.45-Caliber Cross Fire

by Peter Brandvold

  He drew his suspenders up over his shoulders that had once been broad and square but now, with the ravaging of the years, were pulled slightly forward and down to both sides of his chest, which was rather spindly but had once attracted the fond glances of comely females. The old lawman donned his battered tan slouch hat with the hawk feather sticking out of its band, then stooped once more to retrieve his shell belt with his walnut-handled Starr .44 positioned for the cross draw in its left-side holster and a sheathed bowie knife on the left hip.

  “You dropped something.”

  Spurr followed the girl’s gaze to his badge lying on the floor where’d he’d dropped his shirt. He’d removed the copper sun-and-moon from the garment when he’d crossed the border and stuck it in his pocket. It must fallen out in last night’s high jinks with the puta.

  Spurr picked up the badge then shoved it into a pouch of one of his saddlebags hanging over the back of the chair by the table. He looked at the girl. She regarded him gravely, her long hair hanging straight down around her face.

  “They are bad men, those men you ask about.”

  “Si, senorita.” Spurr slid his Starr from its holster, flicked open the loading gate, and spun the cylinder. Only five chambers showed brass; it was his habit to keep the one beneath the hammer empty so he didn’t shoot himself in the leg.

  “They are five. You are only one old…” She cut herself off and flushed, looking ashamed.

  Spurr chuckled as he plucked a .44 cartridge from his shell belt and thumbed it into the empty chamber. “You got that right, senorita. I’m only one old man.” He spun the cylinder, clicked the loading gate shut, and slid the weapon into its holster angled high over his left hip. “But sometimes us old men’ll surprise you.”

  He gave her a wink as he draped the saddlebags over his left shoulder, then grabbed his old ’66 model Winchester repeater from where it leaned against the wall by the door and brushed dust from the brass receiver. Fishing around in his pants pockets, he found a few coins and tossed them onto the bed near the girl’s bare legs.

  “That cover it?”

  “Si, si. Gracias.” She lifted her eyes to his and forced a smile. “You surprised me last night, Senor Spurr. The way a wildcat surprises a rabbit!” She cupped her breasts in her hands, mashing them against her chest, curling her legs, and giggling.

  “Oh, I doubt that,” Spurr said with an appreciative grin. “But I’m much obliged to you for sayin’ so.”

  He pinched his hat brim to the girl and opened the door.

  “Go with Jesus, Spurr,” she said, her face grave again.

  “Oh, I doubt he’d have me. But I do intend to send a few fellas to El Diablo.”

  Spurr blew her a kiss as he hefted the saddlebags on his shoulder, went out, and closed the door behind him. In the quiet room, the young puta crossed herself and lifted her imploring eyes to the crucifix.

  5

  HITCHING HIS CARTRIDGE belt and his pants higher on his lean hips, Spurr walked down the stone steps and into the dirt-floored cantina stitched with sunlight blasting through the dirty front window.

  Three men were passed out in various positions about the cramped place, two on the floor. The previous night’s tobacco smoke and tequila smelled heavy and stale. There was no sign of the proprietor, the puta’s uncle, but Spurr could hear someone moving around behind a curtain flanking the bar consisting of pine logs stretched across beer kegs.

  He didn’t cross to the front of the room but turned at the bottom of the stairs and went outside through a plank-board door. This north side of the high, narrow, adobe building was shaded, but when he started walking west the brassy Mexican sun found him and set his head to pounding so that he wished he’d brought the mescal. It was late in the year, so despite the sun it was chilly, and the cold slithered beneath Spurr’s collar and down his back and made him shiver… and pine once more for the bottle.

  He continued along behind the buildings and trash piles and privies and stock pens, until he saw the whitewashed church ahead. St. Xavier’s was an ancient, crumbling ruin, with a cracked wall about six feet high around it. In several places the wall was open, having given way to the erosions of time, with ancient straw protruding from the old adobe and whitewash. In other places, the wall was pocked with bullet craters and large, faded bloodstains—mementos of the political upheavals and sundry violence that was part and parcel of daily life in Mexico.

