Dust of the Damned (9781101554005)

by Brandvold, Peter

  There were James Younger, Frank James, Bob Younger, Bill Chadwell, Clell Miller, and Charlie Pitts. These others barely acknowledged the introduction. They were a trail-seasoned, sour-faced lot, their hair and beards dusty and sweat-matted, and they were more interested in the stud poker they were playing than their ghoul-hunting fame.

  “The only one who can compete with these boys for takin’ swiller heads and wolf teeth and fer puttin’ the fear o’ god in the western hobgobbies is Uriah Zane his ownself.” The barman said this to only Charlie’s bunch, keeping his voice down. “But everyone knows Zane rides alone. Always has, likely always will. He was in here once, wasn’t all that sociable, but I reckon I never knew an overly sociable ghoul hunter. Odd breed.”

  The apron jerked his head covertly, meaningfully, toward the James and Younger bunch behind him.

  “Hell,” Lucky Snodgrass said, sneering over the beer he was lifting to his yellow-mustached lips, “everyone knows the Jameses and Youngers ain’t nothin’ but back-shootin’, no‑account robbers of small-town banks and slow-movin’ trains. Hell, they’d shoot a hunk o’ rock candy out of a child’s fist.”

  Lucky snickered as he dipped his upper lip into his creamy beer foam.

  The jovial barman looked suddenly stricken.

  Someone cleared his throat loudly behind him. “What’d that sack o’ burnin’ ghoul shit say about me an’ my boys?” Jesse James inquired, his blue eyes flat and mean.

  Chapter 24

  THE DEMISE OF THE JAMES GANG

  The voice of steely-eyed Jesse James, while not lifted inordinately high, cut through the din of the Rincon Mountain Dance Hall and Beer Parlor like a razor-edged stiletto through hog tallow.

  The low roar of conversation died suddenly. The little man playing the piano turned his head toward the James-Younger table, frowning through the smoke curling up from the quirley in his false teeth, and lifted his pale hands from the ivory keys. It was so quiet that Ravenna, still standing with her back to the bar, her belly tied in a half-hitch knot, could hear the piano keys’ dwindling reverberations inside their drink-stained, bullet-scarred box.

  The jovial barman standing between Charlie Hondo’s table and the James-Younger table twisted around on his hips to stare, aghast, at Jesse, who sat slumped back in his chair. The Missourian held his pasteboards on the edge of the table in his left hand, his battered gray Stetson tipped back off his domed, sunburned forehead. The flap of his threadbare wool coat was pulled back behind the carved ivory grips of the.45 Peacemaker angled across his belly from the soft, brown leather holster on his left hip.

  His pale blue eyes were menacingly dull as they stared across the fifteen feet toward Lucky Snodgrass, who sat slouched over his beer, both hands resting on the edge of his table, his eyes hard and cold, nostrils flaring. His long, dusty yellow ponytail curved down over his shoulder to disappear in his lap.

  Charlie and the others wore similar expressions.

  It was so quiet that Ravenna thought she could hear the jovial barman dribbling down his leg.

  She broke the tense silence with, “Amigos! No, no, no, I think you misunderstand my friend Lucky over there. Lucky was only talking about that strange loner, big as a grizzly bear and twice as ornery—Uriah Zane!” She cast a cold smile at Lucky. “Wasn’t that who you were talking about, Joe?”

  She put just enough steel in her voice to get Lucky’s attention, to communicate to the cork-headed fool the gravity of their situation and her previous admonishment to the boys to keep their noses clean here in Tucson.

  “Yeah, that’s what Joe said,” Charlie said, all wide-eyed innocence in sharp contrast to the weirdly menacing tattoos on his cheeks. “He was talkin’ about that loco Uriah Zane. Not you, Jesse, for Pete’s sake.” He chuffed ironically and lifted his beer to his lips.

  “Yeah,” Lucky said, fidgeting around with his own beer. “I meant that old coyote Zane.” Softer now, really biting hard on his tongue, he added, “Didn’t mean no offense to no one else… I reckon…. ”

  He threw back an entire whiskey shot and chased it with a long pull of his beer.

