The Killing Shot

by Johnny D. Boggs

  Duke stood trembling. He reached for the whiskey the barkeep had poured, but Pardo’s left hand shot out and knocked the shot glass across the bar.

  “Tell me, Duke. What brings you to Redington? This is Chaucer’s idea, ain’t it? Well, Duke, what’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?”

  Duke’s head shook violently. “It was Phil, boss man. Phil told me to come.”

  “Phil?”

  Pardo stepped back.

  “Yeah, boss man, Phil. He sent Harrah to Dos Cabezas. Told me to ride up here. He figured you’d first show up in either Dos Cabezas or here in Redington.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Pardo spotted another figure, a tall man with dirty blond hair dismounting a black horse, holding a bucket in his left hand. Pardo turned, halfway drawing the Colt from its holster, before stopping. It was a freshly shaven Swede Iverson, filling the doorway with his giant frame, a grin stretching from ear to ear.

  “Hey, Pardo,” the man called out, just like a dumb Swede, letting everyone in the saloon know who he was, although the only one here who didn’t know him was the Mexican. “I got them strawberries. Mac told me to bring them on over to you.”

  Pardo felt his heart skip. Shoving the Colt back into the holster, he reached up and grabbed Duke’s shirt-front, jerked the spindly man toward him. “Where’s Ma?” he asked.

  Duke’s eyes bulged. His Adam’s apple bobbed. His face went pale. His mouth moved, but no sound escaped his lips, just his rancid breath.

  “Where is she?” He shook the tall man savagely.

  “B-b-boss,” Duke pleaded.

  “Where is she?” He jerked the .44-40 from the holster, thumbed back the hammer, jammed the barrel into Duke’s stomach. “Answer me, you bastard, or I’ll gut you with this Colt. Answer me. What’s happened to Ma?”

  Duke’s trembling mouth shot out the word in a primal scream. At first, Pardo didn’t hear him. Couldn’t have heard those words. Swede Iverson was saying something about strawberries, picking up one of the fruit in his fingers, revealing it like he was showing off a four-pound trout he had just hooked. Major Ritcher was ducking through the door, practically knocking Swede Iverson out of the way. The bartender was exiting through a back door. Pardo shoved Duke against the bar, the tall man’s flailing arms knocking pewter steins and glasses to the earthen floor. The room began spinning, and he heard Duke’s words over and over and over again.

  She’s dead.

  She’s dead.

  She’s dead.

  She’s dead.

  She’s dead.

  She’s dead…dead…dead…dead…dead….

  The Colt fell to the floor, and Pardo knocked off his hat, grabbing his hair, pulling and pulling. No, somebody was screaming, the voice coming from some deep well.

  No.

  No.

  No.

  It took a few minutes before Pardo realized it was he who was yelling.

  He steeled himself, stopped yelling, quit yanking on his hair. Tears blurred his vision, but he found Duke standing by the bar, dumbly staring down at Pardo. Slowly, Pardo rose, wiped his eyes, and asked, “What happened?” His voice, surprisingly, sounded calm.

  Duke made the mistake of hesitating, and Pardo leaped on him, slapping his face repeatedly, ignoring the stupid fool’s pleas. “Who killed her? Who? Who done it, damn you? Who did it? It was Chaucer, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Chaucer. But…”

  Pardo shoved Duke away, turned, found his gun, holstered it, started for the door. He should have known. Should have gunned down that son of a bitch before he left camp. He had felt this for some time, knew Ma would try to get that bastard, but…

  Chaucer.

  Something stopped him, and he turned savagely, eyes drilling into Duke.

  “Y’all let him go?” His hands tightened into balls. “After he gunned down my mother?”

  Duke backed against the bar, gripping it for support.

  “Phil said it was a fair fight.”

  “Phil? Phil let him go?”

  Duke’s head bobbed slightly. “Only…”

  “Only what?”

  “Well…”

  “Go on, damn it. Out with it. Tell me everything.”

  “She, your ma, Miz Ruby, she caught Wade—she had the drop on him. Out in front of Lacy’s tent.”

  “Lacy?”

  Duke nodded. Pardo felt his hands turn clammy. He was sweating profusely.

  “Your ma had Chaucer covered with the Winchester, said she was gonna kill him. And then…” Duke looked around for whiskey, a bottle, a glass, but he had knocked everything to the floor or behind the bar, out of his reach.

