Outrage at Blanco

by Bill Crider

  OUTRAGE AT BLANCO

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1999 Bill Crider

  ISBN-10: 1941298257

  ISBN-13: 9781941298251

  Published by Brash Books, LLC

  12120 State Line, #253

  Leawood, Kansas 66209

  www.brash-books.com

  ALSO BY BILL CRIDER

  Texas Vigilante

  Piano Man (short story)

  This one is for James Reasoner:

  Masked Writer of the Plains

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ONE

  Jink Howard sat in the shade of a tree and ate tomatoes out of a can while Ben Atticks raped the woman in the wagon bed.

  Jink was pretty damn mad because the woman hadn’t had anything to open the can with and he’d had to use his own knife. Besides that, he’d ripped open a ragged strip on the middle finger of his left hand on the jagged edge of the can lid, and it was still hurting him.

  He heard Ben grunting away like a stud horse, and the wagon was bouncing a little on its springs. The springs squeaked, but the woman didn’t make a sound.

  “Hurry up, Ben, goddammit,” Jink said. “You gonna take all day?”

  Ben didn’t answer, but soon there was a grunt a bit louder than all the others and then the wagon stopped bouncing.

  Jink finished the last tomato, drank the liquid from the can, and threw it on the ground. As he licked the last drops of liquid off his fingers, he looked at the wagon and saw Ben standing up, pulling on his pants. He’d never taken off his hat. Ben had his back to the woman, but Jink saw her sit up.

  “Look out, Ben,” he said.

  Ben was a big man, and he turned slowly, like he did most things. The woman was up on her knees, and it looked as if she were about to try pushing him out of the wagon.

  Ben leaned down and slapped her with his open hand. The hand didn’t seem to be moving fast, but when it struck the side of the woman’s face there was a popping sound as loud as a rifle shot.

  The woman fell back in the wagon bed out of Jink’s sight, but he heard her head when it hit the floorboards with a hollow thud.

  Ben straightened up, buckled his belt, walked to the back of the wagon, and jumped down, landing heavily and stumbling a little.

  “Feisty bitch, ain’t she,” he said. He ran his fingers through his matted black beard. “You want any of it?”

  Jink stood up. He was slim as a snake, narrow in all the places Ben was wide, and short where Ben was tall. He had a bristly three-day growth of brownish whiskers and small black snaky eyes that were hard to see under the bony ridge of his brows.

  “Damn right I want a little of it,” he said. “I thought you wasn’t ever gonna finish, though.”

  “Well, get after it, then,” Ben said. He turned back to the wagon. “You reckon she’s got any more of them tomatoes in there?”

  He rummaged around though the supplies that were scattered in the wagon bed and came up with a can. He held it up and looked at it.

  “What’m I supposed to open this with?” he said.

  “Use your damn knife,” Jink said.

  He climbed up in the wagon and looked down at the woman. She had a long, horsey face, with wide, staring blue eyes, and the kind of blonde hair that was almost brown. There was blood on her mouth because she had bitten almost through her lower lip, and the whole right side of her face was a red blotch where Ben had slapped her.

  Jink dropped his pants and lowered himself on her. “Ain’t much to look at, is she?” he said.

  The woman twisted to her right and grabbed Jink’s injured hand. She bit hard into the finger that he’d cut, mixing her saliva and blood with the blood that was running from the gash.

  Jink yowled and grabbed her hair, yanking her head back. The skin of his finger ripped away.

  Jink slammed the woman’s head against wagon bed. It hit much harder than it had when Ben had slapped her. She was stunned, but that wasn’t enough for Jink. He sat back and slugged her on the point of the chin with his fist, and her eyes rolled up in her head.

  “Legs ain’t bad, though,” Ben said, his mouth full of tomatoes. He’d been too busy opening the can to be bothered with Jink’s troubles.

  “Yeah,” Jink said. “But she’s mighty feisty. You didn’t do much to tame her down.”

  Blood and saliva dripped from his hand onto the wagon bed. He started to wipe his hand on his shirt and then though better of it. He wiped it on the woman’s dress instead.

  Then he had another look at the woman. Ben was right about her legs. They were slim and tapered to slender ankles. Her hips were wide, but not too wide, a whole sight prettier than her face. Jink thought he had seen better lookers in most of the whorehouses he’d visited, and the women in the whorehouses weren’t anything to brag about. He pulled her dress up over her head so he wouldn’t have to look at it. Then he forced himself into her.

  It was too bad he’d had to cold-cock her; he would have preferred a little more life in her, maybe a little bit of a struggle, but what the hell. He’d had more than one whore who hadn’t had any more spirit to her than a dead woman. He didn’t require much of a response. Soon he was grunting as loudly as Ben had.

  Listening, Ben smiled behind his beard as he ate the canned tomatoes.

  Ellie Taine woke up lying on the hard boards of the wagon bed. At first she thought it had gotten dark, but then she realized that her dress was pulled over her face. Her head was throbbing, and there was a burning between her legs. She reached to touch herself there, and then she remembered what had happened.