  About twenty feet from the wall, Spurr stopped and pressed his shoulder to the back of the livery barn in which he’d stabled his big roan stallion, Cochise, and where, the previous night, he’d thought he might also find the mules and wagons he’d been following. But the outlaws had been careful. Cochise and a burro were the only tenants. The traitorous killers must have swung the wagons through town and, maybe not liking the setup, parked them out in the desert somewhere. Maybe they feared that in town someone might get a look at what they were hauling and spread the word, eventually making its way to the army, the Federales, or the Rurales. Most of the rural Mexican police force were every bit as corrupt as the banditos and border toughs they fought against.

  Spurr edged a look out from behind the barn. Across the pueblito’s narrow, dusty main street, a nondescript little building sat hunkered beneath a giant cottonwood opposite St. Xavier’s. Its pink adobe was cracked in many places, its flat roof shingled with cholla branches. There was a wooden front gallery propped on stones, and several chairs and even a velour love seat outfitted it.

  A water olla hung from the rafters, and a gourd dipper drooped from a nail in a gallery post. At the moment, a liver-colored cat sat on the porch rail, hunkered into itself, head bowed toward its front feet, awaiting the warmth of the rising sun.

  Unlike most of the other buildings, no smoke lifted from the brothel’s stone chimney. The windows were dark. No sounds emanated.

  Spurr hoped he hadn’t waited too long and let the killers get away. But most desperadoes, especially ones that had been trailing hard across a vast, lonely desert, chose to sleep deep and hard once they reached a town—especially after a night of carousing. And maybe enjoy one more poke and a leisurely breakfast before heading out the next day into the Mexican wastelands.

  Spurr shuttled his glance toward the wall surrounding the church. He saw a gap straight out before him, in the shape of an inverted V, and set his saddlebags down against the livery barn. Holding his rifle up before him in both hands, he pushed out from behind the barn and took three steps.

  A click sounded from the other side of the street. Spurr turned his head to see the brothel’s front door open and a figure emerge from the heavy shadows behind it, but Spurr continued walking, putting the ruined wall of the church between him and the whorehouse.

  He hadn’t been able to tell if the man had seen him. He stopped just inside the wall, gritting his teeth and cocking his ears. Had he blown his opportunity to take the demons unawares?

  As if in reply, a voice rose from across the street. “Hey! You there! I seen you!”

  Spurr glanced in the direction of the main street through a small, ragged hole in the church wall and saw the man—a rangy blond in dirty cream balbriggans and boots and wearing a pistol and cartridge belt around his waist—tuck his pecker back into his underwear bottoms as he stepped off the gallery. Apparently, he’d been coming out to piss in the street when he’d seen Spurr.

  The old lawman cursed under his breath as the brigand passed out of his view as he crossed the street, heading for the churchyard. Spurr looked around quickly. The church bulked up before him, about fifty yards away. Around it were rock-mounded graves, some sporting wooden or stone markers, some marked by nothing but the sage and catclaw growing up around them.

  About twenty feet to Spurr’s right, a tall stone marker fronted a grave that was not a rock mound but merely a barren, grave-shaped depression in the earth. He could hear the outlaw’s boots crunching gravel now as the man approached the wall. Spurr bolted over to the tall marker whose anc
ient inscription had been worn out by time—all he could make out was a faint image of Jesus holding his hands out in blessing.

  Spurr grunted as he bent his arthritic knees, hearing them pop, and sat down in front of the marker. He cursed again in pain as he rested his stiff back against the marker and ground his bony ass into the gravelly ground, then rested his rifle across his thighs. Quickly, he tipped the brim of his hat down over his eyes and lowered his chin to his chest. He breathed slowly, feigning sleep.

  “Hey!” The outlaw’s slightly high-pitched voice echoed around the boneyard, off the sun-blasted adobe walls of the church. “You, there! I seen you. Don’t think I didn’t!”

  Spurr poked up his hat brim up and opened one eye. The unshaven blond brigand stood in the V notch in the adobe wall, aiming a cocked Schofield revolver at Spurr. “Leave me be, damn you. Let a man sleep!”

  He closed the eye and crossed his arms on his chest as though in frustration.

  He could hear the man’s boots crunch gravel. His spurs chinged softly as he approached the old lawman. The crunching and chinging grew louder.