  “There. See?” Ravenna said, swinging her hips as she sauntered over to where Jesse James still sat slouched down in his chair, his dangerous eyes still riveted on Lucky Snodgrass. “I tell you what—just so we can all get our friendly moods back, I will buy the next round for the James-Younger gang!” She pivoted, snapping a thumb above her head. “Apron, another round over here. Pronto! Anything they want! Add it to my tab. Vámonos!”

  “Yes, ma’am! Yes, ma’am!” The jovial bartender, his face flushed deep russet, sweat glistening on his forehead, hurried around behind the counter and motioned for the half-breed apron to begin pouring and drawing fresh drinks. “Yes, ma’am, you got it! Whiskey and tequila all around for the James-Younger bunch! Really makes me proud to see them blessin’ my humble establishment with their Yankee-killing, ghoul-huntin’ presence. Yes, sir! Hurry up, there, Alfred. Pour them beers! No one gets thirsty in the Rincon, by God!”

  When the James-Younger gang was all set up, the conversational din built up gradually again, the tone pitched with relief. The last thing anybody in the place wanted, least of all the jovial bartender, was a lead swap in such close, crowded confines.

  The old man at the piano began hammering away at the ivories again, Charlie and the boys became distracted by their own conversation, and Ravenna herself breathed a sigh of relief as she turned to slouch over her beer and second tequila shot atop the bar. Soon, very soon, she would go over and lasso Charlie and the boys and haul them on out of the saloon and over to some quiet, side-street hotel.

  “Muchas gracias for the drinks, senorita,” a man’s slightly slurred voice said behind Ravenna. She smelled horse sweat and whiskey. A finger poked her shoulder. “How ’bout you haul your pretty Mex self over to our table and join us?”

  Ravenna cast a weary glance over her shoulder to see a ferret-faced young man in a bowler hat and a long, cream duster staring at her brightly. His eyes were spaced too far apart, and his nose sat oddly low between them, giving him the look of a moron. “Jesse’s taken a shine to you, said he’d like an introduction.”

  The young man standing next to this one, a little shorter than the first and with a small knife scar on his knobby chin, chuckled, spraying spittle on his lower lip. “My brother Cole thinks you’re just about the best-lookin’ Mex piece o’ ass he’s seen in a month of Sundays!”

  He rocked back on his undershot boot heels and nervously flicked one of his suspenders over and over again.

  Ravenna couldn’t help scowling at the pair. She recognized both from the James-Younger table, and she knew who they were. The first was Bill Chadwell. The other was Cole Younger’s younger brother, James. She glanced behind them to see Jesse James, slouched casually as before, but staring between several standing men, casting his dully menacing, slightly jeering blue gaze at Ravenna. Cole Younger sat beside him, one stovepipe boot hiked up on a knee, his lips stretched drunkenly inside his shaggy black, tobacco-crusted beard.

  “Tell senors James and Younger I am deeply flattered,” Ravenna said huskily, unable to conceal her disdain for the arrogant Confederate ghoul hunters, “but I prefer to drink alone. Besides, I am leaving soon, on to better and bigger things—comprende?”

  She blinked slowly and tossed her hair back from her face as she slumped forward over the bar once more. In the back bar mirror, behind pyramids of sparkling mugs and shot glasses, she saw Bill Chadwell’s face flush. James Younger furrowed his dark brows and reached forward, grabbed the tail of her red sash, and jerked her around sharply.

  “Don’t turn your back on us, greaser bitch!”

  “Yeah,” said Chadwell, hardening his jaws, “we was talkin’ to you on behalf of Mr. Jesse James his ownself!”

  Ravenna’s own face flushed. Miniature silver javelins of raw fury shot from between her narrowed eyelids.

  Rage swept through her like a tidal wave, and before sh
e knew it she’d muttered three words of a spell the peon witch had taught her long ago in Mexico. Bill Chadwell was suddenly gone, disappeared into thin air. Where his boots had been on the floor was now a yellow and green scorpion curling its striated tail with the venomous stinger at the end, and opening and closing its raised pincers.

  James Younger looked around wildly. He dropped his eyes to the floor and stumbled back, lower jaw falling nearly to his chest. He made a choking sound and pointed at the scorpion.

  “What have we here?” Ravenna said tightly, looking down at Bill Chadwell. “A goddamn scorpion in such a fine establishment?”

  With that she stepped forward and rammed her left boot straight down, smashing Bill Chadwell under her copper-spurred heel. The scorpion crumpled under the red boot, blood and goo oozing out around the heel and staining the floor.

