by Jake Logan
Jeter’s face was only inches from Slocum’s as he sneered and said, “I got you now, Slocum. You’re gonna die. I wish it could be slow and painful, but you’re a slippery one.”
“You still trying to talk me to death, Jeter? You must have killed dozens of men that way, the ones you didn’t shoot in the back.” Slocum hoped to anger Jeter again, to get him mad enough to make a mistake. That had worked once. Not now.
“Die, Slocum, die.”
Jeter’s fingers clamped around Slocum’s neck and began squeezing the life from his body. Slocum fought to get his arms up to strike at Jeter, to claw his eyes, to force him away. The man’s bony knees held him down too securely. Slocum kicked and tried to roll Jeter off. The solid rock cliff face prevented it in one direction, and his left leg was too weak to give much impetus the other—the direction that would have taken Jeter over the ledge.
But Slocum’s groping fingers found the knife sheathed at the top of his boot. Clumsily he drew the knife and knew he had only one chance. In spite of tensing his neck muscles and fighting, Slocum realized Jeter was too strong for him. His air was cut off. The blood to his head was restricted. A heavy roaring in his ears would have warned him of approaching death, even if the world collapsing into a long dark tunnel hadn’t.
He thrust with the knife.
For an instant he didn’t think he had done anything. He tried to stab again, but the blade slipped from his fingers. Slocum frantically grabbed, but his fingers had turned slippery and slid off the hilt.
Then Jeter let out a grunt and toppled to one side. Slocum should have followed him, gone after him, and strangled him the way Jeter had been strangling him, but the air refused to come to his lungs. He tried to sit up, but all the strength had fled from his body. His hand reaching for his six-shooter couldn’t even lift off the cold stone ledge.
Slocum blacked out.
19
Pain lanced through Jeter’s side, causing him to lose his grip on Slocum’s neck. He fell to the side, then screeched like a hoot owl when he started to tumble over the side of the ledge. His fingers grabbed, slipped, and then he plunged away, kicking and screaming as he went. Only pure chance saved him. He hit the stone stairway in the side of the mountain, and managed to grab on long enough to slow his fall.
Panting harshly, Jeter skidded a few feet lower and then stopped, legs still dangling over the side of the ledge but body and arms firmly across the staircase. He felt his left leg tingling from the hunk of flint embedded in his ass, but the pain arrowing throughout his body came from the knife wound. Carefully wiggling forward, he flopped onto the stone pathway and winced as he reached down to touch the new wound.
“Damnation,” he muttered. “The son of a bitch left his knife in me.” Jeter grasped the bloody handle and gingerly pulled. Every inch was acid agony, but he finally extracted the blade and cast it away from him as if its touch were something vile. He looked back up the side of the rocky face and tried to guess how long it would take for him to return to his former hiding place. He had Slocum to kill once and for all.
As he tried to stand, weakness washed through him like a tidal wave. Wavering, dizzying, Jeter sat down hard and fought to keep from passing out. He was tough. He could go on. He could climb up the stone steps and kill Slocum.
“Like hell I can,” he muttered. He had stayed alive this long knowing what he could do and what he couldn’t. If he tried to finish off that piece of human flypaper, he would die before he reached him. Slocum had to wait for another day. Right now, Jeter had to get to his horse and ride like the wind out of here.
“Downhill’s easier,” he told himself. And for a spell it was. He slid on his rump over the stone, marveling at the ease. Then it came to him that he was bleeding so much that his rear lubricated the rock. Jeter slowed his descent, worried off his shirt, and tried to examine the wound between his ribs. Slocum hadn’t been in any position to really drive in the knife blade, but he had done a fair amount of damage. Just touching the gash made Jeter woozy. A few quick rips had his shirt torn into strips long enough to wrap around his chest. The rest of the shirt he pressed against the wound before he cinched himself up. The act of self-doctoring made him violently ill to his stomach. He retched, but he had eaten damn little in the past few days.
