Hey, Cowgirl, Need a Ride?

by Baxter Black

  The old man went to the kitchen drawer and got two big rolls of silvery duct tape. “Take off yer boots. Now you, what’s yer name?”

  “Pike,” said Pike.

  “Pike, you git over here and stand back to back with Hermann Goering, here. Reach both arms around backwards in front of him. Good. Closer together.”

  The old man taped Pike’s wrists together, then ran a strip through Valter’s belt. He repeated the process with Valter, taping his wrists behind his back in front of Pike and securing them to the front of Pike’s belt.

  “Off with yer boots, Davy,” said the old man to the groggy Daniel Boon.

  He then backed Boon up against the left side of Pike and taped the three men together.

  “You’re not going to get far,” warned Valter. “If she’s payin’ you, we can double it, triple it. You’re getting involved in something more dangerous than you know.”

  “Danger!” said the old man. “Danger! I faced the panzers in France, I’ve looked down the barrel of a Nazi cannon. And the kid here, hell, he rode Kamikaze!”

  “Was that you?” asked Pike incredulously. “I saw that! Two years ago at the Finals. I’ll remember that ride all my life! I’d just like to shake your— Well, later. When this is all over maybe I could get your autograph.”

  “Sure,” said Lick, temporarily beyond flattery.

  “Okay, gents. Out here in the center of the room,” instructed the old man. “Feet together.” He encircled the six legs with four roundyround circles of duct tape ankle high. “Now, we are gonna slip outta here, but first . . .” Using eight-inch strips, he covered their eyes.

  “Al,” whined Boon, “whattya doin’? I’m yer mate. I don’t know these guys. I’s just helpin’ out. Bein’ their guide, so to speak. Whyn’t ya let me go. I’ll high-step it outta here, won’t tell nobody.”

  “Hold it, Davy,” said the old man.

  “It’s Daniel.”

  “Really? I thought you wuz named after Davy Crockett.”

  “Nope. Daniel Webster, actually. My mother was a librarian but I—”

  “Come on, Al,” interrupted Lick. “Let’s go. I’ve got the horses saddled!”

  They grabbed their coats and bailed out the door, leaving the seedy triumvirate like a three-dimensional jack of spades. Behind the horse shed they jerked the tie ropes loose and swung into the saddle. Immediately above them the helicopter roared across at fifty feet.

  The old man’s dogs jumped and the horses spooked! Two hundred yards out in the sagebrush they saw Teddie Arizona running at full speed. She was wearing her black ski jacket with yellow stripe accents. The helicopter had spotted her and was in full pursuit!

  A helicopter can be a scary thing. From the ground it is like being attacked by a giant praying mantis. The powerful rotor wash can easily knock a person down and the noise can rattle your eyelids.

  The old man and Lick kicked the horses into a hard run. Lick held his course straight toward Teddie. His horse, terrified of the helicopter, fought to turn off. The old man swung to the starboard side of the helicopter, unhitching his fifty-foot ⅜-inch nylon rope from its keeper on the swell. He shook out a loop.

  Teddie Arizona was zigzagging, but Busby held the helicopter menacingly close. The old man rode up on the tailpiece at a dead run, swinging his rope. With the wisdom of mature plankton, he threw a beautiful loop over the tail rotor assembly, pulled back on the reins, and dallied in true buckaroo fashion.

  The helicopter was twenty feet above the ground when the rope tied to the saddle pulled taut. It lifted the horse and rider straight up several feet before the tail section tipped down, plunging the old man and his horse back to Earth.

  The old man could see T.A. was clear. The jerk had changed the angle and direction of the helicopter. He swung to the left and spurred his mount. Busby was frantically trying to regain balance and control—delicate maneuvers made even more difficult by the lunatic roper who now seemed to be riding in a circle clockwise around the floundering copter.

  Busby felt a fleeting moment of control, pushed the throttle, and pulled back on the stick. The sudden jerk nearly pulled the old man’s horse over backwards but he unpeeled his dally and pitched the slack just in time.

