Avery had turned his back on the others for only a second to loosen the saddle cinch of his lineback dun, frightened by the crashing thunder and hail the size of gumdrops, when Creel slipped up behind him and gave both of Avery’s lobes a hard, painful jerk at the same time.
Adding insult to injury, Creel loosed two loud, mocking whoops—a poor but grating imitation of a train whistle— then stumbled back away from Avery’s swinging fists, laughing as though at the funniest joke he’d ever heard.
The mockery grated Avery no end, and he wanted to pummel Bo Creel’s face till it looked like a pumpkin smashed by a heavy-wheeled ore dray. But before he could lay a lick on the big, cow-eyed son of a bitch, one of the other two men—Stan Kitchen—rushed in behind Avery and pinned his arms behind his back.
Then all three of his cohorts added more insult to injury by accusing Avery of being unable to take a joke!
It didn’t help that Avery, at five-five and a hundred and thirty pounds, was the smallest of the four. He was the smallest of Oldenberg’s entire gang, in fact. Quick as he was with his pistols, with his fists he was all bony, swinging knuckles, hoarse cries of blinding fury, and flying spit. Whenever he retaliated—which was most of the time—he ended up on his back or with his arms twisted painfully behind him.
Avery tended his seething anger in brooding silence while he and the others waited out the storm in the cave, sipping coffee around a smoky fire, with the horses stomping and blowing in the shadows behind them. When an especially loud thunderclap rocked the cave, one or all four of the horses would loose an echoing whinny that pricked the hair on the back of his neck, and twanged his fury-frayed nerves.
After nearly an hour and a half of the pounding, earth-shaking torrent, the rain petered out and the sky began to lighten like a second dawn. Bruce Callaghan tossed his coffee dregs on the fire, ran a greasy sleeve across his thin brown mustache, and heaved his heavy bulk to his feet. “Well, looks like it’s clearin’, fellers. Let’s get a move on. That jail wagon’s gotta be holed up somewheres near.”
They’d become certain they were close behind the jail wagon not long after branching off on the trail to Petersburg, as the furrows and shoe marks they were following matched those that had scored the main trail to Crow Feather.
“Come on, Avery—grab your horse,” said Bo Creel, nudging the little, horse-faced, big-eared man with an elbow. “Less’n you wanna stay here and sulk like a school-girl.”
Snarling, Avery tossed the last of his coffee into the fire. He shoved his cup into his saddlebags, then stalked off into the shadows with the snickering others to retrieve his still-jittery mount.
Though his ears had long since recovered from Creel’s assault, humiliation and anger continued to gnaw Nat Avery’s gut and make the back of his eyes ache, as though mice were nipping at them, while he rode with the others along the muddy trail toward Petersburg.
The horses clomped wetly along the trace. Birds chattered in the pines and aspens, the stream gushed in its narrow bank, and a rain-fresh breeze wafted, tanged with wet sage and pine.
A mile out from the cave, Callaghan, riding point with Stan Kitchen—an Ozark Mountains-trained cold-steel artist and the fastest draw in the entire gang—stopped his big Appaloosa and raised his gloved hand. Avery checked his own mount down beside Creel.
“Yessir,” Callaghan said, scrutinizing the ground beneath his horse. “That wagon came through here short time ago. Not even the rain and hail scoured those wide, deep tracks from the trail.”
“He’s holed up in Petersburg,” Stan Kitchen said, rolling a three-for-a-nickel cheroot from one side of his mouth to the other. “I’d bet my left nut on it.”
“Of course he’s holed up in Petersburg,” Bo Creel said, shifting around in his saddle. “He’ll be holed up there a good long time. And if he’s still headed fer Crow Feather, he’ll either have to backtrack or head cross-country. Them creeks’ll be broiling up around the tops of their cutbanks till nigh on nightfall.”
His anger suddenly receding, his thoughts slowing and clarifying, Nat Avery poked the brim of his feathered bowler hat back off his forehead and lifted his chin toward Callaghan. “Oldenberg said it was only one man tendin’ the wagon. Correct?”
Callaghan spat a wad of chew into the still-dripping brush beside the trail. “Done said that, all right.”