  The crunching and chinging stopped.

  Spurr smelled rancid tequila sweat. The man kicked his right, moccasin-clad foot.

  “What the hell you doin’, sneakin’ around out here, old-timer?”

  Spurr opened his eyes again and stared up at the mean-faced, unshaven blond whose nose was burned as bright as a Mexican sunset. “I done got kicked out of the last bed I was in. Somethin’ about my kickin’ and snorin’. If a man can’t get peace in a graveyard, where can he?”

  The blond brigand stared down at him speculatively. He narrowed his right eye, then his left eye. Then deep scowl lines cut across his forehead, and recognition dawned in his gaze. “Hey, I know you. Why… you’re… Spurr Mor—!”

  Spurr slapped the gun out of his face with a sideways thrust of his right arm. At the same time, he gave an agonized groan, kicked his right moccasin up, and drove it squarely into the man’s crotch. The pistol barked, the slug spanging off a gravestone somewhere behind Spurr. The outlaw folded like a jackknife, crossing his hands over his crotch and glaring at Spurr with bright blue eyes. Spurr whipped his rifle up and slammed the barrel across the outlaw’s right temple.

  The brigand screamed and half twisted around, dropping first to one knee, then to the other knee, and removing one of his hands from his crotch to cover his temple. He shook his head wildly as though to clear it. Slowly, both hands dropped, and he sagged over onto his side in the red dirt and gravel and lay still.

  Spurr grunted as he heaved himself to his feet, leapt the unconscious killer, and ran in his arthritic, shambling, bull-legged gait to the churchyard’s front wall and hunkered down beside a gap. Carefully, he edged a look through the gap and across the street at the brothel.

  Nothing had changed. No smoke lifted from the chimney, no sounds emanated from behind the gallery. Even the cat lounged as before, its head maybe hanging a little lower toward its paws. Obviously even morning gunfire wasn’t all that uncommon around here.

  Spurr ran back to the unconscious outlaw on whose cut temple a pale blue lump was sprouting. Spurr grabbed a set of handcuffs out of a pocket of his elkhide vest and cuffed the brigand’s hands behind his head. The man groaned, blinked his eyes. Spurr rammed the butt of his Winchester against the blond’s other temple, laying him out again, cold.

  It was not a move that Chief Marshal Henry Brackett would condone, if the sage old lawman ever learned of it. But Spurr was a not a by-the-book lawman. He couldn’t count on all his fingers and toes all the by-the-book badge toters he’d known who were now pushing up stones and buckbrush.

  He racked a cartridge into the Winchester’s breech and ran around behind the church, leaping graves and trash piles of mostly wine and tequila bottles, and stepped through a gap in the far western wall. Limping a little on his game left leg—he’d just discovered it was game when he’d pushed himself up so quickly to lay out the blond brigand—he ran across the main street and stole around to the rear of the brothel, where there was more trash and a stinky privy pit that had only been partially filled in, beside a two-holer without doors.

  A voice rose from the two-holer. “Del?”

  Spurr froze about ten feet from the privy. He stared at the privy, thinking fast. “What?”

  “Was that you that triggered that shot? Don’t you know me an’ the boys was wantin’ to sleep in?”

  Spurr stole forward on cat feet, until he gained the near front corner of the two-holer. “Sorry.”

  The voice of the man in the latrine was slow and gravelly—the voice of a badly hungover Texan. “Just cause you can’t sleep past five thirty from your daddy wakin’ you to milk cows when you was just a shaver don’t mean you got a right to go firin’ that pistol of yourn so early in the goddamn mornin’!”

  Spurr looked through the door at the man sitting the hole—a stocky man with thin, curly brown hair and a week’s growth of beard on his fleshy, red-eyed face. The man’s eyes had just started to widen when Spurr slammed his Winchester’s butt solidly against the man’s forehead with a loud, crunching smack and then a wooden thud as his head smashed against the back wall.

  Knowing the man’s wick was out if he wasn’t dead, Spurr whipped around, aiming his rifle at the brothel’s back door that stood about two feet open. A well-worn path led from the door to the privy. There were no windows back here, and Spurr took advantage of that by taking his time, listening closely, as he tramped to the back door then listened for another few seconds before hooking the Winchester’s barrel around the door and slowly swinging it wide.

