Rising Fire

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  “Can you pick up his trail from this ranch and follow it?”

  The Norwegian spoke up, saying, “If Yeager can’t, I can.”

  “I can pick up his trail,” Yeager snapped.

  Scaramello gave a curt nod. “Let’s get ready to move, then. I want this over, and I want Giovanni Malatesta dead.”

  CHAPTER 46

  Painted Post

  Brice made an effort not to groan, move around, or open his eyes as consciousness seeped back into his brain. At first he had no memory of where he was or what had happened to him, but some instinct told him he was recovering from being knocked out. It made sense to see if he could figure out what was going on before he let any potential enemies know he was awake.

  The first thing he did was to take stock of his own situation. His head hurt like blazes; that was a given. He tensed the muscles in his arms, just enough to discover that they wouldn’t move because his wrists were tied together behind his back. A check of his legs told him that his ankles were bound, too.

  So he was tied hand and foot, but he didn’t have a gag in his mouth, just a bad taste. It was the bitter, sour taste of defeat lingering under his tongue.

  He turned his attention outward to discover what he could hear. A low mutter of men’s voices came to his ears. They were muffled, as if they were in another room. He couldn’t make out any of the words.

  Gradually, he had become aware of light shining on his eyes. It wasn’t bright enough to be the sun. The surface on which he lay wasn’t rough enough to be the ground, either. It was a plank floor, he decided. He was inside a building, and not the livery barn where he had encountered the woman, because it had a dirt floor.

  His captors had taken him somewhere else. Inside one of the old abandoned buildings, more than likely. And now that his brain was functioning fully again, he had no doubt who those captors were. He had fallen into the hands of the outlaw gang he had come here hoping to find.

  Slowly, carefully, he opened his eyes a narrow slit. Even though the light coming through an open door into an adjoining room was fairly dim, it was almost enough to make him wince. He controlled the reaction.

  But not well enough, because a voice said, “You’re finally awake. I’m glad. I thought for a while I’d hit you hard enough to kill you.”

  That was the woman. She must have been watching him intently to have noticed his reaction to the light. Since she already knew he had regained consciousness, there was no longer any point in pretending otherwise. He opened his eyes and looked around.

  He was lying on the floor of a small room with a single small window. The floor had a thick layer of dust on it, undisturbed except where his captors had dragged him in here. No furniture except the ladder-back chair where the woman sat. She wore a hat and poncho now and had her left hand wrapped around the neck of a whiskey bottle. Her right hand rested on her thigh where it would be handy to the gun in the holster that poked out from under the poncho.

  He could see only part of the room on the other side of the doorway, but he could tell it was considerably larger. He saw a man with long hair sitting at a table. He was talking, so there had to be other men at the table, too.

  The woman took a long enough swallow from the bottle to make it gurgle. When she lowered it, she called, “Hey, the lawdog’s awake in here.”

  The long-haired man pushed his chair back from the table. Other chair legs scraped on the floor. Two men came into the small room while several others waited just on the other side of the door. One of the pair who joined the woman was the long-haired man. The other was shorter, stockier, older, dressed all in black.

  The long-haired man hunkered on his heels in front of Brice, reached out, and slapped him lightly on the cheek.

  “Welcome back, badge-toter. Or should I be respectful and call you Deputy Marshal Rogers?”

  “Reckon you must’ve found my badge and bona fides,” Brice husked. His mouth and throat were dry enough that talking was uncomfortable.

  The woman said, “If you were trying to hide them, you made a mighty poor job of it. They were in your pocket.”

  The stocky man in black said, “He wasn’t working undercover. No reason for him to hide his identity. But you were looking for us, weren’t you, mister?”

  Denying it served no purpose, Brice thought.

  “If you’re the bunch that’s been murdering innocent people and robbing banks and trains all across this part of the country, then yeah, I sure was.”

  “Well, you sure enough found us,” the long-haired man said with a grin. “Reckon we’d best be scared, because you’re gonna arrest us now, ain’t you, Mr. Lawman?”

  “Let me talk to him, Curly,” the man in black said.

  Curly straightened and stepped back. That meant the man in black was the boss, Brice noted, although he wasn’t sure the knowledge would do him much good.

  “Did you bring a posse with you?”

  “Twenty men,” Brice answered without hesitation. “They’re waiting not far outside of town, and by now they’ll be moving in because they’ll have figured out something’s happened to me.”

  “Something’s going to happen to you, all right.” The man in black drew his gun. “I’m going to put a bullet in your knee if you don’t tell me the truth. Then, if I think you’re still lying to me, I’ll shoot your other knee.” He smiled thinly. “You’ve got two elbows, as well. I reckon we’ll get the truth out of you sooner or later.”

  “I’ve already told you the truth,” Brice said. “Whatever you do to me won’t change that.”

  The man in black studied him for a moment, then nodded.

  “All right,” he said as he raised the gun. “If that’s the way you want it.”

  He pulled back the hammer. The metallic ratcheting sound was loud in the small room. His finger tightened on the trigger.

  * * *

  Denny had pushed herself and her horse hard enough that she expected to catch up to Brice before he reached Painted Post. She hadn’t, which meant that he was traveling pretty fast, too.

