The Man and The Outlaw

Chapter Twenty Three

Utter silence fell at the mention of The Outlaw. Clara wanted to laugh at the absurdity of the lie. Walker looked nothing like Valdez's wanted poster. He was almost the complete opposite. He had blue eyes, not green, his hair was light colored not dark, and his skin, although reddened from days of riding in the sun, had not even a hint of the olive hue that Valdez's did. Todd would never believe it and, even if he did, what would it succeed in but getting Walker killed faster?
Clara glanced up at their adversary, wanting to gauge how he would play this sudden interruption, and saw that he wasn't laughing like she thought he would be. Instead, he was staring down at them in utter disbelief, his face slack and his eyes bulged.
He couldn't possibly fall for that, she thought. We're not that lucky.
She noticed that the two men beside him were also staring as if a ghost had just appeared in front of them and tickled their noses. She didn't understand. Walker was not Hector Valdez. It was a ploy and an obvious one at that. She looked back at him to see what he thought of all this, and it was then that she realized that she knew nothing. It was then that she realized the truth for what it really was.
Walker's appearance was changing before their eyes. His features were becoming darker, his skin more shaded to match that olive color. Facial hair grew out of thin air, a mustache and scruff on his cheeks, the same facial hair that she had thought she'd seen on him before when they first met and then again in that hotel room in Kessinger, always in shadow and always gone again when she gave him a second glance. His pale blue eyes had darkened to a deep, piercing green.
He stood there, a stranger to her and yet she knew his face. She'd seen it many times on the Wanted posters and outlaw databases that she had scoured when she first decided to track him down. There was one in her saddlebags right now, wrinkled and creased from her studying it. Her own jaw fell slack at the sight of him, his true face, and her heart broke. It had all been a lie.
Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. For a moment, the whole world had seemed to stop dead. Clara felt suddenly sick, and she swayed on her feet as though she might faint. It couldn't be true. It didn't make sense and yet there he was standing before her. The man she had been hunting for six long months. The man she had wanted to face, to bring to justice, to see killed for his crimes. The man who had taken her father away from her. It couldn't be true. This man and Walker could not be the same. She could not...love the man who had taken away the only family she had left. She had been tricked again.
"The bounty on my head is forty-five thousand dollars. Surely, your revenge isn't worth that much to you," Hector (Walker) shouted up at Todd, breaking the silence and with it the spell that had fallen over them all. He refused to meet Clara's eye as she stared at him.
Todd smiled up above them. The initial shock of seeing one man transform into another was short lived. In a world full of people like Clara, it was pretty easy to wrap your head around things like that. The mention of money seemed to hurry his recovery along. Todd was a relatively wealthy man, but he was also very greedy. Any chance at furthering his fortune, and stealing a little glory in the process, was something he relished. The thought of bringing in The Outlaw Valdez had his mouth watering. And yet, he hesitated.
"Who's to say that I can't have both?" he proposed. "Who says I don't shoot you now, drag your body back for the bullet bounty, and take Clara with me just for fun?"
Hector shrugged easily. "You cut your reward by more than half if you do that. I'm worth more alive than dead and I know you're smart enough to see that forty-five thousand goes a lot further than twenty."
Todd frowned and reconsidered.
"So, I take you alive then. What's stopping me from taking her too?"
Hector laughed sharply, almost angrily. "Do I look like an idiot to you? What do you think I am, huh?"
He jerked one thumb at Clara, careful to keep his eyes on Todd.
"You know that neat little trick she's got, one that had you strutting around naked as the day you were born? Yeah, well I've got the same trick, but you don't see any marks on my neck, do you?"
Todd's eyes narrowed and he clenched his jaw as Hector continued.
"See, way I'm made, I don't have to give you the warning of opening my mouth before I pull the curtain on you." He tapped his right temple with one index finger, "I can put it right in your head and you can't stop me, short of putting a bullet in your own brain of course. That's how I've gotten away with things for so long, hiding in plain sight. Everybody thought I looked like somebody else, thought I was somebody else. I'd pull a job and I could practically vanish on the way out."
"Like a ghost," Clara muttered, her body numb. She was still reeling from the revelation that Walker and Hector were the same person, but she'd caught up to the conversation between he and Todd by then. She was still staring at Hector (Walker).
He gave her a glance at the sound of her voice, a look full of guilt, before refocusing on Todd who was now completely reevaluating his bargaining power. He stared hard at Hector, his finger twitching on the trigger of his gun. He didn't like the idea of anything that the curious outlaw had just told him. Things were not so neatly within his control as he had thought.
"Shoot him," the man on Todd's right said suddenly in a skittish voice. "He ain't worth the trouble. He'll trick you and we'll all end up dead."
"I'm not stupid enough to think that you'll ever give up chasing after Clara," Hector said quickly. "I could kill you, but I don't really like all that killing stuff. All I want is for you to let Clara leave here with her life and you promise to never go near her again. You do that for me, and I swear I'll go with you quiet as a mouse, no tricks."
"The word of a filthy outlaw isn't worth much," Todd mused skeptically.
Again, Hector shrugged, just like Walker always did.
"Knock me out, drug me, do whatever you've got to do, whatever you want. Just leave her be."
Clara watched all of this through an awestruck stupor. She had trusted Walker, believed him, cared for him even. How could he possibly be The Outlaw Valdez? How could he have tricked her so badly? Her mind raced as she thought back, connecting dots that she hadn't even realized existed before.
Hector's grandmother had mentioned his uncanny ability to get whatever he wanted out of her, even without saying a word. Clara had chalked it up to a cheeky, sweet-talking grandson getting the better of his grandmother as all grandchildren tended to do. "He could convince me of just about anything, even without saying a word sometimes" was what she'd said. It hadn't struck Clara as odd before, but if Hector was a silvertongue who didn't have to speak to use his abilities, then it made a whole lot more sense. Just like he'd said, it was easy for him to move from town to town after pulling jobs, blending in and falsifying himself to keep out of trouble long enough to get away. He'd had plenty of practice too, making the incredible focus needed to pull off such a complicated feat look easy.
Even figuring all this, Clara felt ashamed of herself for falling for it. She wondered, weakly, if everything had been a show, faked for her further entrapment in his little game. Had he merely used her to have a good old adventure, laughing at her gullibility behind her back every chance he got? Had kissing her been the final cruel joke to prove how far he could go with the charade? She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand as though she could erase their moment of intimacy as easily as that.
Her eyes drifted back to him, and she couldn't help staring again. His face, completely different now, still held some of the same characteristics that she'd noticed in their time together, the tilting up of the corners of his mouth as though he could break into a smile at any minute, the way he chewed at his bottom lip when idle time consumed him. He would not meet her eyes still, but she knew that if he did, the green color would not match the blues that she'd gotten used to, but they would hold that same cunning glint that she'd always noticed in them.
She remembered that night in Kessinger when he'd been so upset for her sake about the lobby man asking to see her marks. Had it all been anger at people who mistreated those like him, or had it really been for her? He had no marks to show his difference to the world and yet he had objected whole-heartedly to the forced display of her own. Could that have been one thing real? Could any of it have been real? What did he stand to gain by tricking her? What was the point? And, if he had meant only to trick her, why was he now offering himself to Todd in her place?
"Walker..." She couldn't think of anything more to say, and her voice faltered before she could even correct herself with his name.
He turned his newly green eyes on her at last and gave her a sad smile. Though his face was different, that smile, a smile she'd felt fall on her, warming her from the inside out many times since they'd met, was exactly the same as it always had been. She could almost forget that he was not who he'd said he was. Almost.
"I'm sorry I lied, Clara. I'm sorry about everything," he told her.
Clara's heart broke again as she thought once more about what his being Valdez really meant. She hadn't realized that she was crying. There was pain on Hector's face at the sight of her tears.
"My father," she moaned. "You killed my father?"
Her gut twisted as she said the words. She wanted to scream with the agony that filled her chest. She had fallen for all of it, right from the beginning. How could she have been so stupid? What would her father think of her now?
Hector swallowed hard and opened his mouth to speak...
Two shots rang out then, booming echoes through the ravine. Both Clara and Hector flinched, each of them bracing for an impact and immense pain. Instead of them, the two men accompanying Todd Pryor fell off their horses in unison, dead. Clara looked up at him in utter shock.
"You were right about one thing, Valdez. Forty-five grand goes a lot further than twenty and it goes even further when you're not splitting it three ways," Todd smirked mercilessly.
To Clara, he said, "As for your father, sweetheart, I'm afraid you can't blame the outlaw for that."
Clara felt her throat tighten and her heart nearly stopped as Todd got off his horse and stalked to the edge of the ravine above them, his gun still drawn on the both of them. There was no remorse in his face for what he'd just said, no guilt. He was still smirking, and he almost looked surprised that she hadn't already put the pieces together for herself.
"You?" Clara breathed, her voice trembling.
Todd laughed. Clara almost went for her gun just to shut him up.
"Of course, it was me," he snapped. "The old man was bound to hear about what happened between us, you made sure it wasn't a secret, and I knew that he'd be more than a little upset when he did. Fathers are such fools for their daughters."
"My father was not a fool," Clara snarled.
"I did what I needed to do to protect myself," he shrugged. "It only made it sweeter that you two were so close, that I knew it would almost kill you when you found out he was dead."
"You're a monster," Clara scowled, tears flowing down her cheeks as she struggled not to sob.
"Think of it as justice Clara, for what you did to me. You, of all people, can understand that, can't you?" he said. He leveled his gun at Hector's head then.
"I'll take your deal outlaw. Clara can go but you're coming with me."

