by Will Keen
‘Could have gone west,’ Rankin said, but Carter dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand.
‘Wild speculation.’
‘That’s all we’ve got to go on,’ McClain said. ‘Guesswork.’
‘What bothers me—’ Carter said, then stopped as Ike rode around the front of the house. The gaunt man on the piebald shook his head: he’d seen nothing of any use. If he’d been looking – hoping – for the buggy, they now knew it wasn’t there.
‘What bothers me,’ Carter repeated, ‘is what I said to you, McClain. That house was closed up for days. Liz likes her perfume, her lavender. If she’d been in there. . . .’ He shrugged despairingly.
‘She left with her maid when we were eating, drinking,’ McClain said.
‘She was heading for home. We heard shots and moved fast. If the buggy had thrown a wheel, had one splintered or the horse had broken a leg, we’d have caught her in no time. But there was no sign of her on the way, no sign of her here and she hasn’t been in the house – right, Carter?’
Carter nodded.
‘So what where those shots all about?’ McClain said, ‘and how can two women, Liz Kent and her maid, Maria, disappear off the face of the earth?’
Chapter Fifteen
Early the next morning, McClain was shaving from a tin bowl of water. A butt alongside the saloon collected rainwater from the rusty iron roof. It rained maybe once a year. When McClain drew the water he knew it would be dirty, green and smelly. But it was also warm and, as he had a blunt razor and no soap, his battered face was grateful for that small mercy.
He was on the back gallery of Rankin’s saloon, stripped to the waist, watching pelicans skimming through thin mist hanging over the glassily calm waters of the Laguna Madre. The shaving wasn’t easy – because of the blade with a dull edge – and he’d had no scissors for a while so his drooping moustache was ragged enough to not look out of place on Ike’s gaunt face. And already, that early in the day, he was feeling the heat of the sun. He was also feeling the weight of responsibility because, while lying awake long before dawn, McClain had decided to take charge. Take the bull by the horns. And he smiled at that image.
A big part of his reasoning when taking control loomed large in his thinking was that Carter was in his sixties, Rankin maybe ten years younger, Ike in the decade above or below – in which direction McClain wasn’t prepared to guess. Ignoring Ike, that put McClain a good twenty years younger than any of them. Age was always a factor in the ability to think fast in any given crisis, and in physical ability – in particular the ability to shoot fast, shoot straight, to keep going when the body was screaming for relief. Yes, Carter was an Arizona lawman, but McClain reckoned that in the last twenty years or so the worst dangers the man had faced had come from irate drunks he’d been throwing into his makeshift jail cell.
What had finally made McClain decide was that he believed Carter, Rankin and Ike to be too involved emotionally. Hell, at some time in the past all three might have been holding a torch for Liz Kent, and it was damn certain they all held bitter grudges against the whole Skelton clan. Put all that in the pot and thinking was bound to be skewed, actions impulsive and flawed in timing and execution.
McClain dragged the thin grey towel from around his neck, wiped his faced and donned a shirt and vest. He heard the murmur of conversation from the front gallery that suggested Carter was out of his room and talking to Rankin. They would, McClain guessed, be discussing an early ride out with the intention of catching the young, violent Skeltons still half asleep.
But McClain had his own twist on that idea.
Cutting down the raiding party – if that weren’t too grandiose a title – would leave McClain free to use his own judgement. He reckoned he could rule out Rankin and Ike in any case. Rankin had a business to run: he could be persuaded to stay behind his bar. Ike, as far as McClain was aware, earned a bare living by doing odd jobs – and anyway, the lean man had disappeared late last night, choosing to make his own way back from Liz’s silent, empty house.
Don Carter’s only reason for riding south to the Gulf had been to see Hedrick and Marty Skelton swing for Ma Thom’s murder. But time and distance had worked their magic. It was clear to McClain that Carter’s anger had cooled on the way south, poor old Ma Thom had become a faded memory, and as of last night the Red Creek marshal was hell bent on finding out what had happened to Liz Kent. Carter was convinced the Skeltons were to blame for whatever had happened, hence his determination to ride out and confront them.
McClain wasn’t so sure, but it was irrelevant anyway. Even if the Skeltons had nothing to do with Liz’s disappearance, the two obvious black sheep of that unruly flock had sure as hell had murdered his wife.