  She frantically pulled her dress away from her face and sat up suddenly, putting her hands on the sides of her head as if to hold it in place. She sat like that for a minute, staring down at the blood between her legs, at the ripped underclothing that she had sewed herself and that had been torn away from her by the two men.

  The men.

  They had met the wagon as she was returning from her weekly trip to Rogers’ Mercantile with the groceries for her and her husband. They had hailed her, and she had stopped the wagon. There didn’t seem to be any harm in that, not so close to town, so close to home.

  At first they had been polite, removing their hats and asking courteously if they were on the right road to the town of Blanco.

  “You are,” she told them. “Straight ahead for a mile and a half.”

  They thanked her, and that was when the big one looked around. “Kinda deserted to be so near town,” he said. “What do you think, Jink?”

  “Trees over there,” the one called Jink said. “Be a little cooler. Nobody’d see us there. Nobody’d bother us.”

  The big one put his hat back on. Then he pulled a pistol from the holster at his side and leveled it at Ellie. “If you’ll guide your team over there to the trees, ma’am, we can get on with our business.”

  Ellie didn’t understand, not at first. S
he thought they intended to rob her. “There’s nothing of value here. Just groceries. If you’re hungry, you’re welcome to take whatever you want.”

  Jink grinned, his mouth a thin slit in his face. “We’ll do that, all right, ma’am Let me help you along there.”

  He rode over and grabbed the reins out of her hands, guiding the mules toward the grove of trees.

  When they got there, the bigger of the two men ordered Ellie into the back of the wagon and pulled his horse alongside. When he stepped into the wagon, she sensed for the first time what was about to happen.

  “Don’t,” she said. “Please.”

  He reached out and pulled her backward off the wagon seat and threw her into the bed. She screamed then and tried to twist away, as if hiding herself under the wagon seat would help.

  The big man laughed and reached out for her, and she kicked at him, her foot striking him on the shin, but he just laughed louder and pointed the pistol at her again. When she looked at the menacing barrel aimed at her head, looking as big around as the mouth of a cannon, she stopped screaming.

  She didn’t remember much after that, but it was more than she wanted to remember.

  She felt the big man’s scratchy beard rubbing against her face, and she smelled the stink of his breath, the stale, sweaty reek of his body.

  She shuddered at the tearing sound of her clothing, and she blinked back tears at the sharp fierce pain when he penetrated her. She felt something tearing inside her, and she felt the blood running down the inside of her legs.

  She heard the rustling of his sweat-stiff shirt, the sound of his rutting.

  She closed her eyes and lay still, biting her lip to keep from crying out. She would not give him the pleasure of knowing he had hurt her.

  Her face burned with shame now at the thought of it, and she shook her head, still cradled in her hands, from side to side. But her eyes remained dry.

  She looked at the groceries scattered around in the wagon bed, and she began crawling around to gather them up. She worked methodically, picking up each can, holding it in front of her eyes and trying to decide whether it was fruit or tomatoes, then putting it back into the bag it had come from. There wasn’t much she could do about the coffee, but she tried to gather up most of the pinto beans.

  When she had everything back in the bag from the store, she reached under the seat for her bonnet, which had come off in her first struggles. She smoothed her hair as best she could, put on the bonnet, and tied it under her chin.

  Then she stood up, ignoring the weakness in her knees and the pain between her legs. She climbed back into the wagon seat and retrieved the reins.

  The two mules looked back at her, twitching their ears without curiosity. They took no interest in what had happened. They might have wondered about the unscheduled stop, but the rest of the day’s events had no effect on them.

  She jerked their heads around and got them started back to the road. Then she headed them toward home.

  The woman had been Ben’s idea.

  “Why the hell not?” Jink said when Ben made his suggestion.

  That was they way they lived their lives, from moment to moment. They thought mostly about their immediate desires and very little about the consequences of gratifying those desires in whatever way they wanted to.

  They’d killed and robbed a drifter in Arkansas once and taken two dollars off his body. It hadn’t been money they were after, though. They’d killed him because they could, because there was no one around to stop them.

  They’d killed a white man and his squaw up in the Oklahoma Territory, a couple of years back, too. Buried the bodies in back of the man’s sod house and lived there for nearly a month before they’d exhausted his liquor and food supply.

  The man hadn’t done anything to Ben and Jink. They’d been on the prod, and they’d just happened on the sod house one day. The man had offered them a drink of water for their horses and a meal for themselves, and Ben had shot him right in the middle of his face.

  The woman had smelled like an Indian, but they’d raped her, too, before they killed her.

  Jink hoped the woman in the wagon would be pretty. At a distance there was no way to tell what she looked like under her bonnet, but Jink decided it didn’t matter. Any woman was bound to be better than none, and maybe this one wouldn’t smell like a damn Indian.

  Besides, it had been a long time since Jink had had a woman, any woman at all, Indian or not, and a hell of a lot longer since he’d had one that he hadn’t paid for. The last one like that had been the Indian woman, come to think of it.

