Noose

by Eric Red

  The posse stopped their huge horses directly in front of the marshal’s office and the leader of the gang looked up at Mackenzie from his saddle and doffed his big Stetson with a respectful nod, fixing him with eyes as dark as night above a black handlebar mustache. “Good afternoon, sir. I’m Frank Butler,” he drawled. “These are my men. We caught Bonny Kate Valance and brung her here for the reward. That’s the merchandise back there on the horse.”

  Butler had taken a folded wanted poster out of his duster and proffered it: the sketch was clearly the bound and gagged woman hog-tied on the horse behind him. The handbill read in bold block print letters:

  WANTED.

  FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS

  For the Capture of Outlaw

  BONNY KATE VALANCE

  For the Crimes of

  MURDER, ROBBERY, ARSON, ASSAULT.

  In a smaller font it read:

  CAPTURE ALIVE.

  Deliver Only to Local U.S. Marshal’s Office.

  APPROACH WITH EXTREME CAUTION.

  Fugitive Is Armed and Highly Dangerous.

  Giving the gang a hard once over, Marshal Mackenzie just grunted. “Looks like it took twelve grown men to capture one little lady.”

  “That it did, Marshal.” Butler grinned. “We’re ready to turn her over to you at your pleasure. Then we’d be grateful if you could get that reward authorized so we can be on our way.”

  The old lawman nodded. “First, let’s get Miss Valance locked up. We have a cell inside the office here. You boys get her off that horse and bring her inside and we’ll get her behind bars where she belongs. Then you can sign the paperwork for her and I’ll authorize that reward. How’s that sound, Mr. Butler?”

  “Agreeable, Marshal.” Butler rotated his head like a gun turret and shot a glance back at the scurvy band of cutthroats he had riding with him. “Get this trollop off the horse and haul her into the marshal’s office so he can jail her pretty behind. I want guns on her until the marshal locks her cell with his key. Watch this bitch. She’s tricky. You men know the drill with her.” The leader swung out of his saddle and tethered his horse to the rail in one smooth, muscular move.

  Mackenzie watched from the office porch, quietly impressed by the professional precision and coordination this large posse of bounty hunters operated with, making them like a well-oiled machine; the other eleven men dismounted in unison, boots sledgehammering the ground on landing as four swiftly drew Colt Navy and Peacemaker pistols from their holsters and pressed the muzzles against Bonny Kate’s forest of red tresses as three other men used big knives to cut the ropes.

  A crowd of Jackson Hole pedestrians was gathering around now, and twenty-five locals stood watching the prisoner handoff. Whispers passed like a lit fuse on a stick of dynamite through the crowd as they recognized the infamous woman outlaw.

  Frank Butler slid out his Colt Dragoon and rotated the cylinder with as fearsome a rattle as any snake ever made as he slowly walked up to his captive and glared at her with hooded eyes. “Remember, woman. Only reason you ain’t dead slumped over that saddle is the reward for you is delivered alive. Would have saved me fuss handing you over as a corpse even at a discount. But you was just delivered alive to the U.S. Marshal’s office, cut and dried and in front of witnesses, so if you do anything to make us kill you at this point we still get paid either way. Point being this: don’t test me.” Still face forward, four guns against her head, Bonny Kate just watched him blankly.

  “How about you take that gag off her now?” Mackenzie said from the porch.

  “I would not recommend that, Marshal. The lady has a dirty mouth on her and nothing to say you want to hear.” Butler swept his hand at the crowd of disapproving ladies in the crowd of rubberneckers. “Nor fit for the ears of polite society.” The female outlaw’s eyes were red-hot coals staring over the gag at his face. Her face was the color of fresh strawberries.

  “This is Jackson Hole, not Tombstone nor Dodge City, and we don’t treat prisoners in our civilized town that way. Untie her. Ungag her. Do it now. That’s an order.” Mackenzie took a hard tone.

  “Have it your way.” Butler tore off Bonny Kate’s gag.

  She spat in his face.