  He ground his teeth against the squawk of the dry hinges, then quickly stepped inside and pressed his back against the wall right of the door. He was in a hall, and there was a man standing in front of him, about eight feet away.

  As Spurr’s eyes adjusted, he made out a bearded face with two surprised eyes under the brim of a tan cavalry hat. A Colt Army pistol in the man’s hand was tracking Spurr’s move to the wall. Light from behind Spurr flashed off the Colt’s bluing, and Spurr squeezed his Winchester’s trigger.

  The roar in the close confines made the entire building jump. The man in front of Spurr yelped and triggered his Colt out the open door as he flew straight back down the hall, which Spurr could now see opened onto the main part of the brothel, which wasn’t much except a small bar and several large cots covered in animal skins. Two of the skin piles were now moving, and a man leapt off a cot against the brothel’s right side, hit the floor on his ass, showed his wild eyes to Spurr, then reached under the cot for a sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun.

  “Goddamn you, Little Dog,” he shouted, lifting the shotgun. “You said we had nothin’ to worry about here!”

  “Hold it!” Spurr took long strides forward as he pressed his Winchester’s brass buttplate hard against his right shoulder and levered a fresh round into the chamber.

  “Hold this, you son of a bitch!”

  The man on the floor raised the shotgun higher, and Spurr drilled him through the middle of his forehead. Another man emerged from a pile of skins on the room’s left side, under which a girl was cowering and screaming, and grabbed one of several pistols off the bar planks and ran toward the brothel’s front window.

  “Stop, you devil!” Spurr shouted, ejecting the spent cartridge from the Winchester and racking another round, drawing a bead on the middle of the running man’s back. He was big and naked and nearly as hairy as an ape. As big as he was, he managed to twist around and fire an errant shot toward Spurr before he bounded off his bare heels and dove toward the window.

  Spurr squeezed the rifle’s trigger. The Winchester’s roar was nearly drowned by the screech of shattering glass as the big, hairy man dove on through to disappear onto the gallery while glass rained behind him.

  Another girl began screaming and yet another began shouting Spanish epithets above and behind Spurr, who wheeled suddenly, levering the Winchester and
aiming at a small loft area to which a wooden stairs rose, over the main room. The girl shouting at him was plump and naked and gesturing wildly while calling Spurr every name he’d ever been called in his long career, and a few he hadn’t. No other men appeared to be with her.

  Spurr tipped his hat brim to the angry puta then swung around and walked on out the front door and onto the gallery. The big, hairy, long-haired man was writhing in a bloody sea of broken glass, reaching down with one hand to grab his crotch.

  “Well, if it ain’t ole Alvin Little Dog,” Spurr said, aiming his Winchester at the bloody half-breed’s head. “Last time I seen you, you was bein’ shipped off to Deer Lodge in the good ole Montana Territory.”

  Little Dog looked up at Spurr. His face was broad, pockmarked, knife-scarred, and unlike the rest of him, hairless. “Spurr,” he grunted, holding his hand high inside his right thigh, where apparently Spurr’s bullet had pinked him as he dove out the window. In a pain-pinched, quavering voice, he said, “What brings you to Mexico, you old son of a bitch?”

  “You.”

  Little Dog squeezed his eyes closed and gritted his teeth. “Well… you got me. Figured… it might be you… who’d get me. Just figured it that way.” He was cut up bad. A deep gash in his neck was spurting blood. Sweat popped out on his red-tan cheeks and forehead, and his entire body shook. “Go ahead—finish me!”

  “Where you boys headed with them wagons, Alvin?”

  Dying as painfully as he was, Little Dog only grinned and shook his head. “No, sir, brother. Won’t give you that, you ugly old bastard.”

  He whooped triumphantly, jeeringly.

  Movement on the other side of the street caught Spurr’s eye. The blond outlaw was staring through a hole in the church wall, looking dazed, both temples bloody. Spurr wouldn’t get the information he wanted from Little Dog. At least not before the Cree half-breed expired from blood loss. The lawman would get it out of this contingent of the gang’s sole surviving member.