Hector took several steps, passing close by Clara as started towards the inclining side of the ravine. Todd kept his pistol trained on him as he moved. Clara, almost instinctively, grabbed his arm as he moved beside her. He jumped at her touch.
"You can't," she murmured to him. It was not lost on her that their positions from earlier were now reversed. It was also not lost on her that, now that she knew who really killed her father, she was not so ashamed of the feelings for this man that still lingered inside her.
"It's alright Clara," he said, turning to face her one last time. "Let him take me back to Driscoll. He doesn't deserve the bounty, but you deserve a life without him in it. You'll be safe and that's what matters."
"If he takes you back to Driscoll, they'll send you to Spencer and you'll hang for all your thieving. You know that don't you?" she managed to say.
Hector gave her a knowing smile. His face, coated in sweat and dirt, was tired and worn, sun baked from time spent on the run. She could see the strength in him waning, the guilt of his life outside the law weighing heavily on him. He coughed a few times then and spat in the dirt.
"I never killed anybody just for killing," he told her in a soft, thoughtful voice. "I want you to know that, Clara. I never had the stomach for pulling the trigger first. But that doesn't make me a good guy and I deserve whatever punishment I get, same as he does. And he'll get his, I'm sure of it."
He jerked his head in Todd's direction scornfully.
"It's not right, Hector. You saved Mae's life. You saved mine more than a couple times. I can't let you do this. Not for me," she told him. "You're not like Todd."
"I already told you that dying for you would be the greatest honor of my life." He took the hand that she had grabbed him with and held it for a moment as he pulled his arm free. "On that last thing, I hope you're right."
Then, he was turning his back on her and climbing up the ravine, leaving her with one last warming smile.