  “It happened so fast, boss man. Me and Phil, we was tryin’ to get a fire goin’, get the coffee boilin’, and then Wade was divin’ and palmin’ his Remington. And then…well…it was Lacy, inside that tent. She had that hideaway gun we taken off the girl.”

  “The girl?” Pardo’s eyes squinted.

  “Yeah, boss man. The girl. The girl we taken off the train. Blanche. The one with the potty mouth.”

  Oh, yeah. He had forgotten about the kid. He pictured the ten-year-old’s mother, but then a vision of Lacy replaced the blond-haired German.

  “What about Lacy?” he asked, trying to get the bitter taste out of his mouth.

  “She shot…she shot Miz Ruby twice in the back.”

  “In the back.” Calm. His voice sounded calm. As if he had expected this.

  “Yeah. Mind you, she didn’t kill her. Lacy, I mean. Lacy didn’t kill your mother. But them slugs caught her in the small of her back, like they knocked the breath out of her, and that give Wade all the chance he needed. He had his gun drawn, and put two bullets through Miz Ruby’s lungs. I’m…I’m…I’m plumb sorry, boss man. Phil, he sent me here. To find you when you come in, if you come in. Figured you’d want to know pronto.”

  He turned, headed for the door.

  He saw the bucket at Swede Iverson’s side, saw the strawberries, and the madness struck again, savage, blinding him with rage, tormenting his soul. He jerked the bucket from Iverson’s hand, threw it across the street, then pulled the Colt from the leather. He emptied the Colt into the overturning bucket, which rained strawberries on the street. People came out of the doors, opened windows, peered up or down the street, staring.

  Pardo didn’t care. He watched the bucket hit the dirt, and he kept pulling the trigger, even though the hammer kept clicking on empty chambers.

  “Ma,” he cried, and fell to his knees, dropping the Colt in the dirt, staring down at those red strawberries, staring until he couldn’t see anything for his tears.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Reilly dropped to his knees, pried the Colt out of Pardo’s hand, and let it fall. Like a child, that brutal killer buried his face against Reilly’s shoulder and bawled.

  “Easy, Jim,” Reilly whispered, confused. “What happened?”

  “It’s…Ma…” Pardo choked out the words. “Chaucer…killed…her.” He punctuated the statement with a mournful wail that even caused Reilly to shudder.

  A million thoughts raced through Reilly’s mind. He had Pardo now, unarmed, broken. Duke stood in the door of the saloon, next to Swede Iverson, staring, mouths open. He could take them, and Pardo, take them all so damned easily. The major, Ritcher, he had mounted his horse and was loping out of town by the time Reilly ran out of the mercantile, leaving the bag of supplies Pardo had ordered on the boardwalk. He hadn’t had time to visit the barber. All Reilly had to do was draw his gun. Arrest them. Yet he couldn’t forget Dagmar and Blanche. Chaucer had killed Ruby Pardo, but what had he done with the two hostages? Was he still in camp in the Dragoons? Why was Duke here? Where were the others? Where were Dagmar and Blanche? No, he couldn’t risk pulling a gun on Pardo. It was like he had told the Wickenburg marshal. He had to get back to the Dragoons, had to find Dagmar.

  He put his lips close to Pardo’s ear, and whispered, “Jim, you got to pull you
rself together. Don’t let them see you like this, not Duke, not Iverson.” He looked at the people milling in the streets. “Not these Redington…” He thought of the word. “Hayseeds.”

  Pardo’s breath caught. He was trying to dam those tears soaking the blue chambray shirt Reilly had just bought, which had set him—or, rather, Pardo—back fifty-five cents.

  “Come on, Jim. We need to light a shuck out of town. Jim, listen to me. Since I was a just a young colt, I always wanted to be like Jim Pardo. Bloody Jim. The man the law couldn’t catch. You were better than Quantrill or Bloody Bill, better than Jesse James, Sam Bass. Better than Bill Longley or John Wesley Hardin. But you can’t let these people see you like this. We’ll get Chaucer. You’ll see. Now stand up, Jim. Come on. We need to get out of town. In a hurry.”