  The old man’s horse was in the “Trigger” position when the standing end of his best rope was sucked into the blades of the tail rotor. It sounded like stepping on a tin can. Maybe a lot of tin cans. Pieces of metal flew through the air. The helicopter, whirling like a slow top, crashed to the ground with a deafening roar. Dust, rocks, and brush filled the air.

  As the copter breathed its last, Lick rode up to T.A., who finally got the horse’s attention above the din. She grabbed the reins up next to the bit, slid back along the neck, and grasped the horn and the front of Lick’s brush jacket, plunging her right foot in the left stirrup, which was swinging free. Lick got a handful of her ski jacket and pulled her up behind the horn onto his lap. To their everlasting good fortune, the horse didn’t buck. He just wanted out of there! He leaped to a run in three short jumps. Lick managed to get the reins out from under T.A.’s torso, but she still had her right foot in the left stirrup, which pulled them hard to port. Lick leaned hard in the starboard stirrup to keep them upright.

  Through some awkward banging and tugging he managed to get her laid across the saddle and his own foot back in the left stirrup. Within three minutes, they were far enough away from the battlefield to slow down. Lick trotted the horse, then walked him a short distance more. And short though it was, it was long enough to stimulate a primitive response in Lick’s parasympathetic nervous system. Something had come between them.

  She noticed his interest in her. She also noticed that she, too, had a funny tingle.

  Lick stopped the horse, which was blowing hard. “Whoa, baby,” he said, obviously talking to himself. T.A. slid down his leg off the left side.

  “Quite a ride,” she said, still a little rattled herself.

  Lick gave her a quick, steady look to discern her meaning. She gave him no clue.

  He looked back at the helicopter that now lay still. The old man was riding toward them.

  “Climb up here behind me,” Lick said, kicking the left stirrup free.

  T.A. mounted behind the cantle and loosely put her arms around his waist.

  Lick had not had so much as a kiss since summer. He didn’t even miss women. At least that’s what he thought. He’d kept his distance from Teddie Arizona, a married woman, except for that little back rub. But something had just happened. A spark had just fired in a long-dead cylinder.

  The old man rode up beside them.

  “Pilot’s fine. Heard him cussing a blue streak. It’s gonna take him a while to get himself out of that hunk of junk. Let’s head to the Goat Creek winter camp.”

  Lick felt the warmth of T.A. pressing against his back and she tightened her arms around his waist as they crossed the country at a lope.

  16

  DECEMBER 3: THE CHASE CONTINUES

  Busby shut down the motors as quickly as he could after the crash. It took him ten minutes to wriggle out the door, whose frame had crumpled like a beer can on impact. The tail rotors had snapped and pieces of nylon rope were woven amongst the twisted metal. The mutilated copter looked like an ostrich doing yoga.

  “Aw, heck,” said Busby in his former U.S. Navy training jargon. He squinted into the distance and saw two mounted horses loping across the sagebrush toward the south. “Oh, well, they can’t demote me.” Then he noticed muffled noises drifting from the trailer.

  As he rounded the corner and stepped in the front door of the trailer, he heard loud, angry voices. A wooden chair was upended. A cheap coffee table lay on its side with magazines, matches, pencils, and accumulated cowboy paraphernalia scattered on the floor. Afloat on this landfill lay the three wise men duct-taped together.

  “’Bout time,” said Boon.

  It took Busby several minutes to untangle and untape the captives. Valter had an ugly cut
on one eyebrow that oozed blood. Pike’s nose was beginning to swell. Boon had maneuvered deftly during the fall and had stayed on top. He was unhurt, though his arm was asleep.

  Finally all four stood in the small living room. Valter fumed during Busby’s description of the chase, helicopter roping, and escape.

  “That road they’re on,” offered Boon, “takes ’em down offa the plateau here, across Goat Creek, and down to Highway 51. They’ll pass by an old sheep station on the other side of the creek.”

  “So you think that’s where they’re headed?” asked Valter.

  “Don’t know,” answered Boon. “If the sheila’s tryin’ to get away from you mates, they’d just keep goin’. But it’s twenty miles on out to the highway—if they stayed on the road, of course.”

  “Okay,” said Valter. “Busby, you see if that ol’ car will start. Boon, if they stay on this road, how long before we catch up with them?”