Avery’s heart thudded. He could hear his blood singing in his ears like a choir of cherub-cheeked virgins.
The thought that had just occurred to him—half formed but a thought just the same—had really started occurring to him after Bo Creel had pulled his ears that last time, back in the cave.
Only, he hadn’t realized it until now.
Stan Kitchen turned a snide look over his shoulder. He was a tall, gaunt man with close-set, hazel eyes and a mustache that covered his mouth like a dead beaver. “What the hell you gittin’ at, Nat?”
“This very thing right here, Stan.”
Avery’s eyes didn’t leave Stan’s as he slapped leather and brought up his silver-plated Schofield, which he’d won off a Mexican pistoleer in Juarez last fall, and aimed it at Stan’s right eye. He’d drawn so quickly that the sneer never left Kitchen’s furred lips before the Schofield bucked and roared in Avery’s gloved right hand.
Kitchen’s right eye was punched back into the Texan’s skull, where it was shredded amongst the man’s pulpy brain matter before the bullet tore out the back of his head in a broad, visceral spray before plunking into a pine trunk behind him. Kitchen sat up straighter in his saddle, jerking a little from right to left as his horse started with the pistol shot.
Avery ratcheted back the Schofield’s hammer as he slid the gun slightly left, lining up the sights on Callaghan’s wide-open mouth. The man’s horrified yell died stillborn on his tongue as Avery’s second bullet careened between his lips and into his throat. It jerked Callaghan’s head so brusquely back on his shoulders that his neck snapped like a dry twig under a heavy heel.
The bullet must have exited the back of Callaghan’s head at a low angle and grazed his horse’s rump; the horse’s eyes snapped wide as it reared suddenly and pivoted with a shrill whinny.
The eye-shot Kitchen was just beginning to roll down his horse’s hip, and Callaghan’s dead, swaying carcass was being carried off across the canyon by his indignant Appaloosa, when Avery swung his smoking Schofield toward Bo Creel. Creel was staring wide-eyed at Kitchen and Callaghan.
His lower jaw hung down against his billowy red neckerchief. His usually sneering eyes were wide as two mounds of fresh bear plop, and they were glazed with disbelieving horror.
Creel leaned forward over his horn as though he were trying to catch his breath while trying to speak.
He held his frightened horse’s reins taut as he shifted his gaze to Avery, who sat smugly back in his saddle, aiming the Schofield casually from his belly. He looked as though he’d just shared a good joke he’d been saving up for a long time, and like he was thrilled to have told it just the way he’d rehearsed it in his head.
“What the fuck?” Creel exclaimed, shifting his gaze between Avery and Kitchen, who lay in the soaked brush beside the trail, a rivulet of muddy runoff carving a new trough around his limp body. “What the fuck are you doin’, Nat? Them’s our boys!”
“I just got to thinkin’,” Avery said slowly. “It ain’t gonna take four men to take down that one tendin’ the jail wagon. And, hell, when Blackburn and ole Colorado Bob see what I done fer ’em, they might just throw some o’ that hidden loot my way.”
Creel slid his nervous gaze back and forth between Avery’s Schofield and the big-eared redhead’s eyes. Creel held his hands chest high while drawing back on the reins of his jittery mount. “If you think Blackburn and Colorado Bob are thinkin’ of double-crossin’ Oldenberg, you got another think comin’, Nat. They . . . they ain’t that way. Besides, it’d be pure foolish to cross Karl. Shit, he . . .”
“He can’t send men down every canyon between h
ere and Mexico,” Avery said in that same, slow, self-assured drawl. He was enjoying the casual, fearless sound of his voice almost as much as he’d enjoyed popping two pills into Callaghan and Kitchen.
Almost as much as he was going to enjoy snapping another one or two into Creel.
They were far enough from Petersburg that if anyone there had heard the shots, they’d probably only think them lingering thunder.
“Besides, I do know that’s what they had planned. Heard ’em talkin’ one night over to the hog pen run by the English lady in Helldorado.”
Creel didn’t seem to know how to respond to that. He moved his lips several times, raised and lowered his eyes between Avery’s own ominously mild gaze and the Schofield he held casually out in front of his flat belly.
Sweat glistened on the prankster’s forehead. A bead as thick as a rhinestone dribbled down his unshaven right cheek.