  There wasn’t any law in Redington, but a few merchants were pointing, and those mercantiles had a lot of shotguns, rifles, and revolvers in the cases. If one of them happened to recognize Pardo, or even Reilly, for that matter, these streets could be running red with blood.

  Pardo lifted his head, pinched his nose, and forced a weak smile. “Figured my nose would start to gushing,” he said. “But it didn’t. Never can figure that out.” His hand found the Colt, and he was standing, nodding, plunging the empty casings into the dirt, and filling the cylinder with fresh rounds.

  Most men, including Reilly, kept the chamber under the revolver’s hammer empty, as a safety precaution, to keep from accidentally shooting off a toe, but not Jim Pardo. He kept six beans in the wheel, as the saying went.

  “Thanks, Mac.” Pardo’s eyes were red-rimmed, and snot hung from his nose, yet his voice was firm now. He holstered the revolver, and stared across the street until the people started going back to their businesses. “You get the supplies?” he asked without looking at Reilly.

  “Yeah. Back at the store.”

  When Pardo turned, he almost started to cry again once he saw the strawberries littering the ground near him, but steeled himself and pointed a stubby finger at Duke and Iverson, still standing in the doorway of the saloon. “Mount up, boys. We’re through here. We got work to do.”

  They drifted south to the Southern Pacific tracks and turned east, following the old Overland road. Back in the late 1850s, John Butterfield had created a route for Overland Mail Company, a passenger-and mail-carrying stagecoach road from Tipton, Missouri, to San Francisco, California. When the Civil War broke out, U.S. officials moved the route out of the South and across the Great Plains, but Butterfield’s trail still got travelers, from the Jackass Mail to settlers, and the Army. It still got fairly heavy traffic, although the three riders met only a white-haired Mexican hauling firewood on a burro, and that had been ten miles earlier, as they rode east.

  Instead of turning south for the Dragoons, Pardo rode ahead, and Reilly, Iverson, and Duke followed in silence. At the edge of Texas Canyon, he reined in the roan, allowing the three riders to catch up.

  “What do you think?” Pardo asked no one in particular.

  Swede and Duke looked at Reilly for an answer.

  As he swung a leg over the saddle horn and stretched, Reilly asked in a casual voice, “You mean as a place to hit that Army wagon train?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  Reilly scratched his beard.

  The canyon was fairly wide, yet the road hugged the mounds of twisted rocks and boulders on the northern side. The sky was a brilliant blue, which accented the rocky ledges, the closest ones the color of desert sand, but farther up the canyon they turned a deep red, spotted with growths of juniper, the occasional Spanish yucca, and a bunch of dead mesquite trees whose empty, spindly branches reached out like tentacles of some great sea monster.

  Reilly glanced at Swede Iverson, then looked into Pardo’s eyes, trying to read that man’s thinking, but he couldn’t.

  “You busted Swede Iverson,” Reilly began, then decided to correct himself. “We busted Iverson out of Wickenburg because you wanted a good man with explosives. So you’re thinking about blowing up these rocks.”

  Pardo grinned, until Reilly shook his head.

  “You cause an avalanche, you’ll not only bury the soldiers escorting that train, you’ll bust up your Gatling guns. And the howitzer.”

  “You ain’t so bright after all, Mac,” Pardo said, and hooked his thumb toward the highest peak. “Can you bring down them rocks?” he asked Iverson.

  It took Swede Iverson only a glance. “With ease.”

  “Block this road?”

  This time, Iverson had to examine both sides of the canyon with more care. “Sure,” he said after a while, nodding with less exuberance.

  Pardo’s head bobbed with satisfaction. “Now, here’s where it gets ticklish. According to Major Ritcher, two companies of infantry’ll be guarding that train, been with them since they left Fort Bliss. There’ll also be a cavalry troop out of Fort Bowie riding with it, but it’ll be commanded by a green lieutenant named Talley.”

  Reilly’s eyebrows arched, although he tried to disguise any recognition. It didn’t matter. Pardo was looking at the towering rocks, and Iverson and Duke were staring at Pardo. Talley? Reilly thought. Jeremiah Talley? But Jerry was supposed to have been off to California. He wouldn’t be back yet, unless his orders had changed.

  “The cavalry patrol, green or not, will take off first, ahead of the wagons,” Pardo continued. “Make sure passage’s safe, and once they get here”—he gesturing with his thumb—“they get buried with them big old rocks. And then there’s no place for the wagons to go.”