  “I’ve only been up here a couple times,” replied Boon. “But the road up here on top is a real bush track. Horses can go faster than cars. But once we’re on the other side of Goat Creek, we’ll hit a good gravel road. We’d catch ’em there easy.”

  They heard an engine roar to life outside. They stepped outside to see Busby at the wheel of Al’s smoking Ford Galaxie four-door sedan, which Lewis the foreman had jump-started and charged the battery on that morning. From the helicopter they retrieved their travel bags, which included Valter’s other .45 automatic and an extra handgun for Pike.

  When Boon saw the guns, he balked. “I don’t think I like the idea of shootin’ at my mates.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Mr. Boon,” soothed Valter. “We don’t plan on hurting anybody.”

  “I ’ope not. Friends are scattered far apart out heah.”

  They climbed in the car and turned back toward the road, which more correctly could be described as a series of ruts strewn with oil-pan-whacking rocks and bumper-dragging sagebrush. Skilled pilot though he was, Busby couldn’t avoid all the rocks, ruts, and bumps. Valter, sitting in the passenger seat, with Pike and Boon in the backseat were thrown back and forth, knees to dashboard, hat against the headliner, being whiplashed and snapped at a teeth-jarring, stomach-lurching four miles an hour.

  “Busby!” screamed Valter. “Can’t you make this hunk of junk go any faster? I could get there faster walking!”

  “I’m pushing it the best I can,” Busby said. “It’s like driving a corn picker through a minefield!”

  Ten minutes down the road they passed the extra horses in a large fenced-in pasture called “the trap.”

  “What are horses doin’ there?” asked Valter.

  “Them’s their extra mounts. They use’m to give their best horses a breather,” explained Boon.

  “Stop here, Busby. Let me think a minute,” Valter instructed.

  “There was a saddle hangin’ in the tack room behind the trailer,” remembered Pike.

  “I saw it comin’ back from the helicopter.”

  “All right, then,” said Valter. “Boon, catch these two horses here, go back to the trailer, saddle one, lead the other, and follow us. Shoot, you might even pass us, good as this road is, and that way if they take out cross-county, we’ll be prepared to follow them. Otherwise, we’ll meet up down the road here at Goat Creek and make a plan. Got it?”

  “Righto, mate,” said Boon, getting into the swing of things.

  17

  DECEMBER 3: CONFRONTATION AT GOAT CREEK

  The sun was wan in the west and clouds were scudding in when the bargelike Ford Galaxie tipped over the rim of Pandora’s Thumb and nosed down into the Goat Creek crossing.

  “There they are!” said Teddie Arizona. “Across the creek. You were right, Al, they stole your car.”

  “I figgered that, bein’ the common criminals they are,” Al mused. “’Course, I wouldn’t’ve been surprised if they’d stole our horses from the trap, too. Either way, they’ve got to come through here. It’s our best chance to ambush ’em before we get to the highway.”

  T.A., Lick, and the old man were lying prone at the top of the rock cliff on the west side of Goat Creek. Beneath them, sheltered against a black sheet of vertical rock, lay sheep headquarters. It consisted of a stone house with a tin roof and beyond the house toward the creek an ancient stone horse barn, corrals, and a machine shed. Two saddled horses were tied to the corral fence. The saddled horses were bait in the old man’s ambush plan.

  The three of them watched as the Ford Galaxie slowly descended the steep road across the canyon from them. It drove cautiously to within fifty yards of the house and stopped. Two men got out of the car, one from the front passenger side, one from the driver’s-side back door. Each was carrying a pistol. In the leeward silence of the cliff, Lick could hear the engine turn off and the car doors close.

  Lick pulled back from the edge. In a low voice he said, “Al, there’s two of ’em got out. Looks like the driver’s stayin’ with the car. I don’t see the fourth one. Maybe yer right about them leavin’ one back to bring our horses from the trap.”

  Al rubbed his chin. “’Course I wuz right. You don’t reckon any of that bunch would walk? He might not be far behind, so let’s git our plan goin’. I stay up here and stand guard. T.A., you slip down and let the air outta their tires. Lick, you slide around and grab our two decoy horses and we ride off, leavin’ ’em stranded.”

