Severin sensed danger in the eyes of the gold guards and the very air around him, but he hadn’t quite gotten his right hand over the ivory grips of his Peacemaker again before there was the snick of steel against leather and he felt the weight on his hip suddenly lighten.
There was the ratcheting click of a gun hammer.
Something cold and round jabbed against his lower back, and as he began to swing around, Miguel Encina said, “Uh-uh.” He jabbed Severin’s own pistol harder against the sheriff’s kidney. “One more quick move like that and I’ll drill you.”
Encina swung around, lowering the ingot in his hands, and frowned at his son, his lower jaw loosening so that the stogie almost dropped from between his lips. His eyes dropped to the two guns in Miguel’s hands, one pressed against Severin, the other cocked and aimed at the elder banker’s own belly, just up from his polished black belt.
“What is the meaning of this, Miguel?” It was more of an exclamation than a question.
“You’ll see in a moment, Pa.” Miguel glanced beyond his father and Severin at Hitt, and, grinning devilishly, nodded.
As Hitt removed his shabby hat, Severin looked at Frank Dryden, who stood staring toward the wagon, canting his head to one side and narrowing one eye, vaguely puzzled. Neither he nor any of the other deputies could see the two guns that Miguel Encina was holding on the sheriff and elder banker.
Grinning at Severin, Orrie Hitt waved his hat above his head and then calmly put it back on.
“What’s goin’ on over there?” Dryden called, taking one step toward the wagon.
Severin looked at the wiry, blond deputy just as Dryden’s hat flew off his head. The whip-crack of a rifle echoed around the street.
Dryden’s head jerked forward. He stumbled, lowered his Winchester, and triggered it into the ground a few inches from his right boot, blowing up dust. Dryden dropped to his knees, his forehead looking as though it had been smashed with a large, ripe tomato.
Severin’s gut tightened. He saw the man who’d shot Dryden lying atop the roof of the drugstore directly across the street. The shooter lifted his rifle slightly as he cocked it.
Whipping his gaze around, Severin picked out a dozen other men stepping calmly out of alley mouths or lifting their heads over stock tanks and rain barrels, holding rifles to their shoulders and canting their heads to aim down.
Severin’s mouth grew dry.
His heart lurched, and his gut tightened. He was about to yell to his deputies but only gave a pained grunt when Miguel Encina rammed Severin’s own pistol hard against his kidney. By then it was too late, anyway.
There was a short burst of staccato gunfire from various points around the street, and all four of Severin’s remaining deputies, all taken by surprise, grunted or screamed as bullets tore through them.
The black deputy, Moffett, hit in the chest, flew straight back off his heels and slammed into the wall of the store behind him, giving a clipped scream and triggering his rifle skyward. The rifle flew out of his hands, and by the time it clattered down to the boardwalk beside him, Moffett was lying with his head propped against the store, violently convulsing as his life puddled out across his chest.
At nearly the same time as Moffett had been hit, two slugs had thrown Jim Horn from his saddle. As Horn’s bay bucked and pitched, screaming, another bullet took Horn through his belly, and the thickset deputy lay with his forehead in the dirt, moving his knees as though trying to stand but only grinding his forehead deeper into the dirt and horseshit of the street.
Chase Appleyard was shot in the back twice by a bushwhacker who’d stepped casually out of the cantina behind him. As the bushwhacker finished the writhing Appleyard, Giuseppe Antero, wounded in his left arm, fired two quick rounds, yelling Spanish epithets, at the man who’d shot him from an alley mouth.
Both his bullets only tore wooden doggets from the store flanking the bushwhacker. Firing from his hip, the bushwhacker drilled Antero twice more, direct hits in the chest and right arm.
Screaming louder, Antero spun.
Two more shots from elsewhere around the streets sent him flying and tumbling into the dust. He groaned, sobbed, feebly pushed onto his hands and knees. The bushwhacker who’d first winged him stepped out from the alley mouth—a big, red-bearded man with a large green bandanna billowing around his neck—and walked up to Antero. The big man casually aimed his Henry rifle one handed at the Mexican’s head and tripped the trigger.
