Crossing the Line

by J. R. Roberts

  Shots were being fired from the house in a slow, steady rhythm as the men inside adjusted their aim. Each time a bullet thumped into the ground or chipped at a tree, it was closer to Carl than the ones that had come before. Clint had told him to keep moving, but Carl couldn’t get his legs to follow through on that. The longer he stayed in one place, Carl knew the chances of him getting hit would only get better. Since he couldn’t get himself to move to another spot and he wasn’t about to run away, Carl pressed up against the tree and steadied himself as best he could.

  George was still shouting obscenities and firing his pistol angrily. Still the same loudmouthed jackass he’d always been.

  When Carl saw that son of a bitch, he saw the only reason he’d gotten involved in this whole mess. He saw the man who’d killed his friend. He saw a man who didn’t deserve to draw another breath.

  Even though Carl was well outside of that idiot’s range, he shifted his aim to the center of George’s chest.

  With one pull of the trigger, Carl could put that asshole down for good.

  Then he remembered what Clint had taught him.

  He had to squeeze the trigger, not pull.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Clint knew he could have caught up to Les and Jerry before too long. Unfortunately, they had just enough of a head start that he would be halfway to town before meeting up with them again. If the other two men knew a shortcut or managed to stay ahead of Clint for a little while longer, they might get all the way back to town where they could hole up in any number of spots. They might even have backup waiting for them there. Although Clint wouldn’t mind taking his chances against those odds, Carl’s odds would be a whole lot worse on his own.

  Turning around and letting those two slip away went against Clint’s grain so badly that it almost hurt. He set that aside quickly enough when he heard the sounds of gunshots coming from the farm. Clint snapped his reins and got back there as quickly as Eclipse could carry him.

  The shots were getting closer. They cinched in around Carl like a noose, forcing him to lie flat on the ground and cover his head with his hands. He’d heard a lot worse during the war, but he’d been a kid back then. He’d seen men die, but still never thought it could happen to him. Only grown-ups bled that way and never got up again.

  He was a grown-up now and he knew he could be dead at any second. Once that certainty hit him, the rest didn’t seem so bad.

  Carl forced his eyes open and checked his rifle. If he was going to die, it wouldn’t be due to a lucky shot fired into the top of his head while he was lying on his belly. If these were his final minutes on earth, he’d spend them firing back at the son of a bitch who’d started this whole mess.

  While thinking along those lines, the crackle of gunfire faded away. Carl no longer paid attention to the bullets that whipped past him like angry insects. He pulled himself up, lifted his rifle, and took aim at the men who were making their way from the farm to finish him off.

  Clint charged from the trees and rode toward the farmhouse like a one-man cavalry battalion. The man perched at the top of the windmill fired at him, but Clint fired right back. He’d only meant to force the lookout to duck, but the boards beneath the man’s perch had been weakened and he fell from his spot to drop at least twenty-five feet to the ground. He hit with a loud thump and let out a pained wail. Of the four men rushing toward the trees, two of them turned to see what had happened to their lookout.

  Upon seeing Clint, one of those men brought his gun around to take a shot at him. Clint aimed from the hip, using nothing but raw instinct, and blasted a hole through that one’s heart.

  The second one who’d turned around fired wildly while launching himself through the air to one side. His shots were so wild that they wouldn’t have hit their target even if it had been the old barn.

  Dropping to one knee, Clint straightened his arm and fired.

  When the man hit the ground on his shoulder, he was already dead. A fresh yet messy hole started at his chin and ended at the upper portion of the back of his skull.

  Since the other two that had been running toward the trees had stopped by now, Clint walked forward and came to a stop where one of the dead men had come to a rest. “You up there, Carl?” he asked.

  George stood facing the trees, but was nervously glancing back and forth between them and at Clint. “Yeah, Carl,” George said. “Stick yer cheatin’ head up for me.”

  Suddenly, Carl stood up and lifted his rifle to his shoulder. “Nobody cheated you, dammit!”

  At first, it looked as if Carl was going to shoot George right then and there. Instead, he shifted his aim slightly to a point just over Clint’s right shoulder. Before anyone could say or do a thing about it, Carl pulled his trigger, worked the Winchester’s lever, and fired again.

  The air became heavy and still.

  Then, from behind Clint, someone grunted and hacked up a painful breath. Everyone else was looking in that direction, so Clint took a quick glance for himself. He was just in time to see another rifleman standing at the upper window of the barn. By the looks of it, he’d been about ready to fire a shot into Clint’s back. The rifleman doubled over and fell headfirst from the loft to the hard ground below.