  “You bastard!” the woman screamed now her mouth was untethered. Gasps and a few titters of laughter rose up from the crowd of onlookers. The pistols aimed at Bonny Kate’s head got cocked back in unison by their handlers. The laughing stopped abruptly and there were more gasps from the locals, because watching a women get her head shot off became a distinct possibility.

  Butler wiped the saliva off his face with a mean smile but dead eyes. “That’s as close as I ever want to come in this lifetime to tastin’ a kiss from you, Bonny Kate Valance.” He nodded to his boys. “Cut her loose. Keep her covered. Get her inside. Let’s get paid.”

  Twisting her arms behind her back hard enough to strain the joints in her shoulder sockets, two of the bounty hunters slashed off the ropes on her bound legs and wrists. Jamming rifles and pistols in her back, the shootists force-marched Bonny Kate Valance up the stairs onto the porch with her cussing and cursing them to hell and gone the whole time. “I’m innocent, Goddammit! I didn’t do none of what they say I did! I’m an honest God-fearing, good woman and you can’t treat me like this! You filthy heathens are all going to hell! Took all twelve of you to get me, it did! I’m more man than any of you are! Get your dirty hands off me! Help! Somebody, help!”

  Standing at the door as the hulking gang of gunmen shoved their prisoner inside the office, Marshal Mackenzie and Frank Butler exchanged forbearing glances as they followed last and closed the door behind them.

  In the crowd, lips flapped like flocks of ducks. All anyone standing outside could talk about was how at long last the notorious outlaw Bonny Kate Valance, the most dangerous woman in the West, had been apprehended and was being held prisoner in their town!

  * * *

  “Now shut up,” Marshal Jack Mackenzie said as he eased Bonny Kate Valance out of the fierce grip of the armed bounty hunters and ushered her into the cell. The small but solid iron cage in the corner of the room was built to hold two. Once she was inside, he stood in the doorway and unholstered his revolver. Still staring straight at the infamous lady outlaw, Mackenzie said quietly, “You men can put those irons away now.”

  “Stand down,” Butler told his men firmly, and they reholstered their pistols and lowered their rifle barrels.

  “I have to pat you down for weapons.” Mackenzie snapped his gaze back to Bonny Kate. He took one look at the soft curves filling out his guest’s blue jeans and button shirt and swallowed hard. His face was coloring with embarrassment. “It’s U.S. Marshal regulation when we lock somebody in one of our cells. I can do it or I can ask Mr. Butler here, but I think you would prefer somebody more professional.”

  “Be my guest,” Bonny Kate, with a saucy smirk, said to the lawman.

  With a sharp intake of breath, Mackenzie stepped into the cell with Bonny Kate. “Sorry, ma’am,” he said. “Spread your arms and legs, please.” The marshal did a brisk, professional pat-down of her armpits, bosom, belt of her trousers, butt, crotch, each leg, ankles, and boots. The woman submitted, nonplussed and unoffended. Looking very relieved to be finished, his face slick with sweaty embarrassment, the marshal stood and nodded at his prisoner. “You’re clean.”

  That brought a smile to her lips.

  Mackenzie left the cell. “Step back,” the marshal said, and the lady outlaw retreated three steps as Mackenzie closed the cell door and turned his key in the lock.

  “Let’s get you boys out of here,” the marshal said to Frank Butler and his men, who stuffed the confines of the lawman’s office like buzzards in a gulch, filling it with malignance. Mackenzie took a seat at his desk and opened a file cabinet, pulling out a reward requisition form. The gang stood patiently, not saying a word, as the marshal took out his pen and began scribbling information on the sheet, including the name of the felon brought in for the reward,
the time and place it happened, and his own name and office information. The process took about five minutes and during that time there was not a jingle of spur or creak of leather from the posse, so still they stood. Finally, Mackenzie looked up and lifted the paper. “Okay, boys. Last thing we need are all your signatures at the bottom here, all of you who are claiming the reward.”

  “You boys go first.” Frank Butler had walked several paces to the big board with the reward notice handbills pinned up. Mackenzie could see he was studying the one for a bank robber named Jim Henry Barrow.

  In turn, the bounty hunters walked up and signed their name on the official reward requisition form. A few seemed to be having a problem writing their own name. “Any of you boys don’t got a proper signature, an X will do,” the marshal told them to their visible relief.

