Hanging Fire

by Eric Red

  The day was getting hot, Noose could feel. It would get hotter, fast, this time of year. For the last half an hour it had been at their backs, east, and it was a skillet of flat, hard heat on the back of their necks as they rode west. Now they were into trees. Sun sparkles needled through the tops of the fifty-to-hundred-foot-high conifers, making him squint, creating dense shadows of the heavy branches that took the edge off the heat, the weather a trade-off, like much of life, it seemed to Noose.

  Bonny Kate had been quiet for a time, so he swung a glance over his shoulder and there she was, smack in the saddle, head thrown back, red tresses off her face, eyes closed, feeling the sun on her face with a raw smile of enjoyment. Pleasurably breathing in the nature smells through her nose, the lady outlaw didn’t say a word for a while until: “It’s a good day to die.”

  “You’re dying tomorrow,” Noose corrected her.

  She opened her electric blue eyes then blinked once or twice. “Well, then, today’s a good day to be alive.”

  Noose shrugged, nudging Copper in a left direction on the narrow, snaking trail up the pass. “Every day above ground is a good day, some would say,” he said.

  “I beg to differ. Some days in this life I have lived, Joe Noose, I’d’ve preferred I’d been dead and they had buried me deep.”

  He was looking over her shoulder back at her and the way her face looked with passing shadows in her hooded eyes lent her words the ring of truth.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, ma’am,” he replied. “All your suffering will be over soon.”

  The bullet blew the branch off fifteen feet above Noose’s head as a loud shot came without warning from below—intentional miss, Noose was thinking, already leaping out of his saddle onto his prisoner and dragging the woman from the horse as the second shot caromed off a rock fifty feet away—another deliberate miss—and when Noose and Bonny Kate hit the dirt and he rolled protectively on top of her, quick-drawing his Colt .45, which he thumbed into cocked position, Noose already knew these were warning shots, not kill shots . . . either that, or he was in the presence of the worst shots in the West.

  “Stay down!” Noose snarled to his prisoner.

  Beneath him, tucked under the broad body shield of Noose’s massive muscular bulk, Bonny Kate stared up at him in a naked expression of terror or excitement, he wasn’t sure, but it might have been both since she was smacking her lips.

  “Don’t move,” he whispered sharply. “Don’t say a word.”

  She nodded quickly, now very cooperative.

  Noose and the female outlaw were hunkered behind some large piled rocks in a gap at the beginning of the trail. The two shots had come from below on the wooded approach to the pass, somewhere down there in the trees, out of sight. Noose threw a glance to Copper and the Appaloosa, both horses ten feet away—the shots had been so far afield neither stallion had bolted.

  Bonny Kate gasped, breathless. “Tell me, please, why is somebody shooting at us?”

  Shaking his head slowly, Noose kept his drawn pistol up, peering over the rocks and listening for any movement. “They weren’t trying to hit us, just get our attention. I believe those were warning shots.”

  “But wh—?”

  “Shhh.” Noose suddenly put a finger of his free hand to her lips.

  Because a forceful male voice a hundred yards below was now calling up to them: “You two ain’t hit because I wasn’t trying to hit you! Not yet! Me and my boys don’t want to shoot you, Marshal! We respect the law because we are lawmen! We just want the woman!”

  Noose screwed a squinty glance down at Bonny Kate, eyebrow cocked, not making any sense of this.

  Again the rough and authoritative male voice below boomed through the trees: “I am Sheriff Waylon Bojack from Arizona. Maybe you heard of me, maybe not, but I have in my hand a legal extradition order for Bonny Kate Valance authorizing me and my deputies to bring this outlaw you have in your custody back to Arizona to hang for crimes she committed in my jurisdiction! The states of Wyoming and Idaho have chosen to disregard this extradition order and in doing so are breaking the law, but I mean to enforce it and take her back by any means necessary if I have to! Lawman to lawman, Marshal, I hope you appreciate my position! But if you don’t, that’s too damn bad! Just hand her over and we’ll be on our way! What do you say ?”