  This morning, though, she had reached the settlement. Without knowing that Brice had stopped at the same place less than an hour earlier, she reined in and studied the gulch and the ghost town laid out in it.

  Then she had stiffened as she saw a familiar figure dart out of some brush and race over to the back door of a large building that looked like a livery barn. That was Brice, she told herself. No mistake about it. The only reason for him to be sneaking around like that was if he believed the outlaws he sought were here.

  She was debating whether she should try to go down there and join him when she spotted someone else slipping along the alley behind the buildings. This was a lean hombre in a poncho who paused near the open doorway as if thinking about something. After a moment, the figure discarded hat and poncho, and Denny realized that wasn’t an hombre she was looking at, after all. It was a woman, but one who packed a gun and looked like she might know how to use it.

  Alarm bells went off in Denny’s brain. She started to reach toward the carbine in its saddle sheath, but before she could pull the weapon out, the woman had yelled something and charged into the barn. Denny’s guts knotted as she waited for the crash of gunfire.

  No shots sounded, though. She watched tensely, and after a few minutes, the woman reappeared. She was alone. She trotted back down the alley the way she had come.

  Frightened that something had happened to Brice, Denny swung up into the saddle and was about to send her mount charging down that steep, winding trail when she realized that if she did so, she would be in plain sight of anyone in the town. She hesitated, torn between fear for Brice and the natural caution of someone who had survived numerous gunfights.

  It was a good thing she did hesitate, because mere moments later the woman returned with several men. They would have seen Denny and she would have lost any advantage she might have.

  She stayed where she was, concealed in the thick shadows under the trees, and
watched as the men carried Brice’s limp figure out of the barn and toted him along the alley. They went in the back door of another building.

  Denny’s heart was racing. She told herself that Brice was just unconscious, not dead. If he’d been dead, they would have left him in the barn or tossed his body in the brush. The fact that they had taken him into another building meant that he was alive.

  She tried to convince herself of that, but the only way to know for sure was to get down there.

  And if he was dead, those outlaws would pay, Denny swore. She would see to that.

  * * *

  For the next half hour, she worked her way down into the gulch, sticking to cover as much as she could because it was possible the outlaws had sentries posted. The whole time, her heart pounded because she expected to hear gunshots at any moment, signifying that Brice’s captors had executed him.

  But by the time she crouched in the brush not far from the back of the building where they had taken him, no shots had rung out. If Brice had been alive when they took him in there, there was at least a chance he still was.

  She looked up and down the alley, searching for any sign of a guard. She didn’t see any, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

  Excessive caution didn’t mean she was going to find out what was happening to Brice. For that she had to get closer, even though it might be dangerous.

  She had left the carbine on her horse, back in the brush about fifty yards, but she had her revolver, and the two-shot, .41 caliber derringer she usually carried in her bag when she dressed up was in her jeans pocket if she needed it. She drew the Colt Lightning, straightened up, and dashed across the alley. Pressing her back against the building, she slid along the wall.

  There were no windows back here, only a door. She slipped around the corner and spotted a small window not far away. All the glass was broken out of the pane. Keeping low, she moved closer until she could hear what was going on inside.

  Her blood seemed to freeze in her veins as she heard a couple of men talking to someone who was obviously Brice. She couldn’t risk raising her head enough for a look, but judging by the way they were talking, he was a prisoner. Probably tied up and helpless. And now one of the men was threatening to blast apart his knees and elbows if he didn’t tell them what they wanted to know.

  Brice was too stubborn, just on general principles, to cooperate with outlaws. They were going to torture him and eventually kill him. Outnumbered or not, Denny couldn’t let that happen.

  She straightened and ran back to the corner. She rounded it and headed for the open door. Someone inside must have heard her boots hitting the ground, because a man stepped through the door, looked around with a puzzled frown on his face, then yelled, “Hey!” as he spotted her. He clawed at the holstered pistol on his hip.

  Denny shot him. She aimed at his chest, but the bullet went a little high because she was running. It didn’t matter, because the slug tore through his throat. He jerked his head back as blood spurted several feet onto the dirt in the alley. His knees buckled before he ever cleared leather.

  Denny hurdled the falling body and landed inside the building, which, judging by the bar along one side of the room, had been a saloon. A man stood just outside the door of the room where Brice was being held. He whirled toward Denny and got his gun out before she could fire. They pulled trigger at the same time. The outlaw’s bullet whipped past Denny’s ear, so close she felt the heat of it. Her bullet struck the man in the body and twisted him halfway around. He stayed on his feet, though, and raised his gun for another shot at her.

  She dived forward and fired again as she went down. The man’s shot sizzled through the air over her head. The slug from her gun punched into his belly, tore through his guts, and doubled him over. He collapsed with a groan.

  Another shot roared from somewhere up and to Denny’s right. The bullet chewed splinters from the floorboards less than a foot from her head. She felt a couple of them sting her cheek. She rolled onto her back and saw a man standing on the balcony in front of several rooms on the second floor. Smoke still curled from the muzzle of his gun as he tried to draw a bead on her again.