There were wooden tables on the saloon’s front gallery, unsteady on their legs, the tops warped by years of heat and humidity. Rankin and Carter were sitting at one of those close to the rail. They had tin cups of coffee. Carter was chewing at a thick slice of buttered bread. The wedge of cheese on his tin plate showed teeth marks, some of them human.
McClain dragged up a chair, dropped into it and shook his head when Rankin waved vaguely at the coffee. He let his gaze drift to the street, a sun-drenched expanse of yellow dust, with buildings scattered like a child’s wooden play bricks not painted since Texas was admitted to the Union. One establishment, McClain knew, was a general store, but other than that Rankin’s seemed to be the only other place of business. Year-round sunshine, plain but nourishing food from the store, strong drink just across the street, McClain mused. Who could ask for more?
‘You decided?’
Carter stared. ‘Didn’t we work that out last night?’
‘Heat of the moment,’ McClain said. ‘Daylight brings clearer thinking.’
‘Such as?’
‘The idea was we head inland early and ride onto Skelton land. But there’s a risk. Early doesn’t mean bleary-eyed kids. Middle of the morning, young men can be all fired up. Rested, clear eyed and dangerous, they go hunting for women or trouble, whichever comes first.’
‘And that worries you?’
‘Numbers worry me. If the odds are stacked against, I like to work it so the dice are loaded in my favour.’
‘The Skeltons are what they are.’
‘That’s moonshiners, right?’ McClain said. ‘They’ve got stills out there in the woods, produce white lightning, mountain dew, sell it to bootleggers or direct to saloons like Rankin’s.’ He looked at the saloonist. ‘You ever known a moonshiner who wasn’t sampling his wares?’
‘There’s not a gent on the planet handling strong drink who isn’t halfway drunk by midday.’
‘My point exactly,’ McClain said, grinning at the frank admission, even if it was a generalisation. ‘Skeltons are moonshiners, and the air around your average illegal still is fifty per cent alcohol, enough to fell a grown steer. Those fellers are working in it, breathing it, as well as taking frequent nips from a jug. By midday they’ll be bleary-eyed, staggering, and looking forward to an afternoon dozing in the shade.’
And now Carter was nodding slowly.
‘Loaded dice,’ he said. ‘There’s good sense in what you’re saying, McClain, but how does holding off until later help Liz Kent? What if she’s being held in some stinking hovel crawling with roaches?’
‘Last night we heard shots and raced to the Kent house but found nothing. What you’re doing is wildly casting blame on the Skeltons, but for what? Not a damn thing has happened. The answer you’re looking for lies not out there with some ruffians milking illicit stills, but in a westerly direction where an elegant lady owns a fine house. That’s the way she went. In a buggy. With her maid, so there’s two women missing, not one—’
‘Damn it, we looked, McClain.’
‘So go look again. If the Skeltons are supposed to be holding those women as hostages, a cruel way of getting me to back off, where are they? Why aren’t they here letting me know, issuing ultimatums? Leave town, or what happen
s to the women is on your head.’ He grimaced. ‘No, that’s not the answer. Go out there now, Carter – and, OK, if I’m wrong and you don’t find Liz and Maria, then this afternoon we go and discuss kidnapping and murder with the Skeltons.’
When McClain rode out of Lo Tranquilo an hour later it was not with much confidence. He had a Winchester repeating rifle in his saddle boot, a dead man’s Colt Peacemaker six-gun in the holster tied alongside his right thigh and spare shells adding weight to his saddlebags. But he was nervous, and very much aware of an unusual tremor in the hands holding the reins. He supposed every man who had left home in 1861 to fight in the terrible war between the states must have felt grim forebodings akin to his own; it struck him forcibly that, if he’d overestimated his own abilities, this could be a one way trip.
With that thought came regret. Not for himself, because the decision to go after the two murdering Skeltons had been his from that day up in the Arizona high country. As was his decision to get Don Carter out of the way with trickery, and go it alone. But he was still riding a borrowed horse. After a month or more and Lord knew how many miles, he had grown fond of Jed Crane’s chestnut mare, and would trust it with his life. But that day on the Arizona homestead he had promised Sarah Crane that he would return everything he had borrowed. He was now facing the possibility that death would step in to force him to break his word.