“You owe me a meal, Slocum,” he grated out. “How about I eat your damned liver?” Wiping his lips, Jeter sat for a few more minutes garnering his strength. Then with a supreme effort, he heaved himself to his feet and lurched down the increasingly broad stone steps to where his horse was still corralled. He had expected Slocum to steal the horse, and was surprised to find the stallion where he had left it.
“Whoa, boy, down. Don’t rear up like that,” Jeter said as he neared the horse. The scent of blood spooked the horse. It took him several minutes, both because of the horse’s fright at the blood and because of his own weakness, to get into the saddle. When he did, he sagged forward and hung on for dear life.
“Get me outta here. Anywhere you want. You got your head,” Jeter said to the huge black horse. The stallion got through the narrow neck of the nook and out onto the canyon floor.
For a moment Jeter got turned around, and didn’t realize that the horse was carrying him toward the posse’s campsite. When he snapped out of his lethargy, he sawed at the reins and turned the horse’s head.
“Other way, boy, other way. Go fast.” The horse tried to buck him off, but Jeter was expecting it. The stallion didn’t like it when he sawed on the reins like that. But he had no other choice. To have been carried smack dab into the middle of the posse was a death sentence, even if they were mostly drunk and many had passed out.
Jeter fumbled to find his six-shooter, and was content when he discovered it securely in his holster. He couldn’t remember much about the descent from his aerie on the mountainside, but as he passed the point directly below, he looked up almost expecting to see Slocum aiming a rifle at him. But that was ridiculous. He wasn’t sure, but thought he had broken the son of a bitch’s neck. Jeter stared at his hands. They were cut and bleeding, but some of that blood came from bandaging himself. The rest came from the scuffle.
A final glance over his shoulder. Still no Slocum beckoning him to return to finish their fight.
“Killed him,” Jeter said, getting dizzy and almost falling from his horse. “Swatted the fly on my flypaper.”
He wobbled and held on tight, then sat straighter when he heard something he couldn’t immediately identify. He sucked in a great deep breath and gagged when the pain in his side got to be too much. Jeter took a gentle bend in the canyon and cast a look over his left shoulder, and uttered a string of curses when he saw the source of the curious noise. The echoes trapped by the canyon walls had disguised the sound of a dozen horses—all on his trail. He had thought the posse was drunk on their asses and no threat. He couldn’t have been more wrong.
Jeter slowed his horse, and then halted to be certain the sound was that of the posse. He heard muffled voices as they drunkenly argued. One came through clarion clear, though.
“He took his horse and went that way, Marshal Eaton.”
“I heard you the first time, Billy. You put a lot of trust in Slocum. Where’s he off to?”
“It don’t matter, Marshal. Nuthin’ does but arrestin’ Jeter. That’s what Slocum said ’fore he sent me back to fetch y’all.”
“Flypaper,” Jeter muttered. “Even when he’s dead I can’t shake him.” He brought his horse to a slow walk, hoping no sound reached back to the disorganized posse. If he kept moving and they didn’t spot him, he would get away scot-free. They were too drunk to keep up pursuit of a ghost for very long.
“Stay out of sight,” Jeter repeated to himself until he believed he could do it. A smile crossed his face and joy momentarily blotted out the pain when he saw the far end of the canyon. Another branch. Without Slocum to steer them in the proper direction, he could lose them all here. Or half, if they chose to split their forces. With th
e proper choice, he could even take on all of them. The western canyon was rugged, but the one going off to the southeast afforded better spots for ambush. That was the one he would take.
A few shots and they’d hightail it all the way back to San Esteban with stories of being up against the fiercest bandido in all of Texas!
Jeter was approaching the juncture when he realized that the posse was getting closer. Too close for him to lay a false trail, even if he could. Jeter’s head spun, and he felt as if his body would split into sections. His left leg might fall off, but that would be all right. His chest filled with liquid fire every time he sucked in a breath. Clinging to the hope of eluding the posse, he turned into the rockier canyon. The other would have given him more chance to ambush them. Jeter was in such bad condition now he wasn’t sure he could hold a six-shooter without it shaking too much to aim properly.