  “She’s a witch!” James Younger squealed, pointing at Ravenna with one hand and snagging one of the two Schofield pistols he wore in shoulder holsters inside his long denim jacket.

  The piano fell silent once again, as did the crowd. All heads turned toward the commotion. James Younger whipped the Schofield up, raking the hammer back, and fired. Only his target was no longer before him. Younger’s slug hammered into the side of the head of a bearded bounty hunter sitting at a table in Younger’s line of fire.

  As the man’s head snapped sideways wildly, blood flying out his opposite ear to paint the two men sitting to the wounded bounty hunter’s left, Younger gave another horrified yell and glanced down at the rangy mountain lion snarling and curling its tail in the same spot in which Ravenna had been standing only a second before.

  Several startled bellows rose, the men sitting nearest the wildcat leaping to their feet and jumping back as Ravenna’s angry cry swept through the room and she leaped off her back feet. She was a tan blur to most of the gents in the room as she rammed her lithe, dun, white-bellied body into James Younger, who triggered his pistol into the floor as Ravenna dug her fangs into the young border tough’s throat, jerking her head from side to side, ripping and tearing. The young man’s carotid arteries jetted hot, scarlet blood in all directions as the snarling lion rode him straight back down with a reverberating thud, causing the floor to lurch violently.

  Thunder pealed as every man in the room not already standing bounded out of his chair and slapped leather, shouting. Charlie Hondo loosed his own version of a rebel yell as he and his three partners kicked their own chairs back and filled their fists with wood and iron, crouching as their pistols leaped and roared, flames stabbing toward the James-Younger table.

  The James-Youngers were caught unawares, as they’d all trained their pistols on the mountain lion, who, in the ten seconds that had elapsed since it killed James Younger, had bounded onto the back of Clell Miller, driving him into the floor beneath the James table.

  Charlie Hondo’s first shot blew Cole Younger’s right earlobe off. Having bolted out of his chair and now aiming his Peacemaker and a short-barreled Remington toward the mountain lion killing Clell Miller under his table, Jesse James flinched and swung around toward Charlie. Hondo’s second bullet slammed through Jesse’s shoulder and punched him back into the table behind him.

  As the mountain lion bounded out from under the James-Younger table, someone from another table triggered two shots at it, plunking one bullet into Frank James’s knee while the other shattered the Missouri gorilla fighter’s beer schooner, spraying glass and beer in all directions. James bent over, yowling and shooting the short, derby-hatted ghoul hunter who’d pinked his knee.

  More pandemonium followed, the ghoul hunters shooting one another in the confusion while the mountain lion swept the room, dodging bullets and grabbing men’s legs or arms and pulling them to the floor to rip their throats out beneath tables. The ghoul hunters were so confused as to whom exactly they should be shooting at, aside from the lion, that Charlie and the boys had a fairly easy time drilling one ghoul hunter after another, after making fast work of the James-Younger bunch, all of whom lay in bloody piles among overturned tables and chairs and blood-splattered cards and spilled ashtrays.

  When most of the other men were down and powder smoke hung in an almost impenetrable haze from the rafters, Charlie started making his way to the front of the room, reloading one of his pistols quickly. “Come on, boys—I reckon we done wore out our welcome in the Rincon Beer Parlor!”

  Lucky was down on one knee behind the bullet-shaped stove in the room’s center, having just reloaded his own pistols, and was rolling the cylinder of one across his forearm, looking around in sparkle-eyed delight. He echoed Charlie’s rebel yell and shot a wounded man climbing to his knees on the room’s right side, then ran after the others, following Charlie to the front of the room and out the batwings.

  “Come on, darlin’!” Charlie shouted back into the room from over the doors. “You cleaned up right well. Yessiree, indeed you did!”

  He laughed as Ravenna bounded toward him, leaping sleekly over the only three tables still standing upright, and followed Charlie on out of the saloon. Only it wasn’t the mountain lion leaping across the front gallery but the lovely black-haired witch herself, cursing shrilly in Spanish as the end of her red sash trailed out behind her.

  “Mierda!”

  “Best you learn to control that bean-eater temper, darlin’!”

  “I think you’re right, mi amor. But I have to admit to enjoying myself back there!”