  “Except out of the canyon,” Duke said, “due east.”

  “How about if I blow up the other side, too?” Swede Iverson rubbed his hands together, excited about the prospects. “I can do that, Pardo. Blow up both entrances to this canyon.”

  Pardo blinked. “So we got the Army patrol trapped, eh? No way in, no way out?”

  “Yeah,” Iverson said.

  “Then we can just pick ’em off,” Duke said and, slapping his thigh, raised his voice excitedly. “Be like a hawg killin’.”

  Pardo, saying nothing, looked at Reilly, who grinned.

  “Boys,” Reilly said, “if you do that, how do we get the Gatlings out of this canyon?”

  Frowns quickly clouded their once-excited faces.

  “We could haul them up,” Pardo said, and Reilly’s face froze. “With ropes. Have some wagons waiting on the other side, load them, and raise hell for the Mexican border. I like it.”

  Reilly didn’t. “That’ll take a long time, Jim. Too long. Plus, you’re likely to run into more than a few patrols out of Fort Huachuca. You bring down these canyon walls, that noise will be heard for miles. Word will be out about what happened here long before you ever reach the border. And it won’t just be Army patrols.” He pointed south. “You’ll have the posses out of Tombstone, Contention, Charleston, Bisbee, maybe as far west as Nogales.”

  “Uh-huh.” Pardo’s blue eyes shined. “Give us a chance to test out my new Gatling guns.”

  Reilly tried to swallow, found his throat parched, and reached for his canteen.

  “What about it, Swede?” Pardo asked. “Can you do that? Bury them blue-belly horse soldiers, then bring down the wall and block any escape that train would have?”

  This time, Iverson wasn’t so confident. “Let me ride through this canyon,” he said, and the four men did just that, silently, looking at the palisade of red and white rocks, some of them hanging ever so precipitously, as if a strong wind would blow them over. When they had reached the eastern edge of the canyon, Iverson nodded.

  “It could be done, but timing will be important. Real important.”

  “Can you do it?” Pardo asked irritably.

  Iverson’s head bobbed again.

  “How much dynamite would you need?”

  Now, Iverson shook his head. “Not dynamite. Fuses ain’t that dependable, and the powder can be temperamental. No, sir, for this job, I’d need nitroglycerine.�
��

  “Nitro?” Duke exclaimed.

  “That’s right.” It was Pardo who answered. “That’s how I figured it, boys. Wanted to see if Swede here figured it the same. You done good, Iverson. Had you said dynamite, I would have pegged you for a fool and left you dying here with a bullet in your gut. Nitro it’ll be.”

  Reilly cleared his throat. “Even if you pin down those soldier boys,” he said, “that’s two companies of infantry that’ll be here, plus muleskinners and drivers. And any horse troopers that survive the avalanche. Trained professionals, and more than one hundred twenty men. You’ll need more men than what you have now.”

  “You forget, Mac,” Pardo said, “that I’ve seen how you handle that Evans repeating rifle. Like Duke said, it’ll be a hog killing. But I plan to get a few extra men for this job. Just to make you feel better, cut down on the number of Yanks you’ll need to kill.”

  “What if the cavalry troop doesn’t separate from the main branch?” Reilly asked. “Or what happens if the wagon train waits until the troopers are all the way through the canyon?”

  “Good questions,” Pardo said.

  “You got any good answers?” Reilly challenged.

  Pardo shook his head before a toothy smile exploded across his face. “Them boys’ll be just a few days from Fort Lowell. They ain’t gonna be waiting around none. They’ll be in a hurry to get to some good whiskey and bad women. They’ll be right behind them horse soldiers. I got a feeling. A good feeling.”

  Reilly ran his tongue across his chapped lips, tried to think of something else to say, some type of argument, then decided against it. The wind moaned through the trees and rocks, rustling the blades of tall, sunburned grass on the edge of the road.

  “What’s next?” Duke asked.

  Pardo pointed east. “Duke, you take Swede back to camp. Tell the boys what we got cooking.” He scratched his palm against the hammer of his Colt. “How’s that woman, the German woman, Dagmar, and her kid?”

  “They was fine, boss man. Fine when I left the Dragoons.”