  To his surprise, Noose saw the face of the flaming redheaded woman a foot from him was wild with terror suddenly—he hadn’t seen her scared before but she sure was now. Bonny Kate hadn’t shown any particular fear of being hanged in Idaho so Noose didn’t see why the prospect of being hanged in Arizona was causing her to shake her head no at him so desperately right now.

  Noose yelled harshly over the heavy rocks: “I say, you boys better back off now if you know what’s good for you, because the next bullet comes our way I will kill the man that fired it and kill the man standing next to him directly! I don’t know if you are who you say you are and don’t give a damn! My sworn duty is to deliver my prisoner to the hangman across the pass and I will do so!”

  Bonny Kate gave a coarse laugh, impressed by Noose’s sheer nerve.

  Noose didn’t notice. His gaze busily scanning their woody surroundings, Noose’s eyes locked on a fork in the trail just ahead that led up to a granite cliff that would provide effective cover if they made it with the horses the fifty yards it would take to reach it. Getting there, the terrain would be open to view from below and expose them to the line of fire of their adversaries, but Noose figured if he laid down enough covering fire beating the retreat, the other men would be ducking, waiting for him to finish shooting and that would give him time to get Bonny Kate and the horses safely to the rocks.

  If nothing went wrong.

  Which it often did.

  “There’s six of us and one of you, Marshal!” yelled Bojack. “Think about it!”

  “You need more men, if that’s all you got!” shouted back Noose.

  “Is that your final word?” bellowed Bojack fiercely.

  “My final word will be a bullet between your eyes if I don’t see the hind ends of your horses with your hind ends on ’em ridin’ back down the trail by the count of ten!” roared Noose. While he was doing all that hollering he was busy making quick hand signals with his free hand to Bonny Kate, pointing and gesturing with his fingers, explaining the plan to her, and the woman nodded she understood. Noose put up his finger: On my go.

  “I respect you, Marshal, for doing your duty as you see it. And I will say a prayer over your grave right after I spit on the grave of Bonny Kate Valance!”

  “Go!”

  Leaping up from behind the rocks, Joe Noose swiftly drew his second Colt .45 from his side holster and was firing one Peacemaker in each hand into the trees below in the direction of the voice, his boots already backing up, Bonny Kate bolting like a jackrabbit over to the horses and grabbing both reins, running up the hill toward the fork in the trail, Noose giving them cover, firing and firing from the hip, one round after another, fire and smoke exploding from his guns, blowing chunks from the trees below and geysers of dirt and grass in a relentless fusillade of lead.

  Tallied up, it took them thirty-two seconds to reach the protection of the cliff: fifteen seconds for Noose to use up all his bullets; twenty seconds for the woman to get the horses behind the crag; seventeen seconds for the man to scramble as fast as his boots would carry him across the open ground for cover . . . but by the seventeenth of those seconds Sheriff Bojack and his deputies had gauged Noose’s guns were dry and broke cover, firing everything they had, and Joe Noose spent the next ten seconds running uphill directly in the line of fire with scores of rounds whistling past his head but he was a little faster than they were and got to safety unscathed.

  The bullets kept coming until Joe Noose grabbed a Winchester repeater from Copper’s saddle holster, levered it, and began blasting around the corner of the cliff.

  When he heard the single high-pitched scream and the thud of the body fall Noose
knew two things . . .

  The bullets had stopped and the number of men shooting at them were one less.

  CHAPTER 4

  Sheriff Bojack knew the boy. Stood witness at his birth. Now twenty-two years later, stood here, witness at his death.

  A bad way to die, a long way from home.

  The gut-shot deputy lay sprawled on the grass on his back in his final death twitches, bleeding out copiously from a fist-sized hole in his stomach that spilled his insides. Bojack had just gestured to his men to cease firing and he now knelt by the young man he knew as Ned Hodge, gripping his bloody hand so his deputy didn’t die alone, until that hand went limp. The man was dead. The sheriff grimly took off his hat in respect. Crossed himself with two fingers. Reached those same two scarred fingers out to shut the boy’s eyelids over his lifeless, staring eyes. The sheriff was regretful his young deputy had to pass over knowing how much dying can hurt.