  “You still want that bath?” Charlie asked her as he untied his horse and swung into the leather.

  “Sí, but I guess a creek will have to do!”

  She leaped into the saddle of her own mount and jerked her gelding away from the hitchrack. Boot scrapes sounded from across the gallery. The jovial barman, no longer looking so jovial covered in blood, pushed through the batwings wielding a double-barreled shotgun.

  “Monster bast-arrrds!”

  He leveled the shotgun. Holding their horses’ reins taut in their left hands, Charlie and Ravenna fired the pistols in their right hands. The bloody barman screamed as he triggered both barrels of his shotgun into the gallery’s roof and danced back into the saloon, where he fell with a thud.

  Charlie and the boys and Ravenna looked around warily. Men were moving toward them from up and down the street, crouched over rifles or extending pistols.

  “Which way, chiquita?” Charlie said. “I’m feelin’ a mite crowded.”

  Ravenna looked around, saw a gap between two buildings behind her. “South!”

  Her gelding whinnied as she wheeled it around and shot it through the gap, the others galloping behind her, Lucky and One-Eye triggering a couple of rounds at men cautiously approaching along the main street. They thundered down the gap, weaved around several stock pens and piles of stacked mesquite wood, and hammered off into the saguaro- and greasewood-stippled desert, their hoof thuds dwindling behind them.

  Back at the Rincon Beer Parlor, gun smoke sifted out over the still batwings and across the gallery, as though a fire smoldered inside. A face appeared in the smoke over the doors. Two pale blue eyes shone against ridged, sandy brows beneath a domed, windburned forehead. The man was hatless, his thin, light brown hair sitting close against his bony skull.

  Jesse James staggered through the batwings. Holding himself tensely, bleeding from a shoulder wound and a leg wound and several grazes, he stumbled out to the edge of the gallery. His knees buckled, and he slammed onto the gallery floor. Kneeling there, bleeding, his face bleached and bland except for one eye twitching, he stared into the gap between buildings through which the gang of ghouls that had cut down his gang had disappeared.

  “You got a reckonin’ comin’, ghouls,” he muttered, gritting his teeth till his jaws cracked. “You…you ain’t seen the last o’ Jesse Woodson James!”

  Chapter 25

  THE LITTLE MAN IN THE BONEYARD

  “Goddamn you, you green-livered cur—drop that boot! Drop it this instant, you hear?”

  The
enraged admonition rumbled inside a shed on the left side of Tucson’s crooked main drag. Hearing it, Uriah Zane reined General Lee to a halt before the long, disjointed, mud-brick and wood-frame building of which the side shed was a part. A shingle identified the sprawling dump as H. A. DEROSSO’S CABINET MAKING AND UNDERTAKING, with a smaller sign below that read: NO INJUNS SERVED HERE. SEE MIRO ESTACADO AT THE BLACKSMITH SHOP.

  The voice inside the shed cursed sharply just as a yellow-and-brown mutt hurled itself through the one-foot gap in the shed’s sliding door. The dog gave a little cry as the boot caught on the door and slipped from the cur’s jaws to lie in the dust just outside the shed. Undeterred, the cur picked up the boot, and, as a potbellied, stoop-shouldered older man in a shabby canvas hat poked his head out the gap in the door, the thieving beast took off at a dead sprint past Zane, Angel, and Al Hathaway, heading at a slant across the main drag.

  The potbellied man, possibly in his late sixties, though he could have been older, sucked in his gut, shuffled sideways out the door, and shook his fist toward the cur, shouting, “That’s Cole Younger’s boot, you son of a bitch! You bring it back here pronto and I maybe won’t fill your ass full o’ double-ought buck!”

  The cur didn’t slow its step but ran beneath a ranch supply wagon parked in front of a general merchandise store. He ran out the other side of the wagon and cut into a break between the general store and a tonsorial parlor, disappearing down the gap, leaving only a smear of sun-coppered dust behind him.

  “Goddamn!” cried the potbellied oldster, whose face was nearly as black as the cur’s stolen boot, though he was obviously a white man. He wore a red-and-black-checked shirt under a greasy deerskin vest that hung down to his bony knees. “Where’m I gonna find another boot to match the other’n?”

  Angel studied the oldster. “Did you say that was Cole Younger’s boot?”