The whip-crack resounded. The Mexican’s head jerked in the same direction in which blood and brains spewed from the bullet’s exit hole to paint a long, grisly stain in the street.
Antero dropped and lay still.
“Jesus Christ!” Severin bellowed, lunging forward and angrily closing his hands over the side of the wagon box.
From Frank’s Dryden’s death to Antero’s, the shooting hadn’t lasted over fifteen seconds. The sheriff’s mind had been slow to catch up to what had just happened, but it was catching up fast now as he saw all his deputies lying in bloody piles around him.
23
THE GOLD GUARDS glared at Sheriff Severin like hungry wolves, each now casually aiming his rifle across the wagon at him. Behind them, the bushwhackers—hell, executioners!—were disarming the dead deputies. Severin thought he recognized a couple of their faces from wanted posters.
There were at least a dozen of them. Cutthroats, all . . .
He heard a sharp slap and turned to see Jose Encina snarling at his son as he lowered the hand that had left a crimson welt on the side of Miguel’s handsome face. The banker had dropped the gold in the street, near his polished half boots.
Miguel stared at his father, menace in the upward curve of his mouth corners.
“Why?” asked Encina through gritted teeth.
“Why not?” Miguel said. “The past two and a half years I been waitin’ for this. Waitin’ to rob you blind, steal all your precious gold and”—he slowly turned his head to Severin, keeping a cocked pistol aimed at each man—“take over your civilized, law-abiding town. Turn it back over to the kinda men that started it.”
Severin clenched his fists and narrowed his eyes. “I knew you were still as rotten as the day you dropped from your mother’s womb!”
Too fast for the sheriff’s age-slowed reactions, Miguel raised the pistol high and swept the barrel across Severin’s right temple, raking it savagely down across the man’s nose and opposite cheek. Severin gave a pained grunt and fell back against the wagon, throwing his arms at the side panel but missing and falling in a heap on his butt.
A red welt blossomed on his temple. The pistol’s front sight had carved a bloody notch over the bridge of his nose and another on his lower left cheek. He grabbed his temple as he sat in the dirt and glared up at the young outlaw, a few strands of gray-brown hair hanging loose across his forehead.
Miguel’s nostrils expanded and contracted, and he was breathing as though he’d run a mile. “You leave my mother out of it, you old bastard.”
“Miguel!” ordered Encina, brown eyes bright with exasperation. “Put those guns down! Tell these men to throw theirs down! Or everything I’ve done for you will have meant nothing!”
Miguel broke into crazy laughter as he staggered backward and squeezed his eyes closed. “Ah, don’t sell yourself short, Pa. What you did for me meant a helluva lot. Shit, it meant the whole world to me.”
Suddenly, his laughter died without a trace, and his jaws had turned hard as twin anvils. He lurched forward. His father had just started to raise his arms defensively and turn his head away when the same pistol Miguel had used on Severin crashed down across the top of the elder Encina’s head.
Jose screamed and staggered sideways before he fell at the base of the wagon’s right front wheel, groaning and clamping a ringed hand over the top of his head. Blood shone between his fingers.
“That’s how much it meant to me, you hog-wallopin’ son of a bitch!”
A gasp sounded in the bank door be
hind Miguel. He turned to see a young, plain-faced female teller staring out, hands over her mouth, eyes bright with terror. Another, older woman stood to her right, partly hidden by the door frame, steel-framed spectacles hanging low on her pale, upturned nose. The loan officer, Mayville, stood behind both women, his eyes wide, lower jaw hanging.
“You three are fired,” Miguel said, waving a pistol toward the bank. “I want no one on my payroll who’s worked for this chicken-livered son of a bitch, kissing his ass and licking his boots. From now on, only my friends here’ll be workin’ for me . . . though I don’t ’spect the bank’ll be open for business much longer”—he turned to cast a jeering gaze at his father—“seein’ as how there won’t be any gold or much of anything else left in the vault. Fact, I might just turn the vault into a whore’s crib . . . once me an’ the boys have divvied up the gold!”
Miguel laughed.