“There he is!” went up the cry behind him. He had tried to make his choice of paths and not have them spot him. Considering their condition, the members of the posse might have argued an hour or until they passed out from too much booze. But they didn’t argue. The one who was sober—Billy—had spotted him.
Jeter gave the stallion its head, letting the powerful horse run through the jumble of rocks, finding the surest path, getting him away from the law. This was the first time the horse had ever been given such freedom. Usually its rider was in complete control, but not tonight.
“Get me home,” he said, clinging to the horse’s neck.
The stallion failed him.
It took a turn into a narrow canyon that proved to be a dead end. The horse reared and pawed at the air when Jeter jerked hard on the reins. So little time before the posse caught up. So little time. No time at all.
Jeter went for his six-shooter when he saw four of the posse arrayed in a fan behind him. All of them had their rifles trained on him. Drunk or sober, good marksman or bad, there was no way the four would miss if they opened fire. And behind them crowded the rest of the jeering, shouting lawmen.
“I surrender,” Jeter said, hands going up into the air. He knew it was a mistake, but he was too pain-racked to fight. The new town marshal would arrest him, patch him up, and go through a mockery of a trial. Somewhere along the way a deputy or the marshal himself would slip up and Jeter would be free again.
He was smarter than the lot of them put together. Eventually, he would ride out of San Esteban and most of them wouldn’t.
“Don’t shoot, boys,” Marshal Eaton called. “We got him fair ’n square.”
“What now, Marshal?” asked the youngster. Jeter fought to keep the young man in focus. This had to be Billy, the one Slocum had put on his tail. Jeter might clear leather and cut him down if he got lucky. But that would mean the others would kill him. No sense dying now. He could escape the town jail and then eliminate every member of the posse, one by one. Might be, he would save Billy for the last since he owed him the most. Watching the callow youth’s face as he begged for mercy and didn’t get it would be a memory that might keep Jeter warm for months afterward.
“You got me. No need to get itchy trigger fingers.” Jeter almost fell from the saddle.
“It’s a trick, be careful,” Eaton warned his men.
“No trick, Marshal,” Billy said, riding closer. “There’s not a patch of clothes anywhere on his body that’s not soaked in blood. He’s a complete mess.”
The others rode closer to look at him as if he were a circus elephant, or one of those damned camels they had tried at Fort Davis years back and that the Drunk Camel was named for.
“What happened to you?” asked Eaton.
“You should see Slocum,” Jeter got out. He grinned through bloody lips and looked like a death’s skull. He got a thrill out of seeing the reaction a simple smile produced. When he got back in the saddle and went after these men, they would do more than recoil in horror. They would shit their britches before he pulled the trigger and ended their miserable lives.
“He don’t look like he’d make it back to town, Marshal,” Billy said. “What we gonna do ’bout that?”
“Yeah, what you gonna do?” Jeter laughed and then spat blood.
The marshal pushed back his hat and scratched his chin as he stared hard at Jeter. It took him a few seconds before he said, “Must be an oak tree around here somewhere.”
“What?” Jeter didn’t understand what the man meant. “What are you sayin’?”
“You won’t live to stand trial so I reckon we gotta hang you now. Saves the citizens of San Esteban the trouble of gettin’ a judge down from Fort Davis and goin’ through the charade of a convenin’ a jury.”
“I can ride,” Jeter said, his heart feeling as if it would explode in his chest when he realized what the marshal intended to do. “I can make it alive.”
“Which of you men knows how to tie a hangman’s knot?”
Jeter tried to escape, but there were too many of them and he was as weak as a kitten from loss of blood. They took him to a nearby oak with the strong limb at just the right height, then settled the knotted rope around his neck. Les Jeter had a curse on his lips as he flopped off his horse and died, kicking.
20
Amy Gerardo came awake, her hand on the derringer under her pillow. She lay in the hard bed a moment longer, then rose and went to the hotel room door. From outside came the strange, rhythmical sound again. Clutching her derringer, she unlocked the door and peered into the hallway. The threadbare carpeting stretched toward the rear of the hotel and a stairway down to the alley. Empty.
