by Ben Boulden
BLAZE!
RED ROCK RAMPAGE
Ben Boulden
Blaze! Red Rock Rampage
Text Copyright 2017 by Ben Boulden
Series Concept and Characters Copyright 2015 by Stephen Mertz
Cover Design by Livia Reasoner
A Rough Edges Press Book
www.roughedgespress.com
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
CHAPTER 1
A coyote baying in the distance and Kate’s rhythmic breathing, her blonde hair pale in the cold light, lulled J.D. into a false sense of comfort. His sleep heavy eyes scanned the desolate nightscape of Southern Utah’s badlands. In the daylight the sandstone cliffs and hard soil were baked red by the unrelenting desert sun, but with the high glow of moonlight it was now variations of white on black. J.D. stirred; in an attempt to keep his growing fatigue away he touched the cold steel of the large Colt revolver strapped to his left hip, its butt forward in a cross-draw rig. A mild breeze blew fresh across his face, the sweet smell of sage in its grasp, and his eyelids closed again.
A scratching noise wound its way into J.D.’s consciousness. His eyes opened to the night. He held perfectly still, his hand resting on the revolver at his belt, and listened to the night’s silence. His eyes scanned the cold ground. His ears strained for sound—
He heard it again.
The sound of a boot heel sliding across rock. J.D. tensed and leaned forward, his eyes searched the landscape. He gently nudged Kate with the toe of his boot. Kate’s eyes opened with a rush, but she remained motionless and kept silent. J.D. made a small gesture with his hand, his left pinky extended, palm up, and Kate understood its significance instantly. She pulled her Winchester into her arms and lithely rolled to her knees. The desert wind drowned the small noises of her movements. She looked at J.D. and he pointed with the barrel of his Colt. Its bluing sparked the night’s light, toward the cliff face thirty feet away.
“Over there.” The whispered voice sounded like a shout across the canyon floor. It was followed by a muted, mumbled answer. Kate’s gaze captured a man’s shadow against the cliff wall and the Winchester .44-40 quickly followed. Its front sight marked the speaker’s slouched form behind a raggedy copse of sage. She kept off the trigger because the whispers came from two stalking vermin and Kate didn’t want to spoil the ambush. She wanted the fight settled quickly and painlessly—for her and J.D.—and that meant both men dead with as little shooting as possible.
That’s when a blinding flame leaped from J.D.’s Colt followed quickly by the deafening roar of the blast. Kate didn’t flinch. She drew a bead on the frozen shadow, inhaled shallowly, pulled the trigger with her exhalation. The Winchester jumped against her shoulder, its kick satisfyingly heavy. Even more thrilling, the man dropped to the ground like a stone. She was on her feet a moment after the shot was fired, levering a fresh round into the rifle’s chamber, scanning the area for another target. She felt, more than heard, J.D. rush past her and across the rough, broken ground following a man-shaped shadow into the night. The roar of his heavy revolver echoed between the high canyon walls.
Kate let him go and cautiously approached the man she shot. He sprawled across a sandstone slab. His left foot twisted backwards; a pool of dark, almost black, blood beneath him. Kate kicked a revolver away from the man’s hand and watched his nearly motionless form. His chest rose and fell with ragged breath. Blood frothed at his lips and pulsed from the bullet wound in his chest with each beat of his heart. He was alive, but so close to death he could see its inky darkness.
He whispered, but Kate couldn’t understand the words. She came closer to the dying man, took his hand in hers.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Everything is fine now.”
The man squeezed her hand, trembled, said, “S-S-ma-ll...B-B-a-si—” before faltering into silence.
Kate kneeled beside the man, his hand still in hers, until his chest stopped rising, the phlegmy rattle of breath quit his throat and the fingers of his hand loosened and fell away. She stood then, looking across the broken country wondering just where J.D. was, and why it was so damn quiet.