  The idea of taking the woman right there out in the open, in her own wagon, had excited Jink, and it didn’t seem like much of a risk. It wasn’t as if they were going to be staying on in Blanco, after all.

  Now, however, riding toward the town, Jink was uncharacteristically worried. “Reckon that bitch’ll cause us any trouble?” he said. “What if O’Grady finds out?”

  Ben didn’t seem worried at all. In fact, he seemed downright cheerful.

  “In the first place,” he said, “we’re the ones oughta cause her trouble. My knees are still hurtin’ from rubbin’ against those damn planks in the wagon bed. And those beans were pretty hard on ’em too. Besides, ain’t nobody gonna tell O’Grady, least I ain’t. What about you?”

  “Hell, no. You know better than that, Ben.”

  “Then how’s there gonna be any trouble? You think she’s gonna get up a posse and send the sheriff after us? We’ll be long gone before that happens.”

  “Maybe,” Jink said. He shook his head. “You never know with women, though. You just never can tell.”

  “Bull,” Ben said. “You can tell, all right. Besides, she enjoyed it, at least she enjoyed my part of it. Mighta enjoyed you, too, hard as that is to believe, if you hadn’t slapped her around like you did.”

  “She bit me,” Jink said.

  “Didn’t say I blamed you.”

  Jink’s finger, the one he’d cut on the can lid, was hurting him, and he sucked on it for a second. He took it out of his mouth and looked at it, but it looked all right, maybe a little swollen and red, but not too bad.

  “Woman that’d bite a man, no tellin’ what else she might do,” he said. “I think maybe we shoulda shot her. That way, we wouldn’t have to worry about her tellin’ anybody about what we done.”

  Ben was getting tired of the conversation. He reined his horse to a stop and pulled his makings from his shirt pocket. He rolled a cigarette quickly and efficiently, twisted the ends, and stuck it in his mouth. He plucked a match out of his hatband, struck it with a fingernail, and lit his smoke.

  After a couple of puffs he said to Jink, who had reined up beside him, “Look at it this way. We’ve done a lot worse things before now, and the only time we got caught at ’em was our own damn fault, not some woman’s. And in an hour or so we’re gonna be in a hell of a lot worse trouble than any woman can give us if O’Grady’s waitin’ for us in Blanco like he said he’d be.”

  Ben was surely right about that, and Jink shut up. Still, even though he was quiet, he couldn’t stop worrying about the woman. There was just something about her, something about the way she’d looked at him just before she bit him, that bothered him.

  He couldn’t explain what it was, and he guessed he was just being stupid. Ben was right. Considering what they were going to Blanco for, the woman didn’t make much difference.

  They couldn’t hang a man but once.

  TWO

  Burt Taine poured the water out of the wooden bucket onto the wilted tomato plants, but he didn’t figure it would do them much good. Too late in the season, and the tomato crop hadn’t worked out very well this year anyway. First it was the birds, and then it was the bugs. He was lucky to get a single tomato for himself and Ellie. He hoped she’d bring a few cans from the store. He was a man who liked a tomato now and then.

  Taine wasn’t tall, but he was broad, wide across the shoulders and thick through
the chest. He strained the buttons of his work shirts, and the muscle of his arms bulged the sleeves as he poured the water. He watched it soak into the parched ground and then turned to carry the bucket back to the well.

  On his way, he shaded his eyes and looked up at the sun. It was getting on toward late afternoon, and he wondered why Ellie hadn’t come back from town yet.

  Taine wasn’t really worried that his wife was a little late in coming back. There were any number of things that could have delayed her. Maybe Alf Rogers had showed her some new bolts of cloth at the mercantile store, or maybe she had run into someone to talk to, some woman she knew from the church who’d invited her to stop by for a cup of coffee or tea. Ellie liked to get away from the farm now and then and talk to someone about something other than the latest crop or whether it was going to rain in time to save the corn or what the price of cattle would be when the next calves were ready for market.

  Burt didn’t blame her. He liked to get away himself now and then. They’d spent six years now, six hard years, trying to hang on and make a living by running a small farm and ranching operation, and it hadn’t been easy.

  They raised enough food for their own needs and still often had enough left over to sell in town, though by this late in the summer most of the garden was played out, which was why Ellie had to do some shopping every week.

  Now and then the livestock they raised did more than pay their own way, too, but when you came right down to it, Burt and Ellie didn’t have a lot to call their own. They had a small account in the Merchants’ Bank in Blanco, and they kept their debts paid at Rogers’ Mercantile and Andrews’ Feed and Seed, but no one could say they lived high on the hog.

  Maybe it was a blessing that they’d never had children, though Burt was sure that Ellie wanted them. She often said that it didn’t matter to her, but he could tell that there was a longing in her, just as there was in him. He would have liked strong sons or daughters to help him around the place and for the company they’d be, but he knew that a larger family would also mean extra trouble and expense.