Sucking in her breath, she opened the door a little farther and chanced a quick peek in the other direction, toward the stairway leading to the lobby. The noise became a distinctive creaking sound as boards gave way under a heavy weight. Someone was coming up the stairs.
She knew it had to be close to dawn, but this was a strange time for anyone to be in the hallway—if their intent was legal. Cocking the derringer, she lifted it as a head slowly appeared above the top of the stairway. Then she lowered it hastily and hid it in the folds of her nightgown when she saw Ambrose Killian.
The man had a distracted look and stared directly at her without seeing her. Amy felt a surge of irritation at this. She was in her nightgown! He should have reacted in some way! At least he could have averted his eyes and mumbled an apology. Or he could have come to her, taken her in his arms, kissed her, then pressed her back into the hotel room and—
“Ambrose?” she called, uneasy at the way her thoughts were taking her. “Are you all right? You look so . . . distant.”
“Hmm? Oh, Miss Gerardo. What are you doing out in the hallway?”
“Come in, quickly, Ambrose,” she said, moving to let him into her room. Her heart beat so fast it caused her breast to pulse and the frilly lace of her nightgown to ripple as if some unseen breeze disturbed it. Amy worked to find a spot to hide her pistol. Explaining why she had gone into the hallway to greet him with a gun would be too confusing at this time of the night.
To her delight, Ambrose brushed past her, his arm pressing for the briefest instant into her breasts. Then he seated himself in the single straight-backed wood chair in the corner of the room by the wardrobe. He kept both feet flat on the floor and his hands folded in his lap, as if he were an obedient schoolboy.
“Why are you wandering around like this, Ambrose?”
“You shouldn’t open the door without some way of protecting yourself, Miss Gerardo,” he said in his distracted tone. “I should buy you a small-caliber pistol and teach you to use it in self-defense.”
“I heard a noise in the hallway,” Amy said, sitting on the edge of the bed. She drew up her nightgown a little to expose her ankles, then her bare calves. Ambrose didn’t pay any attention. She put the derringer down on the beside table. His eyebrows rose slightly, but he did not comment on the pistol. He was too consumed by something else.
“I had a strange feeling,” he said.
“I have one too,” she said,
her breath coming faster now and a flush rising to her cheeks. “Right now.”
“Amazing,” Ambrose said. He stood, and she thought he was coming to her. Instead he went to the window and pushed back the curtains to stare into the dark street running through the feeble heart of San Esteban. “I was sound asleep and this odd feeling of loss hit me like a brick. Something was suddenly gone.”
“Gone?” Amy sprawled back on the bed, her legs now wantonly bare as she pulled up her nightgown.
“It was as if I had lost an arm or an old friend or—Jeter.” He turned and stared at her without seeing her. “I think Jeter is dead. Did you sense that too?”
“No.”
“It can’t be. I had arranged for a judge to come up from San Antonio. A jury would be easily rounded up. There would have been a sentence, an execution, and I would take pictures of Jeter on the gallows and you would record every word uttered at the trial. I had it all planned so completely.”
“And his coffin,” she said, remembering the elaborately carved box O’Dell had made. The undertaker was a true artisan, skilled and quick.
“Yes, yes!” cried Ambrose. “I intended to use that photograph as a cover for my memoirs of him. The Fall of a Titan: The Outlaw’s Deadly Life I was going to call it.”
“A nice title,” Amy said, pursing her lips. She tipped her head back and parted her lips slightly. “Come closer, Ambrose, and tell me all about it.”
He ignored her and began pacing. She recognized the cadence now as the one that had awakened her. Only this time Ambrose Killian was pacing about her room, not about the lobby below, with the clicking periodicity of a metronome. He bent forward, hands clasped behind his back, as he moved around the room. His gaze was fixed on the floor, not on her. Amy wondered what she had to do to attract his attention. She reached up and untied the top satin bow on her nightgown, showing the upper parts of her fine, firm breasts.