  Clint snapped his head back around to watch George and the last remaining gunman. “What the hell is going on here?” he asked.

  “You’re breathing your last breaths,” George said. “That’s what.”

  “Les talked you into helping him rob Pace’s?”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “If you were a better liar, you’d be a better card player,” Clint pointed out. “Since it seems like you’re not good for much of anything, we’ll just have to put you and your friend down for good so we can be on our way.” With that, Clint sighted along the top of his barrel and Carl did the same. Fortunately, that was enough to get their point across.

  “We were supposed to rob the Emporium, but that’s over now,” the man next to George said.

  George wheeled around as if he meant to kill his partner on the spot. “Eckhart, you fucking asshole!”

  Eckhart might have been at the wrong end of several guns, but he seemed more annoyed with George than anything else. “For once in your goddamn life, will you shut the hell up? We don’t got enough men to do the job now anyway!”

  “We still gotta try! You saw what he did to Paul.”

  Trying to get back into the conversation, Clint asked, “Who’s Paul?”

  “Paul’s the man Les gunned down in the street,” George snapped. “You should recall that, since you was there!”

  Clint nodded as he remembered Les killing one of George’s partners after the tournament. “If you’re working for him, why would he do that?”

  “Hell, I wasn’t working for the son of a bitch until he did that!” Blinking as if he’d just sobered up, George said, “He came to me when I was locked up and told me I could either go free and help him or die. He swore that if I wasn’t hung for what I done before, he’d finish me off the moment I was set loose. Since that lazy prick Sheriff DeFalco practically eats from Mister Pace’s hand, I knew there wouldn’t be anything stopping him from making good on that claim.”

  “So once you were out, Les put you to work for him?”

  George nodded and finally let the gun slip from his fingers. In the space of a few seconds, all of the fight had drained out of him like water through a crack in a bathtub. “He said he intended on robbing the Emporium, but needed to clear out a few troublemakers that might make it tough for him. Delilah was one of those.”

  “What?” Carl growled. “You came in there to kill her?”

  “Don’t feel bad,” George said. “I meant to kill you first.”

  “Why kill any of them?” Clint asked.

  “Because Delilah had the goods on everyone at the Emporium. How do you think she was able to run her crooked game without bein’ tossed out on her pretty little ass? She knew Les wasn’t r
eally backing Mister Pace, and when she got close to a known gunfighter like you,” George said as he leered at Clint, “that was it for her. Les wasn’t about to risk her being a thorn in his side.”

  “Why rob the Emporium?” Carl asked.

  Eckhart chuckled and asked, “What else in Trickle Creek is worth robbing? Even the bank don’t carry half the cash as what can be found in Mister Pace’s office. The only reason he ever deposited any money there was to make folks think he kept it somewhere other than under the floorboards in his office. You really think he’d trust his money to a—”

  “That’s enough, Eckhart!”

  The booming voice didn’t belong to George, Clint, or either of the two men they held at gunpoint. It belonged to the towering figure that stood like a statue that had been erected at the edge of what used to be the farm’s largest field.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Les stood in his familiar way, with both hands held within easy reach of the double-rig holster strapped around his waist. His back was straight as a board and his head was angled forward like a bird of prey examining mice running along a canyon floor. His lips barely moved when he said, “You shouldn’t have come back here, Adams.”

  “I wasn’t about to leave Carl to have all the fun,” Clint replied.

  “I’m talking about this town. This county, for that matter. You shouldn’t have come back after the tournament.”

  “Is that when you decided to rob Mister Pace? You saw all that gambling money come in and you had to have it for yourself?”

  “I been setting this up for months. Pace thinks I’ll guard his money like a damn dog and get paid nothing but table scraps. That prick pays me less because I sleep upstairs from his precious saloon. After all the skulls I’ve cracked and all the men I’ve shot for him, he still ain’t made me a partner. It’s time for me to take what he owes me.”

  “Yeah! Me too!”

  “Shut the fuck up, George!” Locking eyes with him until George slumped over again, Les said, “You got two options, Adams. Either ride with me into town and help me tear up that Emporium to get Pace’s money, or I kill you for the blood you spilled here.”

  “You’re not in much of a position to make threats,” Clint pointed out. “The only two men you got left are in a bad spot.” Then, he noticed Jerry still on horseback near the farmhouse. The barkeep had a rifle to his shoulder, but Clint had to ask, “You think he’s good enough to hit both of us from there before we clean out the rest of you? That’s a lot of faith to put in a man who wipes up whiskey for a living.”