“Go on—git!” he shouted at the three bank employees looking nearly ready to pass out in the doorway.
They jumped as one. The youngest teller bolted out of the building first, sobbing and holding her skirts above her ankles as she ran stiffly up the street. The older woman followed, her face bleached, her glasses hanging off her nose. Mayville shoved her quickly along in front of him, a hand on her back.
Miguel fired two shots into the street a foot behind them, blowing up dirt and grit. The youngest woman screamed while the other tripped and nearly fell. Mayville jumped nearly a foot straight up in the air before breaking into an all-out run, leaving the older woman behind him.
In the wagon, Orrie Hitt roared.
The other outlaws followed suit, including the bushwhackers who’d now walked up to form a shaggy semicircle around the three horseback riders and the wagon, holding pistols or rifles with casual menace. They pointed and laughed, and the big man who’d shot Antero slapped his thigh as he doubled over with deep guffaws.
When all three bank employees had disappeared around a bend in the crooked street, Miguel, chuckling and swinging around loose-limbed with his new-found defiance and sudden freedom, saw his father glowering up at him from the dirt.
“You’ll never get away with this, boy. You can desecrate everything I’ve built here, steal my gold, turn the bank into a brothel . . .” He swallowed, overcome with emotion, then continued growling through gritted teeth. “I’ll have you hunted down and hanged like the mangy cur you really are! A cur from a worthless bitch!”
Jose Encina had barely gotten that last out before Miguel buried his right half boot in his father’s belly. The elder banker gave a shriek and bent forward, clasping his hands across his stomach.
“You little bastard!” shouted Severin, still in the dirt to the banker’s right. Orrie Hitt and Bronco Brewster, who’d stepped into the wagon, both covered him with rifles. “I’ll hunt you down myself, and I’ll see no judge wastes his time on you. No judge and no jury, neither!”
“You think so, town tamer?” Smiling savagely, Miguel raised the pistols in his hands. He fired them both at the same time, the twin slugs punching through each of the sheriff’s upper arms.
Severin jerked back against the wagon, throwing his chin high and showing his teeth through an enraged, agonized grimace. His mouth drew wide, but no sound emanated as he clutched both bullet-torn arms with his hands, the blood welling up between his fingers.
“You miserable savage,” he grated out, his eyes tearing up from pain, his cheeks looking suddenly blue and hollow.
“Miguel!”
The female voice lifted the blood-hungry Miguel’s head and turned it slightly. Gleneanne O’Shay was running toward him from the Golden Slipper, a silk cape fluttering about her shoulders in the freshening breeze that smelled of rain. Her red hair danced across her shoulders. Her eyes were wide, horrified.
She stopped and looked down at the sheriff and Jose Encina, both breathing sharply, lips stretched with misery. “Oh, my god!”
The actress looked at Miguel. “What have you done?”
“What have I done?”
Miguel ran a sleeve across his sweaty forehead, set his pistols on the jockey box attached to the wagon, and picked up the gold bar that his father had dropped at the edge of the street. He ran a hand across the ingot, removing the horseshit and dust, and held it up for Gleneanne’s inspection.
“This is what I’ve done, my sweet.”
The actress’s eyes found the gold and fairly glowed. “Oh, my . . .” Color rose in her cheeks. “Holy shit,” she breathed. “I don’t believe I . . . I don’t believe I . . .”
“Believe it,” Miguel said, pressing the bar against her breasts. She looked at him in disbelief as she wrapped her arms around the ingot and held it taut against her chest, staring down at it as though at a beautiful, newborn babe.
“Stop him,” pleaded Jose, staring through watery, bloodshot eyes at Gleneanne, who ignored the old man.
Miguel chuckled and gave his father another kick. He kicked the elder Encina again and again, until he’d kicked him out into the street in front of the wagon.
“No, Miguel!” the old man shrieked, dust- and shit-caked from the crown of his thin, silver-haired head to the toes of his twelve-dollar shoes. “Please, I beg you . . . stop this savagery! You’re going to kill me!”
“Intend to.”