CHAPTER 2
It had started four days earlier in a dusty northern Arizona town with J.D. sitting in a saloon idling away a hot summer afternoon, a cold slider of beer in one hand and a bowl of peanuts at the other awaiting notice of a robbery. A few weeks, several dozen beers, and a handful, more maybe, of explorations of the Kama Sutra with Kate, earlier J. D and his bride had been approached by a big man from the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway in New Mexico. A rash of robberies on the Santa Fe’s northern route over the past year had caused enough financial blood for the bosses in Chicago to notice and J.D. and Kate were offered a tidy sum to solve the problem; half payable at job’s acceptance, the other half at completion.
The old dandy sent to make the deal gave only one instruction: “Stop the sonsabitches anyway you like.” He spat tobacco juice, missed the spittoon in the room’s corner by three feet. “Incarceration,” the rusty guts said, “Or otherwise, prejudicially, stop the gang savaging the people’s trust in AT&SF.”
“Prejudicially?” Kate said. She decided not to delve into the possible trust issue as it was likely too big for a one-day meeting.
“Yes ma’am,” said the dandy. His gaze failed to find Kate’s eyes for her breasts. “Prejudicially.”
“That’s new,” said J.D.
“By any means necessary.” The dandy found the strength to shift his gaze from Kate’s bosom to J.D. where he saw a frown and J.D.’s head shaking while his eyes were moving between the man’s rheumy eyes and concave chest.
“I think he wants us to run them in or kill them, J.D.,” Kate said, a winsome smile crossing her red lips. A smile the dandy never saw because he didn’t look at Kate as she spoke, but rather stared languidly down at the spotless hardwood table top to keep as far from J.D.’s bad side as was now possible.
“Who are they?” J.D. said.
The dandy, still avoiding eye contact, said, “We don’t know, exactly.” Then: “There are four. We know they tend to split into two groups after the robberies—one goes north, the other south, making it damn difficult for us.”
J.D. glanced at Kate, a frown on his face. “We work together, Kate and me. We never separate.”
The dandy didn’t hesitate. “Not expected.” He sounded like a lawyer, giving J.D. something else to dislike about him. “We want you to follow the northbound robbers and we’ll take care of the southbound; assuming they keep that habit.” The dandy’s eyes were gaining courage with his words, looking, while not quite eye level, several inches above the table top, but still avoiding Kate’s direction entirely.
Kate nodded at J.D. She was enjoying his brief brush with jealousy at the dandy’s obvious appreciation of her. She enjoyed it all the more because jealousy was a cloth she wore more than he. “We’ll take it,” she said.
That was how it started, a simple conversation and transaction of bills. A few weeks waiting, comfortably, for another robbery and four days tracking the gang across the Arizona desert, less comfortably, to their cold camp no more than half a mile behind the two robbers. A distance Kate and J.D. thought was more and the robbers’ thought was less.
CHAPTER 3
Kate strained to hear, but no sound rose above the air’s movement across the cut landscape. The metallic stench of bloo
d ruined the desert’s sweet fragrance. She turned away from the dead man and walked toward the sparse camp; the sleeping rolls and saddles deathly pale in the moon’s glow. The desert felt empty to Kate and the sudden silence bothered her, but she knew J.D. was not an easy man to defeat. He was out there in the darkness tracking the scallywag across the alien landscape and all Kate needed to do was find him.
J.D. was the tracker, but Kate was no stranger to it. She retraced her steps to where J.D. had rushed past her in his pursuit of the fleeing man. She found his trail easily, boot heels deeply rutted the red earth, disappeared at a sandstone shelf before reappearing on the far side. Kate moved cautiously across the desert floor. She stood still, listening, scanned the horizon for anything out of place and only then she moved forward. It took fifteen minutes of this careful chase before she found J.D. lying unconscious next to a rock fall. He had laid awkwardly on his side with his left arm pinned beneath his body, his legs splayed wide. Kate rolled him onto his back and pulled him out straight by his feet. She found a patterned linen hanky beneath her shirt, wetted it with her mouth, wiped his forehead and then worked on a dollar-sized blood-matted wound on the top of his head.