  Waylon Bojack was remembering kneeling over another deputy, barely older than this one, shot in the back.

  His boy. Jim Bojack. Twenty-six years old.

  Shot by her.

  It was the true reason Sheriff Bojack was here and why he meant to bring the murderess back to face Arizona justice and be hanged in his jurisdiction . . . or, failing that, kill her here in Wyoming or Idaho by his own hand. Waylon Bojack had a son to avenge and promises to keep.

  It all began a year ago when an Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad was held up at gunpoint by Bonny Kate Valance and the notorious gang of dangerous outlaws she ran with. The one woman and five men used trinitrotoluene to blow the tracks and halt the train then to blast the door off the heavy safe in the bank wagon that contained over a hundred thousand dollars in government payroll. The heist was well planned, brutal, and efficient. Within ten minutes the Valance gang had made off with the loot and left two bank guards shot in the back. One guard survived, one didn’t, and Sheriff Waylon Bojack didn’t care which one of the gang shot him, just that the robbery happened in his jurisdiction. Word of the train robbery traveled to his office within the hour and he had his lawmen saddled up, armed to the teeth, and galloping hard due southeast past the tracks, where the seasoned tracker quickly picked up the trail of the fleeing outlaws.

  Bonny Kate Valance and her crew had made two mistakes he would school them dearly for: the first was robbing a train in the first place and the second was robbing it in Sheriff Waylon Bojack’s county—a jurisdiction with a 100 percent apprehension rate for outlaws who committed crimes therein and therefore one of the safest territories in the thirty-eight United States. Bojack was a legend. The lawman always got his man and he was relentless. As were his highly trained attack dog deputies, their fierce, powerful horses, and especially the sheriff’s son and head deputy, Jim Bojack, who would succeed him as sheriff when the old man retired.

  For five days and nights the Arizona lawmen pursued the Valance gang and drove them to ground on the fifth night in an abandoned Indian pueblo, ambushing the exhausted, beaten-down outlaws while they foolishly slept. Sheriff Bojack and his eight deputies left their horses a mile away and approached the pueblo huts on foot from four sides and went in shooting. Bojack wanted the outlaws captured alive if possible and his deputies aimed for the legs and knees when they shot the first Valance gang thugs.

  The train robbers had put up a hell of a fight, taking cover around the pueblos and for fifteen minutes it was a terrific firefight, until the better trained and armed Arizona deputies hammered them back with relentless fusillades of lead, boxing the gang in and capturing them.

  Bojack didn’t lose a single man that night. Except one. The one that counted most.

  It was Jim Bojack who first saw the woman break cover, running away like her ass was on fire and ducking into the sheltering darkness between the huts—Bonny Kate Valance looked so scared as she cowardly deserted her gang, Waylon didn’t think anything of it when his son, Jim, gave his father a nod and took off after her. The last Sheriff Bojack ever saw of his firstborn was the back of the strong young man with pistol drawn swallowed into the gloom of the alleyway between those pueblos like a man sinking into tar, and right away the elder Bojack had a bad feeling.

  By then, the deputies had rounded up all the rest of the gang and were in the process of disarming and shackling them—this distracted the sheriff for a few fateful moments before that awful loud gunshot rang out . . . in the jagged muzzle flash that lit up the alley he saw Jim crumple, trying to clutch his back.

  They found him dead a few moments later.

  Never found her. She had shot his son in the back and fled into the desert like a gutless coyote.

  They looked. Did they ever. But Bonny Kate Valance was not to be found—not that night nor the following day nor weeks nor months later. She was in the wind that blew hot and dry and dusty across the harsh and arid Arizona desert.

  The grief-stricken sheriff Waylon Bojack hunted the fugitive outlaw Bonny Kate Valance clear across his territory from one end to the other, every fruitless day compounding his corrosive hatred of the woman until it destroyed everything he had, chasing her shadow long past when it had become apparent to everyone but him that the female outlaw had safely fled his jurisdiction to points south or north or east or west; it didn’t matter, because she was out of his grasp and long gone. Perhaps Bojack knew it, too, just didn’t want to, or just couldn’t, admit it.