  “This bank robber Barrow has a thousand-dollar reward, dead or alive, it says,” Butler stated, his back to the lawman as he regarded the poster.

  “That’s what it says,” Mackenzie replied.

  “Says here he was last seen making off for the Hoback area. That’s ’bout thirty miles due south of here, right?”

  “Yes, it is. It’s the jurisdiction of my counterpart, Marshal Sugarland.” Mackenzie did not care to bandy words with obvious brute killers like these men, especially their leader, who looked to be the worst of the bunch, but the man was a dog with a bone.

  “Being as we’re here, and my boys and I are presently unemployed, so to speak, think we might go on after this Barrow fellow.”

  “Well, you’re a little late, Mr. Butler.”

  At this, Butler turned to face Mackenzie, and his eyes had that hooded look back again. “He been caught, you mean?”

  “Will be. What I mean is another bounty hunter named Joe Noose checked into my office a day ago and is already hunting Barrow. He’s worked with our office before and he always gets his man.”

  The last bounty hunter scratched his name on the reward requisition form and a silence descended on the room. There was a tambourine metallic chime of spurs as Frank Butler crossed to Mackenzie’s desk, bent at the waist like a gentleman, and signed his name.

  The marshal glanced at the ornate cursive of the signature and was surprised at the elegance of the penmanship. This was an educated man who was kin but not kind to the mad-dog killers he had riding with him; someone who projected an air of intelligence and cunning far superior to his minions. The marshal got the distinct impression Butler came from a different gene pool altogether—an enigmatic, mysterious, and highly dangerous background Mackenzie couldn’t guess and didn’t want to. The leader of the gang set down the pen respectfully and plucked up the requisition form in his gloved fingers. He spoke with a calm and eloquent formality to his drawl as he said to the marshal evenly, “My understanding is if this other bounty hunter hasn’t caught his man yet he can’t lay claim to the reward and it remains an open bounty.”

  “You understand correct, sir.”

  “Then my boys and I intend to go after it. The reward is dead or alive, correct?”

  “Correct. You may take that reward requisition form in your hand to Jackson Savings & Loan just down the street and they will cash it for you and give you your money.”

  “Much obliged.” Butler tipped his hat and he and his gang departed.

  When Butler was halfway out the door Mackenzie stopped him by saying, “We prefer alive.”

  “Of course you do,” Frank Butler retorted as he departed.

  Not much later, after as much time as it would take to stop at a bank, there was a loud martial thunder of horses’ hooves that swiftly faded south toward Hoback, and the men were gone.

  It was the last Marshal Mackenzie had seen or heard of these bounty hunters, men he would characterize more as bounty killers, until the telegraph came from Hoback requesting authorization for the reward for the murdered marshal Sugarland. Mackenzie didn’t like Butler or his gang then and he liked them less now with each passing hour, knowing they were out there, knowing there was some bad business going on.

  Those boys were just wrong.

  CHAPTER 18

  “Where’s your mother?”

  Bess looked over, surprised, to Butler, who she saw had fallen back and was riding beside her. His head was tilted as he regarded her with interest in his hard eyes that, she now saw, were such a dark shade of brown they only appeared black.

  “She passed when I was six,” Bess replied.

  “I’m sorry,” Butler said.

  “Never really knew her.”

  “You father, God rest his soul, he raised you, then?”

  “Yes, he did.” Bess smiled sadly.

  “Brothers? Sisters?”

  She shook her head tightly. “Just me. And him.”

  “And he taught you the family business. Raised you to be a lawdog.” He peered at her from under the brim of his black Stetson.

  “It’s what he knew.” She shrugged.

  The gang leader looked ahead and nodded to himself with approval. “I think that’s good. A woman makes a fine lawman.”

  Frank Butler seemed a lot less threatening all of a sudden. Bess didn’t want to admit it to herself but it felt good to talk to someone after all that had happened today and was still to happen. The big, hard man beside her gazed at her watchfully with a nonjudgmental regard. He radiated a forceful, implacable masculinity that she found oddly reassuring. He was easy to talk to when he wanted to be, it seemed. “I apologize for the manner of my men. They’re not as socialized as they might be. These boys are a little rough around the edges, I admit. Spend most of their time out on the trail. But they’re all good men and can be counted on. Handpicked them myself. We’ll get your father’s killer, that you can be sure of.”