He quirked a self-effacing grin and wrinkled his brows. “Nat . . . you ain’t sore cause I jerked your ears, now, are ye? I mean, I was just kiddin’.”
“You were laughin’ with me.”
“That’s right. You know how I am—always doin’ some-thin’ stupid to lighten the mood.”
“Well, goddamnit, Bo, why didn’t you say so?”
“I—I’m sorry, Nat. I shoulda—”
“Because that not only hurt, Bo,” Avery yelled, rising up in his saddle now, his blood rushing hotly once more, forked veins standing out in his forehead. The saucer-sized ears sticking out from both sides of his head were as red as a New Mexican sunset. “It made me feel knee-high to a damn cricket!”
Creel flung his arm up, raised his hand palm out in front of his face. “No, wait, Nat! Don’t shoot me!”
Pow!
A quarter-sized hole appeared in Creel’s palm, just below the V of his middle and ring fingers. The hand flopped down to Creel’s thigh, revealing the bullet’s path through the man’s left cheek. As the prankster’s startled horse backed up, nickering and twitching its ears, Creel’s head jerked forward over his saddle horn, and he dropped his reins. Both arms flopped like cooked noodles over his stirrups.
“There you go, you fun-lovin’ bastard,” Avery grated through gritted teeth.
He drilled another round through the top of Creel’s hat.
Then, as Creel’s horse bucked the dead man from the saddle and lurched back up the trail, screaming, Avery snarled another satisfied curse and enjoyed the sound of his own laughter.
He took a minute to reload the Schofield, then flicked the loading gate closed, holstered the piece, and reined his own horse down trail toward Petersburg.
16
NAT AVERY ROSE up in his saddle as the town pushed down the slopes around him and the rotting boards of a narrow bridge thudded beneath his horse’s slow-plodding hooves.
He shuttled his cautious gaze from the dark, silent, dilapidated shacks on both sides of the trail to the faint furrows of shod wagon wheels, intermittently visible in the sopping mud of the narrow, winding street. When he’d threaded his way between the rows of mostly closed and forlorn-looking business establishments to the other side of town, he halted his horse before the only building he’d seen issuing smoke from its chimney.
Tolstoy’s Tavern was a tall, sprawling log affair on the other side of the creek. The sky had nearly cleared for a time, but more clouds had moved in from the direction of the last ones, and rain had started spitting again, thunder rumbling in the north. The tavern looked darkly wet and ominous, its windows black as missing teeth.
Avery thought he’d heard fiddle music when he’d first ridden into the canyon. But now there was only the tick of the rain on the wet mud, the rush of the creek under the bridge, the distant thunder, and the soft sighs of his tired horse.
The wagon’s intermittent trail led across another wood bridge, heading toward the tavern, but it returned again over the same bridge. Clods of mud from caked shoes and wheel spokes littered the bridge planks. It crossed in front of Avery and angled down a side street, disappearing in a soupy low area in which the light rain splashed the standing water like handfuls of thrown pellets.
Avery caressed the hammer of his Winchester with a gloved thumb and studied the saloon once more. A cunning half smile etched itself on his thin mouth, lifting his gaunt, pale, pimpled cheeks. He neck-reined his gelding left, in the direction the wagon had gone, keeping a cautious eye on the saloon behind him and scrutinizing the roofs and sodden woodpiles and trash heaps around him for signs of a possible ambush.
The tracks appeared again on the other side of the standing water, angling off across a weedy lot toward a dull red stable sheathed in cedars, with a solid shake roof. A stout padlock was looped through the iron handles of the two front doors.
Continuing to look around cautiously, his pulse quickening, Avery rode over to the stable and swung down from the saddle. He held his rifle high across his chest as he backed up to the doors, keeping his eyes on his back trail in case he’d been followed out from the saloon, and scrutinized the ground in front of the stable.
The broad wheel troughs disappeared under the doors.
Avery’s head grew as light as a virgin’s on her wedding night. The wagon was locked up tight behind these doors. And whoever had locked it up was outside somewhere with the padlock key. Probably wetting his whistle and drying his ass in Tolstoy’s Tavern . . .