  His badge was tarnished in letting Bonny Kate escape. After that, his apprehension rate was officially dropped to 99 percent and his legendary lawman’s record was no longer perfect . . . a sullied reputation just the beginning of his long decline as a peace officer traveling into that uncharted and gray country where the law ended and justice began.

  Now, finally, one full year and a thousand miles away, Sheriff Bojack was a bullet’s trajectory from the flesh of the bitch who murdered his boy. Had laid his eyes on her face just minutes before.

  The sheriff hadn’t wanted things to go this way—he had warned that local marshal and given him a fair chance to walk away but the big, stubborn cowboy had refused and now one of his deputies lay dead at his feet.

  That damn Wyoming marshal had drawn first blood.

  There was no turning back now.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Are those men who they say they are?”

  Bonny Kate was tight-lipped as she met Joe Noose’s blunt gaze. He wanted answers. She nodded and said, “Yeah, Sheriff Bojack. I know him.”

  “So it’s true, then.”

  “The them being lawmen part, yeah.”

  “Why the hell are they trying to kill you?” he asked.

  “For something I ain’t done.”

  “Lady, for a woman who ain’t done nothing you got a lot of people want you dead for it.”

  The two people were walking single file up the narrow gap in the granite crevice between the cliffs, leading their horses carefully, moving single file with Noose in the lead, Bonny Kate tailing him. There was barely room in the tight space for the width of the horses to squeeze through. Noose was walking backward to keep a flinty eye on the opening several hundred yards behind, where they had slipped through, escaping the posse. Noose held his loaded Winchester and Henry rifles, one in each hand, ready to fire, his reins loosely slung over his right wrist because Copper needed little supervision. The bronze horse agilely placed its hooves on the steep, rocky ground, ascending the treacherous draw toward the opening up ahead that spilled out onto some kind of higher ground. The female outlaw brooded, giving Noose a narrow glance.

  “I don’t give a squat if you believe me or not,” she said. “I’m between the hawk and the buzzard anyway and either way I’ll be dead in a day or two.”

  “Can’t believe or disbelieve what I don’t know nothing about. Why do those lawmen want to kill you?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “It’s a long ride. Mind if I ask you a question, Miss Valance?”

  “Ain’t like I’m stopping you.”

 
“Why is it that you ain’t shown a lick of fear about swinging at the end of that noose they got waiting for you in Idaho but that sheriff back there scared you so bad you were quaking in your boots?”

  “Was not.”

  “What difference does it make to you whether you die by a rope or a bullet?”

  “Because a noose is quick. Waylon Bojack, he ain’t just gonna kill me, he’s gonna kill me slow, after he removes my lady parts.”

  Noose passed the Winchester in his left hand to his right one with the Henry to reach out and take Bonny Kate’s hand, helping her lead her ragged quarter horse up a tricky section of path. “Firstly, that ain’t gonna happen,” he said. “Nobody’s gonna kill you before I get you to the gallows to die legal. Them lawmen are interfering with due process and I’ll kill all of ’em if I have to. That’s on them for breaking the law they was sworn to uphold, but I’m getting you to the noose just like I’m sworn to do.”

  “Lordy.” She looked at him oddly with a penetrating gaze. “You’re gonna risk your life, probably get yourself killed or shot up real bad, going up outnumbered against all those men trying to kill me just so the folks in Idaho can kill me. What’s the sense in that? Either way I’m dead.”

  “I have a job to do, you’re that job, and I’m gonna put paid on it.”

  “Well, good for you.” She snorted. “You may be big and tough and all and have all them big guns but you ain’t got a lick of sense. Not hardly a lick.” She shook her head and laughed harshly. “Get yourself killed just so some folks can kill me instead of other folks. That makes no sense.”

  “Does to me.”

  “Because?”

  “Because I swore an oath to Marshal Bess, because it’s the law, and because in this situation it’s the right thing to do. I gave my word.”