.”
    “I know I’m not going to die now. I mean when I die.”
    “Don’t talk about it,” Diego Luz said.
    “I leave you everything I have if you do one more thing for me, all right?”
    “Go to sleep,” Diego Luz said, “and shut up for a while.”
    “If you get me something from my room at the boardinghouse.”
    “You want me to go now?”
    “No, this time of night that old lady’ll shoot you. During the day. Tomorrow.”
    “What is it you want?”
    “In the bottom drawer of the dresser,” Valdez said. “Everything that’s there.”
     
     
    Goddam, he wished he could tell somebody about it.
    R. L. Davis stood at the bar in the Republic Hotel drinking whiskey. He didn’t have anything to do. He’d been fired for not being where he was supposed to be, riding fence and not riding all over the goddam country, Mr. Malson had said. He’d told Mr. Malson he’d gone to see Diego Luz about a new horse, but Mr. Malson didn’t believe him, the tight-butt son of a bitch. Sure he had gone off to Tanner’s place to see about working for him, figuring the chance of getting caught and fired was worth it. What surprised him was Tanner not hiring him. Christ, he could shoot. Probably good or better than any man Tanner had. He saw himself riding along with Tanner’s bunch, riding into Lanoria, stampeding in and swinging down in front of the Republic or De Spain’s.
    He could go over to De Spain’s. At least he’d been paid off. Maybe there was somebody over there he could tell. God, it was hard to keep something that good inside you. But he wasn’t sure how everybody would take it, telling how he’d pushed Valdez over like a goddam turtle in the sun. The segundo had mentioned the turtle and it had given him the idea, though he thought one of Tanner’s men would do it first.
    Maybe if he told Tanner what he did—
    No, Tanner would look at him and say, “You come all the way out here to tell me that?”
    He was a hard man to talk to. He looked right through you without