Avery lowered his hat brim against the pelting rain, ran the back of his hand against his nose, and turned his head toward the half-inch gap between the doors. He kept his voice just loud enough to be heard in the immediate vicinity. “Pssst! Blackburn! Colorado Bob! You fellas in there?”
A wooden squawk rose from inside the stable, and a low murmur of conversation.
“Blackburn? Bob?” Avery repeated. “You in there?”
Silence but for the rain and ratcheting thunder.
A voice that Avery recognized as Colorado Bob’s said, “Who’s there?”
Avery squeezed his rifle and swallowed the enervated knot in his throat. He’d found them!
“Howdy, Bob! It’s Nat Avery!”
“Well, I’ll be goddamned.” This from Frank Blackburn.
“Avery?” one of the others whispered. It sounded like Brush Simms. “Who the hell’s Avery?”
“Nat Avery. The late Louis’s kid brother.”
“Who—?”
“Shut up!” Colorado Bob rasped. Then he yelled, “Oldenberg out there, Avery?”
Avery shook his head as he regarded the crack between the stable doors, both doors buffeting slightly when the wind lashed them. “It’s just me. Oldenberg and the others continued on toward Crow Feather. Couldn’t tell if you’d branched off the main trail or not. Long story how it came to be only me out here, but rest assured I’m gonna get you outta there!” He was wondering when he should broach the subject of the hidden strongbox and his right to some of the money—before or after he’d let the three double-crossing cutthroats out of their cage? “Gimme a second and I’ll blow the lock off!”
“No!” Colorado Bob said. “I seen the size of that lock. It’ll take several shots, and a ricochet might take your head off!”
“Well, just what in the hell do you propose, Bob?” Avery heard Blackburn growl inside the stable, the clink of manacle chains reaching his ears, as well.
“Christ, shoot the fucking lock off!” Brush Simms bellowed in frustration.
“Shut up!” In a calmer but louder voice, Colorado Bob said, “Avery, by the time you shoot that lock off and then start tryin’ to shoot the lock off the jail wagon, that big, blond son of a bitch’ll be on you like a duck on a june bug! You’re gonna have to take care o’ him first!”
Avery looked around beyond his horse standing hang-headed in the rain and pressed the back of his head against the door behind him. He could hear the men arguing inside the stable though he couldn’t make out much of what they were saying above the rain and the occasional, echoing thunder.
Then, loud and c
lear, Frank Blackburn shouted hoarsely, “That bastard Widow Maker took out four of our best men and beat Fuego here to a bloody red pulp—not to mention he blew the poor man’s only remaining ear off with a single shot!—and you expect that jug-eared little weasel out there to go in all by his lonesome and kill him?”
Avery felt a hot poker of blue fury push up from his asshole to the back of his throat. He set his teeth, but before he could say anything about how it was him running around out here, free, and it was them locked up in there, at his mercy—the conversation inside the stable tapered off.
“Avery?”
“What?”
“You’re gonna have to dry-gulch the son of a bitch.”
Cuno pressed his face against the back of Ulalia’s head, burying his nose in the thick tresses of her wavy, chestnut hair. Belly down, she groaned into the deep feather mattress as Cuno toiled against her soft, round rump, which was driven up taut against his belly.
“Oh, Jesus,” the girl said in her beguiling, Old World accent, as Cuno used the tips of his toes to lever himself slowly back and forth and in and out while she writhed beneath him, making the bed’s leather springs squawk and the headboard knock the wall. “Oh, Christ.”
She added a short, throaty string of half-whispered, half-sighed Russian, grinding her cheek into the mattress and raising her arms to wrap her hands around his neck and run them brusquely up the back of his head through his long, blond, still-damp hair.
It had dawned on him halfway through their first bout of lovemaking that the girl, whom he had at first thought as pure as the driven Siberian snow, was actually a nubile young lady of the evening . . . and, obviously, a stormy afternoon. He’d been too busy enjoying the girl’s supple, squirming flesh and the bewitching, moist caress of her rich lips across his nether regions to feel foolish. He was, after all—in spite of a brief, ill-fated marriage—new to the game of women and the dark, thrilling secrets of the boudoir.
.45-Caliber Widow Maker Page 13