  “I don’t need any help to kill you and Carl,” Les said. “I face worse odds when I gotta tell a bunch of ranch hands to stop groping whores. You seen me work, Adams. Don’t be stupid.”

  “You killed Delilah,” Carl said in a shaky voice. “Robbing a rich man is one thing, but killing a good woman is another.”

  “She wasn’t a good woman,” George snarled. “She was a whore and a cheat!”

  Carl bared his teeth and gripped his rifle tight enough to whiten his knuckles. “Shut your mouth!”

  “Eh, to hell with all of you!” As he said that, George stooped down to snatch his pistol up from the ground.

  Having already aimed his rifle at George, Carl twitched and pulled his trigger.

  Clint knew he had about half a second to do something before Les cut loose with both of the guns he carried. That was just enough time for him to snap his arm around and fire as if he were pointing his finger at his target. The modified Colt bucked against his palm and sent its last round through Les’s forehead.

  The big man stood in his spot with a gun in each hand and not enough life in him to put them to work. His eyes rolled back into their sockets and he fell over like a tree that had been chopped down.

  But Clint knew he wasn’t finished. His Colt was empty and Eckhart was still unaccounted for. Clint turned to get a look at the last gunman to see if he’d actually made a smart choice. Instead, Eckhart raised his gun hand so he could burn down everyone in front of him.

  Clint dug his toe under the gun that had been dropped by one of the men who’d already been killed, flipped the gun up into his hand and fired a shot. If he hadn’t been standing so close to Eckhart, there would have been no possible way he’d hit him. Even at point-blank range, Clint only managed to put a round through Eckhart’s ribs. That was still enough to take the fight out of him, and Eckhart crumpled.

  George was already on the ground and Carl stood over him.

  “You killed Delilah,” Carl said. “Now you’ve got to pay.”

  George had been hit by Carl’s first shot but was still drawing breath. His shirt was soaked with blood and he was on his back, but he simply refused to stop talking.

  “Go . . . fuck yourself,” George grunted.

  “No,” Carl replied. “Fu—”

  “Carl. Don’t.”

  He glanced up at Clint, but only for a second, and he didn’t let his rifle stray from its target. “You heard him, Clint. He killed Delilah and it wasn’t even an accident. He’s got to pay for that.”

  “And he will,” Clint said, “but not like this.” He reached down to take the gun away from George. “He’s unarmed.”

  “I don’t care,” Carl replied.

  “And he’s wounded. It’s over. It took a hell of a lot to stand up and do what you did. I wouldn’t have tracked them here before it was too late. If you weren’t here, the rest of these men would have surrounded me and then ridden in to finish what they started. You did everything right so far. Don’t stop now.”

  Carl just kept shaking his head. “I can’t let this pass.”

  “It won’t pass,” Clint assured him. “We’ll finish this the proper way. You pull that trigger and it’ll just be an execution.”

  “That’s what he deserves.”

  “Yeah,” Clint replied, “but you don’t deserve to have something like this weighing you down for the rest of your life.” Although he knew Carl was listening to him, the sight of George’s ugly, sneering face was counteracting every last one of his words. “Do you really think you’ll be able to go back to a quiet life with this on your conscience? Once you cross this line, there’s no going back.”

  “All these men crossed the line,” Carl said.

  “And they’re not going back,” Clint pointed out. “Trust me, we’ll make sure of that.”

  After a long couple of seconds, Carl let out a deep breath and lowered his rifle. The moment George started to say something, Carl shut him up by slamming the rifle’s stock against his chin. Finally, George was silent.

  “What now?” Carl asked.

  Clint smiled proudly at the other man and said, “Now, we bring the ones that are still breathing into town and hand them over to Sheriff DeFalco. There’s a reward coming for George, you know.”

  Now, Carl smiled. “That’s right. There sure is.”

  “Then we stop in to have a word with Mister Pace. After all we’ve heard and seen today, I think we can convince him that his guard dog wasn’t as loyal as he thought. The sheriff may be a lazy ass, but Mister Pace won’t be content to let these two get away with shooting up his place and trying to rob him blind.”

  Carl nodded with the confidence of a man who knew he would see justice done. “Come to think of it, I may have heard someone mention that George was the one who’d been in cahoots with Les from the beginning. I bet that’d rile up Mister Pace even more.”

  “Yeah,” Clint said as he looked down at the poor bastards curled up on the ground. “I bet it would.”

  Watch for

  BAD BUSINESS

  336th novel in the exciting GUNSMITH series

  from Jove

  Coming in December!

 

 

 
-webkit-filter: grayscale(100%); -moz-filter: grayscale(100%); -o-filter: grayscale(100%); -ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share