  “What if that other one come ridin’ up while I’m sneakin’ the horses around?” asked Lick. “They’ve all got guns. I’m beginnin’ to wonder if this decoy-horse plan was such a great idea after all.”

  “What’s the matter with you, kid? You think I don’t know what I’m doin’? I didn’t get three stripes in Uncle Sam’s army for bein’ dumb. Wuz you ever in the army?”

  Lick shook his head.

  “Well, that’s why. If you wuz, you’d know this wuz one of Rommel’s favorite tricks. He’d park a camel tied to a palm tree out there in the desert and wait behind a sand dune for the Limeys to fall into his trap. That’s how come he got to be a general.”

  Lick almost got snared in the logic, but gave up. “They’ve still got guns, Al,” he repeated. “I’d be a sittin’ duck.”

  “Have faith, my boy. We, too, are armed,” the old man replied, patting the Winchester Model 94. “Besides, if we don’t stop ’em now, they’ll get T.A. fer sure.” Al looked over at Teddie, who’d been listening. “Don’t worry, little lady, we’re gonna get you outta this mess, but it’s gonna be exciting.”

  The old man stayed on top of the rim with his two dogs napping soundly behind him. Teddie took the .22 pistol and eased to the south, staying low because her black ski jacket with the yellow stripes was poor camouflage. Lick tucked Valter’s co-opted Colt .45 into his belt and climbed down the north side above the corrals to reach the horses. His job was to lead them along the creek and up behind the car. There he would join up with Teddie, follow the road up out of the little Goat Creek canyon, and pick up the old man.

  The sheep headquarters lay in the shadow of the cliff. For many years the old man had had poor vision, but with age it had improved, which helped his aim enormously. Unfortunately, his hearing had gone the other way. But he could still create a diversion should Lick or T.A. get in trouble. He could see the two pursuers cautiously inspecting the main house.

  T.A. managed to get up behind the car more easily than she’d anticipated. She stayed low in a long ditch, then crawled directly behind it.

  Busby, being a professional pilot, was used to long waits in the cockpit or log room while his passengers did their business. Waiting in the Ford Galaxie was no different for him. He had a pocket computer that played solitaire, a Louis L’Amour novel, and the patience of Job. At present he was actually asleep at the wheel.

  Meanwhile, Lick was coming up from the north side of the horse barn, out of sight of the house. He crept toward the horses that Al had tied to the corral fence as a lure to draw in their pursuers.

 
The old man watched as Valter and Pike circled the stone house and eased slowly toward the horse barn. In the dim light he could see Lick coming in their direction. Now was the time for his diversion. He picked a spot a foot or two in front of the one closest to the barn and squeezed off a shot.

  Teddie Arizona was on her back underneath the rear end of the car. She had just removed the valve stem cap from the right rear tire and was fixing to release the pressure when the shot rang out. Suddenly the key clicked, the crankshaft turned over, and the engine started.

  T.A. pulled the pistol out of her waistband as the car began to move forward. Still lying on the ground, she fired one shot into the tread of each rear tire.

  Busby froze as the car lurched beneath him and then he stomped on the brakes. He’d heard the shot in front of him, then two shots behind him. He could see Valter and Pike racing back toward the stone house and diving for cover. Who was doing all the shooting?

  He noticed the sudden change in the angle of his craft. Should he get out? Should he drive forward to rescue the passengers? He mentally referred to the giant book of Pilot Obligations and Ethics regarding this situation. It was essentially the same as the giant book used by news photographers when faced with the dilemma of getting the shot or saving a life . . . ALWAYS GET THE PHOTOGRAPH! The professional obligation was to get the aircraft (in this case, the vehicle) home safe and sound.

  Busby scanned the horizon. Seeing no enemy in sight, he carefully opened the door and peeked out the crack. The left rear tire was flat. He pushed the door open and dove to the ground, rolling toward the back of the vehicle for safety. He slid beneath the left rear fender, still looking in the direction of the first shot. He exhaled deeply.

  “Don’t move a muscle,” a female voice said intimately.