J.D.’s head pounded with a blister of pain. His eyes opened to lightning and only when it cleared did he see Kate’s brown eyes looking down at him, a smile on her lips.
“Nice nap?” she said.
He tried to smile and was rewarded with a bolt of pain behind his eyes. The pain stopped his smile, but it didn’t stop him from pushing up onto his elbows and, with Kate’s help, butt-sliding the few feet to the rock fall where he rested, his back against a broken shard of stone.
“Goddamn,” J.D. said. “The s.o.b. pistol-whipped me.” He rubbed his forehead with the big fingers of his left hand.
“That’s not like you, J.D.” Kate’s smile wider than before, a gleam of mischief in her eyes.
J.D. glared at her and then, after patting at his holster and the surrounding ground within his reach, said, “You see my Colt anywhere?”
Kate stood and walked in a widening circle until she was several yards past where J.D. had fallen. “It’s not here, J.D.”
“Damn,” J.D. said. “He must of took it.” He looked angry and chagrined at once. He fought off a momentary rush of nausea, stood up on wobbly legs and nearly fell back again before catching himself.
“You better be careful, big man,” Kate said. “You’re in a rough place, a woman wants to take advantage, and you without your precious Colt.”
J.D. glared, rubbed the top of his head, brought blood back with his hand. “Shit!” he said. “What happened to the other one?”
Kate smiled coyly. “I never miss my man. He’s still as fallen oak, right where I shot him.”
“Good girl, Kate,” J.D. said.
“And only one shot.” Kate’s smile lifted J.D.’s spirits more than it should have. “He said something interesting, too.”
J.D. nodded, doing his best to ignore his brain bouncing against his skull.
“It sounded like ‘Small Basset’ or ‘Small Bas’—”
“Small Basin?” J.D. said, finding it easier to ignore the pain in his head. “Is that it?”
“Could be.”
He showed his crooked grin and laughed. “I know it,” he said, “and if that’s where our desperado is headed he’ll stick out like a sore thumb.”
“And here I thought our night was ruined.”
“Not even a little,” said J.D. “And I think this job’s closer to done than it has any right to be. Your fella dead and the other headed to Small Basin.” He laughed, the pain in his head forgotten.
“You’ve been there?” Kate said. Her blonde hair and pale skin looked especially wondrous to J.D. just then.
“Yep. Eight, maybe nine years back. It’s a Mormon town. Polygamists and dirt farmers.” J.D. turned his gaze to Kate, still admiring the moon’s unearthly glow on her flawlessly smooth face. “Which gives us some time before daybreak.”
“We’ve got a lot work ahead of us, J.D.”
“We sure do,” J.D. said as he pulled Kate’s lithe form into his arms, closing the gap between them into nothing.
CHAPTER 4
Small Basin was larger than J.D. remembered, but not by much. The town was abstract and foreign in his memory and seeing the bisecting streets from a distance, its population bustling along the boardwalks—women wearing pink and yellow and blue dresses, men in standard black and brown and white—was outside his experience. Small Basin itself looked the same, sitting between two small mesas, cascading dirt at their bases and soiled red stone at their tops, but the activity astonished J.D. On his last visit, chasing a killer on a scenic route from Fort Worth to California, Small Basin was deserted by all but a few hard-bitten and unfriendly Mormon men. Their beards heavy and wild, their conversation limited to, “Nope,” “Ain’t seen nothin’,” “Keep riding,” “Don’t come back.”
That was from a distance. But as J.D. and Kate rode into town, followed by the dead man strapped across his horse’s saddle, everything was just as J.D. remembered. Empty and quiet. The streets, the stores, the boardwalks abandoned. No wild-haired brethren to keep any outsiders moving along. The only sign of life was a young boy standing on the boardwalk just below a sign that read, “Zion’s Cooperative & Mercantile.” His arms folded reverently across his chest and a scowl on his small face.
Kate urged her horse over to the boy and gave him her best smile. A smile guaranteed to melt the heart of any male, human or not, between womb and coffin. The boy didn’t budge. Not even a twitch. If anything his resolve to reverently scowl at Kate only deepened.