Rankin had been able to tell him little about the Skeltons’ location, other than that some miles from the coast in a north-east direction the Texas landscape became more hilly, the hills thickly wooded, the rough trails snaking around bluffs and rocky outcrops. In one of the naturally forming valleys, Rankin said, McClain would come across an untidy sprawl of rough timber dwellings, outbuildings and corrals. Back of those, tucked away in dense woods, there were open fronted sheds where the moonshine whiskey was distilled.
There on the shaded gallery, as Carter brought his horse around from the makeshift barn and headed west, Rankin had looked amused. He was a man, McClain surmised, who did a lot of listening, spoke only when he had something worth contributing to a discussion. The saloonist knew what McClain was up to with Don Carter, but had said nothing. Nevertheless, his silence had been more eloquent than words: he agreed with McClain; that was clear. Carter had been away from the Gulf coast for years, and was best putting his efforts into looking out for Liz Kent. McClain should deal with the Skeltons, one way of another, and leave men like Rankin and Ike to get on with their lives.
One way or another, McClain thought wryly. He forced a smile in a vain attempt to lift his mood, flicked the reins, and headed into the hills.
Chapter Sixteen
They came at him from the front and from behind, riding out of the woods so that he was caught in a pincer: whatever the hell it was called, the manoeuvre was simple enough and carried out with skill, leaving McClain trapped.
He had been riding for less than an hour, the day’s heat always increasing; he’d let the mare take it nice and easy, hugging the trees and the shade whenever possible. He’d covered no more than five or six miles, deep in thought. In particular he remembered saying to Carter that the Skeltons knew of Liz Kent’s falling-down shack in the woods. They must have known that McClain had been taken there – so where were they?
And asking himself that same question, over and over again, yet so occupied with his thoughts that he’d neglected to keep his eyes and ears open.
Where were they?
Hell, the beating that had placed him in Liz Kent’s care had carried a clear enough message: get out of town, McClain. Forget about your dead wife, the dead homesteader and the defenceless old woman who’d had her throat cut in a Red Creek rooming house. Forget the Skeltons. Go back to life in small-town Arizona. Pin on your deputy’s badge, pick up the pieces and grow old the easy way.
Or else.
There had to be an ‘or else’. And that warning, unspoken but implied, was sure to be enforced by Mill and Reb and however many of the Skelton cousins they figured was necessary – this second time, to drive the message home. The only questions McClain had needed to ask himself were where and when.
Well, he’d been careless, and now he knew.
Except that once again he’d got it wrong. The riders who came out of the woods with rifles cocked and ready were not cousins. They weren’t Reb and Mill. It was the lean, cold-eyed killer, Hedrick Skelton, and his brother, the depraved man McClain still thought of as the mad dog: Marty Skelton.
They gave him no room. Exploding out of the woods with a fierce crackle of brush, they crowded him. Hedrick brought a tough looking bronc hard up against the startled mare’s tail. His crazy brother was on McClain’s big blue roan. Looking like a weird circus clown in his tall hat and thick glasses, he spurred the horse in close. The huge weight slammed into the mare’s neck, driving McClain and his horse sideways. Off balance, the mare tossed her head, wide eyes rolling. Snorting, she instinctively used the roan’s weight to help her in a fast turn to the left. Then she settled all her weight back on braced hind legs as she prepared to bolt. McClain was hanging on in the saddle. One hand clung to the horn; the other scrabbled desperately for his six-gun. At the same time he was using his knees and spurs on the mare, cursing and swearing at her to ‘go, go, go’. He knew if she broke clear he stood a chance.
Marty Skelton, eyes wild behind his thick eyeglasses, yellow teeth bared in a grin, anticipated the move with a detached, ice-cool manner. He lifted his arm and swung high and wide with his rifle. The barrel cracked McClain on the bone behind his ear. He sagged, eyesight blurring, senses reeling. Clamping his jaw against the blinding pain, he locked his hand on the saddle horn. His distress, more than his words, reached and galvanised the mare. Her hind legs gave a muscular thrust and she shot forward. Away and running, she left trail and woods behind and galloped into the low scrub. It was what the stunned McClain had prayed for, but the move was almost his undoing. The sudden fierce acceleration flung him backwards, sideways, but his grip on the horn held fast. That, and his desperate grab at the mare’s flying mane, saw him out of the saddle but clinging to the horse’s left flank like an Indian brave circling the wagons.