  She snapped a shot at him. The steep angle meant that when the bullet struck him between his nose and mouth, it bored up through his brain and exploded out the top of his head. He dropped his gun, pitched forward, and crashed through the half-rotted railing along the edge of the balcony. He turned half over in the air as he fell and smashed down, landing on his back on one of the tables. The table broke under the impact and dumped him on the floor.

  Denny scrambled for another table, got her shoulder under it, and overturned it to use for cover as the three people who had been in the room with Brice burst out of it and opened fire on her. As she hunkered there behind the scant cover, she heard slugs thudding into the table. In a matter of moments, it would be shot to pieces and she wouldn’t have anyplace to hide.

  The batwings were still hanging in the saloon’s entrance, although rather crookedly. A man slapped them aside, stepped into the room, and opened fire with the gun in his hand. At first Denny thought he was shooting at her, then realized he was aiming at the three outlaws who had her pinned down.

  His entrance had taken them as much by surprise as it had her. As Denny came up on her knees and thrust the Lightning over the table, she saw one of the outlaws staggering back and forth as he pressed a hand to his bloody midsection.

  “Alden!” the woman who had captured Brice in the barn cried out as she flung herself at the wounded man while still blazing away at the newcomer. Denny aimed carefully and drilled a bullet through her body. She gasped and stumbled.

  At the same time, the man who had just pushed through the batwings shot the third in the trio of owlhoots. The outlaw grunted and fell backward as the slug drove into his chest. All three of them fell in a tangled heap.

  The newcomer rushed toward Denny and cried, “Cara mia!”

  In the middle of all the carnage, she hadn’t really recognized Giovanni Malatesta, but somehow she wasn’t surprised to find out that he was her rescuer. Still on her knees, she turned toward him—

  Another shot blasted, this one from behind Denny. Malatesta stumbled. Denny jerked around, saw that the man she had gut-shot when she first rushed into the abandoned saloon had pushed himself up and managed to raise his gun long enough to fire. She was about to put a bullet through his brain when he dropped the gun, slumped forward, and didn’t move again.

  Denny looked toward the entrance again. Malatesta had fallen and lay there facedown. He wasn’t moving, either. As she came to her feet, she took a step toward him.

  Then turned and rushed into the other room instead, calling, “Brice! Brice, are you in here?”

  CHAPTER 47

  “Denny!”

  She had already seen him. She dropped to her knees beside him. His hands were tied behind his back, and his feet were lashed together as well. She holstered the Lightning—it was empty, anyway—and reached in her pocket for her clasp knife.

  She cut through the bonds quickly and helped him sit up.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I’m fine, but what about you? It sounded like a war out there!”

  “It pretty much was,” she said with a smile. “But I came through it all right.” She wiped away a small smear of blood from her cheek, left there by one of the flying splinters. “Just a scratch, and I mean that literally.”

  “You killed all of those outlaws by yourself?” Brice asked as she helped him to his feet.

  “No . . . not by herself.”

  The voice came from the doorway. Denny and Brice both looked in that direction and saw Malatesta standing there, the gun still in his hand. His shirt and coat were stained with blood on the left side where he had been hit, but he seemed steady enough on his feet.

  The gun he pointed at Brice was certainly steady enough.

  “Please, cara mia, step away from the marshal.”

&nbs
p; Denny stared at him. “You’re crazy!” she exclaimed. “I’m not going to let you shoot him!”

  Malatesta shook his head and said, “After risking my life to save both of you, why would I shoot Marshal Rogers now? I just thought you might be grateful enough for my timely assistance that you would be willing to tend to this annoying wound . . .”

  He swayed a little then. He wasn’t in as good a shape as he first appeared to be.

  “The count’s right,” Brice said. “He’s hurt. Why don’t you give him a hand while I check on those outlaws and make sure they’re all dead?”

  Denny sighed and nodded. She pushed the chair toward Malatesta with her foot and said, “Sit down and I’ll have a look.”

  “Thank you, cara mia.”

  Brice stepped out of the room, bent over to scoop up two of the guns the fallen outlaws had dropped, and began making sure none of them were a threat anymore.

  While he was doing that, Denny pulled back Malatesta’s coat and shirt, uncovering the deep, bloody bullet gash in his side.

  “It’s kind of a mess, but you’ll live,” she told him. “I think I saw some bottles of whiskey out there. I’ll get one of them and a rag and clean that wound, then bandage it.” Denny paused. “It’ll sting like fire when I do.”

  Malatesta nodded and said, “I understand. Do what you need to do.”

  Brice appeared in the doorway, still carrying the two guns. “All those outlaws are dead, like I thought. The ones down here, anyway. I’m going to go upstairs and make sure nobody else is lurking around.” He nodded toward Malatesta. “He going to live?”

  “I think so,” Denny said drily.

  “Disappointed?” Malatesta asked with a quirk of his mouth.

  Brice shook his head and said, “No. In fact, I’m glad, because I want to thank you for your help. Without it, Denny and I might not have gotten out of here alive.”

  “I did it for Denise’s sake, not yours.”

  “I can accept that,” Brice said with a shrug. “I’m obliged to you anyway.”