Then, just as Kate decided to try her power of speech on the boy, a well-coifed, small man with a badge pinned to his chest, interrupted—
“What do you want?” He looked from J.D. to the dead outlaw and back to Kate, suspicion in more than just his words.
Kate tried her smile again, but if anything the results were even worse. The man’s frown became more pronounced and a deep furrow appeared on his brow.
“Well,” she said, never taking her startling brown eyes from the stranger’s, “I’m Kate and this is my husband J.D. We chased this scoundrel”—signaling to the dead man tied to the saddle—“across Arizona until he decided to kill us.”
“Unsuccessfully,” J.D. added. Then: “We’re owed a bounty for this one. And we’re still looking for his partner.”
“Who would that be?”
“His partner?” Kate said.
“I guess I don’t know the name,” said J.D. “But it’s likely he rode into town a few hours ahead of us.”
“But heck,” Kate said as she lowered herself from the saddle and walked back to the dead man. She pulled the blanket covering him back, lifted his head. “You may be able to tell us since the bandits might be locals.”
A shadow of recognition briefly glimmered in the small lawman’s eyes before he was able to disguise it with bland disinterest. He lowered his head slightly, shifted his gaze from Kate to J.D. and back. His frown turned into something approaching a gassy grimace. “Nope,” he said, looking at J.D. “You can take the dead man to Washington City. We don’t want him here. Or you.”
J.D. provided his warmest smile. “Good to know,” he said. “You got an undertaker around town? This fella’s going to ripen in this heat.”
“And a hotel,” Kate said. “I’m a terrible mess and a place to clean up would be wonderful.”
The lawman pointed west. “Washington is three days that way.” He shuffled his feet slowly, made a display of a familiar large bore Colt revolver on his hip, then said, “Small Basin doesn’t have any hotels, rooms, bathhouses, or nothing else where you can sleep or clean up. Your best bet is Washington.”
“Nice hogleg,” J.D. said. “It’s chambered for the .44-40?”
The lawman smiled, gave J.D. a wink, and walked away as smoothly as a cat.
J.D. turned to Kate smiling, said, “I don’t think h
e likes you much.”
“I’m pretty sure he thought the same of you,” Kate said. “Not to mention, I reckon the hogleg on his belt was yours.”
J.D. didn’t smile. “I noticed that, too.”
“On the bright side, he must be as new in town as we are,” Kate said, “because there’s a hotel right there across the street.”
CHAPTER 5
J.D. and Kate were feeling more unwelcome than ever as they exited the Dixie Inn, Small Basin’s lone hostelry. A name that confused Kate since Dixie was a thousand miles and a world away. The waif of a woman working the front desk, nervous with furtive bird-like movements, told Kate it was called “Dixie Inn” because several years earlier The Church—Mormon, not Catholic—decided it would be a good place to grow cotton. The cotton crops failed in the semi-arid climate, but the name stuck. The explanation turned out to be the woman’s only hospitality. She turned them away with a claim that no rooms were available, but the guest register was empty and the room key cubbies full.
“What now?” Kate said as they exited the high door of the Dixie Inn. The sun blistered the late-morning sky.
J.D. held both hands to his temples, the pointer finger of each extended, made a circular motion and said, “I’m seeing sage brush, rocks, and hard ground in our future.”
Kate had a snappy come back, but instead of responding she made her way back across the hardpan road to where their horses were waiting at the hitching rail. She untied her horse from the rail, but before she could swing into the saddle J.D. caught up to her and gently placed his hand on her shoulder. Kate didn’t turn around, but J.D. felt her soften under his touch.
“What’s the matter, Kate?”
“Not a thing,” she said. “I just want to find that sonofabitch robber and get as far away from this squirrely town as possible.”
J.D. gave her a lopsided grin, pulled her tight against his chest and kissed her. Kate didn’t resist and enjoyed the closeness more than she would ever admit.