The thought floating in his dazed brain brought laughter bubbling. It died, left his mouth open, gasping, as he fought to hang on to the racing mare.
McClain’s mare had stamina, but Hedrick’s bronc was a sprinter. Using his spurs savagely, Hedrick brought the wiry horse crashing through the scrub after the fleeing mare. From a virtual standing start it overtook McClain in a few raking, ground-eating strides. That brought Hedrick alongside. He too used his rifle as a club. His target was McClain’s wrist; break his grip, get McClain down off the horse, and it was all over. The rifle barrel glinted in the sunlight as it lifted and chopped down. McClain, head twisted, caught the move and acted. Knowing that if the blow landed his wrist would shatter, he let go of the saddle horn. At once his weight took him down between the two racing horses. They were galloping through thick chaparral. The tangled scrub caught McClain’s feet, tore his hand from the mare’s mane and he crashed down. Sharp branches raked his clothes and skin. Sucking in deep breaths, he desperately shook his head. He needed clear vision, needed to see the killer.
He was aware, even as he battled against the lingering effects of Marty’s vicious blow, that releasing the saddle horn had been an instinctive act of self-preservation that had rewarded him with the gift of time.
For Hedrick Skelton had tried to peel away from the still running mare but was having difficulty turning the stubborn bronc. Its nostrils were flaring, its eyes flashing with the thrill of a chase it was reluctant to abandon.
Marty Skelton had delivered the blow to McClain’s head, watched his brother take off in pursuit when the mare bolted and had followed but without haste. He was closing in on McClain, but was shaking with laughter as he watched his brother fight the bronc.
Down in the thick chaparral, McClain drew his six-gun and coolly shot Marty Skelton in the chest.<
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The laughter died, cut as if by the slash of a knife. The thick glasses slid from his face, as the flesh seemed visibly to slacken. The exposed wild eyes became the dull eyes of a dead animal. Lifeless hands lost their grip on the rifle as Marty Skelton went backward out of the saddle. His tall hat flew, floated and fell. One booted foot remained caught in a stirrup. When the blue roan bolted, Marty Skelton was dragged through the chaparral on his back, a dead man flopping as limply as a child’s rag doll.
McClain pouched his six-gun. He could hear the roan, still running, and could hear Hedrick Skelton cursing at the top of his voice as he fought the excited bronc. Time. It could only be a matter of time; he had seconds, not minutes. Crawling on hands and knees, using the chaparral as cover, McClain fought his way through the scrub, reached Marty’s fallen rifle and fell on the weapon. It was a fine Winchester. He worked the breech, heard the shell slide home, and experienced an almost eerie relaxation of strained nerves. Then, clawing his way up out of thickets and thorns, he stood and turned.
Hedrick Skelton had fought the bronc to a standstill. It stood, quivering. Hedrick was standing in the stirrups, gazing after McClain’s roan. Struggling against the weight of Marty Skelton’s body hanging from one stirrup, it was clearly slowing. It came to a halt as McClain watched. Then he turned towards Hedrick, saw the look of venomous hatred he cast in McClain’s direction and knew at once that, even while fighting to control his horse, he had seen McClain coldly shoot his brother in the chest and watched his dead sibling dragged for a full hundred yards.
For both of them, McClain sensed, it was a moment for swift decisions. At ease with himself, his nerves calmed with one man down and the other consumed by rage, McClain chose to wait with the rifle resting in the crook of his arm.
Skelton moved, but not in the way McClain had expected. With a wild expletive that drifted to McClain through shimmering heat alive with tension, he spurred the bronc towards the standing blue roan. It was a short ride through the low chaparral, then across an open area where the flying hoofs kicked up clouds of dust. He hauled on the reins when he got close to the roan and moved the bronc in close at a slow walk. The standing horse was nervous, but intelligent enough to know that the deadweight hanging from the stirrup made flight impossible.