  Bess just nodded. She thought about the five of the gang that had already been killed by the man accused of killing her father and decided not to mention that inconvenient detail. “Where do you and your boys come from?”

  “All around,” Butler replied.

  “You work in Wyoming.”

  “We’re manhunters, Marshal. We go where the men we’re after are. New Mexico. Utah. Arizona. California. Even Mexico. We’ve worked all those places.”

  “Anywhere there’s a fat reward, you mean.”

  “It’s our job. Somebody’s got to do it.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “Some of the men we hunt, sometimes there’s gangs of them and often they cross state and territorial lines. Local law can’t follow and coordination with their counterparts is disorganized. That’s where we come in. The men we hunt are often heavily armed and dangerous and don’t think twice about killing women and children. The local law sometimes is simply plain outgunned. We’re professionals. We hit what we aim at. And we always get our man.” Butler sounded pretty damn sure of himself.

  “Good to know.” Bess meant it.

  “This may be out of turn, Marshal, but I think your daddy would be proud of you.”

  “You’re right,” she said. He looked at her. “It is out of line.”

  “No offense, Marshal.”

  Butler rode on ahead.

  The trail took a downward turn and widened out, the horses’ hooves crunching on slippery rocks. A clatter of tumbling stones into the ravine made her stomach clench. Beneath her backside, the horse felt unsteady. Bess kept her eyes straight. Ahead, a high plateau loomed with arrowheads of pine trees like green lizard scales covering the skin of grass and granite. It was going to be a rough slow climb. Bess couldn’t imagine how the fugitive Noose was staying ahead of them by escaping up this rugged terrain with a bullet in him. She couldn’t help but wonder if the bounty killers were going in the wrong direction—a fast glance at the body language of Frank Butler, tall and confident in his saddle with the steady to-and-fro turns of his head almost machinelike as his keen eyes swept the landscape for sign of their quarry, calmed her doubts. The man was like a human bloodhound on a scent, his perseverance relentless and
his entire presence a little frightening in its raw obsessiveness.

  It was almost like this was personal.

  Like it wasn’t even about the money.

  The rest of the pack of mercenaries were all about the money, though, she had no doubt of that. They smelled of murder and blood, a bad scent emanating from their rotten pores. Bess swung her gaze across the faces of the gang behind her, holding their stares when they met hers and not showing fear. She was protected by her badge, and these jackals would do her no harm.

  She was a U.S. Marshal.

  So why did she have to keep telling herself that?

  CHAPTER 19

  A week before in Jackson Hole, Deputy Nolan Swallows had been out running an errand for his boss, Marshal Jack Mackenzie, and had just left the gun store after buying a few boxes of .44 ammunition and dropping off two Henry rifles to be overhauled and have their sights checked. He hadn’t been gone from the marshal’s office thirty minutes and had been in the store half that time. The town of Jackson had been quiet and Broadway mostly empty when he went in the establishment but fifteen minutes later when he left, the same street was bustling with activity; the sidewalks were jammed with people and the air filled with urgency and excited talk, so the deputy immediately knew something big was happening in Jackson.

  Whatever it is, Swallows thought, word travels fast.

  The lean young lawman knew he better get back to the office with all possible haste so he hurried with his parcel of bullets down the dirt street, dodging past horses and wagons as his sharp ears caught snippets of passing conversation from a few men.

  “—in our own damn jail—”

  “—hear she’s twice as much of a looker than they say she was—”

  “—Naked, I tell you! Had her bosoms hanging right out catching the breeze, was what Joe told me—”

  More confused than ever, Swallows quickened his pace, turned the corner onto Pearl Street, and was greeted by a large crowd of local businessmen and shopkeepers leaving their stores and throwing up CLOSED signs as they joined a burgeoning crowd of pedestrians heading like a herd of steers toward the U.S. Marshal’s office a half a block down.