Miguel kicked Jose in the ribs, rolling him over with a horrific shriek. Gritting his teeth, Miguel buried his boot again and again in the old man’s body, a grisly smile returning to his gaze as he felt and heard his father’s ribs pop and splinter, saw the anguish and terror build in the old man’s darkening eyes.
He heard a shout and turned to his left. Hitt and Brewster were giving Severin the same punishment twenty feet away, between the bank and washhouse. The two outlaws took turns ramming their boots into the sheriff’s dusty, battered body, rolling him gradually toward the bathhouse on the other side of the street.
The other outlaws, Casol and Sawrod on horseback, the others standing, were yelling and hoorawing, a couple firing shots of revelry into the air.
Severin and Encina’s shrieks dwindled to gasps and then groans barely audible above the growing rumble of thunder issuing from the storm clouds piling up over the canyon’s southern ridge.
When he could no longer get even a sigh out of his father, Miguel wheeled toward Hitt and Brewster.
“Hold it!”
The men stopped and looked at Miguel.
“Hell-Bringin’ Hiram ain’t dead, is he?”
Orrie Hitt grinned. “Not yet!”
Miguel turned to one of the horseback riders—Sawrod, a killer and rustler whose acquaintance Gleneanne had made after a performance in Ouray—and waved an arm. “Get over here, Royal. Bring your rope. I do believe it’s time for a Dutch ride through prickly pear!”
Both riders whooped and peeled their throw ropes off their saddles. Sawrod rode over to Miguel, swinging out a head-sized loop and tossing it down on Jose Encina’s bloody, rumpled chest. Miguel crouched to work the loop over his father’s shoulders and arms.
Jose looked up at him through the narrowed lids of his swollen eyes. His voice was a raspy whisper as he said, “You will burn in hell for this. . . .”
“Maybe.” Miguel winked. “Maybe ole St. Pete’s got a special place just waitin’ for me, Pa.”
Miguel stepped back and slapped the rear of Sawrod’s horse. The blaze-faced roan shot forward with a whinny, heading west. When the rope snapped taut behind it, Jose Encina’s ragged body lurched violently forward, more bones snapping audibly.
The elder banker wailed shrilly as he dashed like a human missile westward along the street behind the galloping roan, angling past the opera house and heading toward the open country beyond the town.
Severin wasn’t far behind, fishtailing and bouncing along in the dust of Juventino Casol, who whooped and fired his pistol into the air. As the sheriff shot past Miguel, his arms pinned to his sides by the noose, Severin cast a fleeting, dark gaze toward the young banker.
Former young banker.
Miguel waved. As Hell-Bringin’ Hiram lurched and jerked up the empty street, he cupped his hands around his mouth to shout, “Didn’t much care for that old mine shaft, Sheriff!”
He chuckled and lowered his hands to watch Casol and Severin thunder out of sight as the first of the pellet-sized raindrops began ticking off Miguel’s bowler hat.
“Nope. Didn’t care for that one damn bit. . . .”
He turned to the men behind him and raised both arms high in the air. “It’s a wide-open town, boys. Drinks are on me, but you gotta pay for the whores your own damn selves!”
His dimples cut into his cheeks as he roared.
Then he walked over to where Gleneanne O’Shay was still admiring the gold.
24
AT THE SAME time, and about six miles as the crow flies from Juniper, Lou Prophet put Mean and Ugly into a side canyon that forked off the main canyon that he and Louisa had been following since nearly being hammered finer than a breakfast serving of Georgia grits by the rock slide loosed by the gold guards.
“Hell, I’m not sure if this is the way back to Juniper or not,” he grouched, off his feed and feeling dumber than a lightning-struck steer for having let himself be hornswoggled like that.
Louisa rode along beside him, feeling no better than he did. “Then why are we taking it?”
“Because the sign in the other one said Copper Gulch, four miles straight ahead, and I know from lookin’ at a map before we rode out here that Copper Gulch is west of Juniper, and there’s a tall ridge between the two towns.”
“What sign?”
“You didn’t see the sign?”
“I saw no goddamn sign.”
“Jesus, you’re startin’ to curse bad as me. We gotta get you back to town quicker than I thought.”
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