The Devil's Winchester

by Peter Brandvold

  Utter felt his cheeks roll up slightly in a satisfied half smile. He’d figured Rubriz would note the riders. The man was old, but his senses were still as keen as those of an old brush wolf that had long outrun its enemies and was still, for the time being, staying one step ahead of the crows.

  Beaudry and the others glanced over their shoulders at the old mestizo, their faces tightening with chagrin.

  “Ain’t much fun getting flanked, is it, Beaudry?” Utter said. “At least he didn’t shoot you in the back. Not yet.”

  Beaudry stared long and hard at Utter over his pinto’s twitching ears. “We come to talk civil-like, Marshal. We come to get Blanco out of jail real peaceable. You know we could do it the hard way. Sam don’t see no point in that.”

  Utter’s grim smiled faded. He felt another surge of hot fury work its way up from his tailbone to the back of his neck.

  Metalious had so little respect for his and Rubriz’s abilities that he hadn’t even come himself to spring his worthless, murdering son. He’s sent his number one and a couple of lackeys who’d likely honed their shooting skills in the Nations or out on the Llano Estacado. Metalious thought Utter would scare or, worse, listen to Metalious’s own brand of twisted reason. That Utter would see the futility in holding the killer against a certain insurmountable onslaught and, ignoring the badge pinned to his vest as well as his own self-respect, toss Beaudry the keys.

  He’d sit back in his chair and watch Blanco walk. Utter swallowed the hot, tight knot in his throat. He didn’t know which was worse—having only three men sent to talk him out of his prisoner, or having all dozen or so of Metalious’s riders gallop in with guns popping like firecrackers on Cinco de Mayo.

  Utter spat to one side. “You go on back to the Triple 6 and tell your boss that his son’s goin’ in front of the judge. He deserves to go in front of the judge. And then he deserves to hang. His boys killed innocent citizens here in Corazon, including a little boy.” He waved the shotgun menacingly. “Go on and tell him that, and stop wastin’ my time with this nonsense about turnin’ a cold-blooded killer free on the world. I ain’t got the use of my legs no more, but I’m still the law, by god. And as long as me and Ivano’s the law here in Corazon, no killers’ll be walkin’ free from our jail.”

  “Ah, shit.” Beaudry shook his head and cast dark glances to the men on either side of him.

  “What do you want to do, Boss?” asked the man to his left.

  Beaudry glanced over his shoulder at Rubriz. The old deputy stood as before, holding his Spencer carbine across his forearm, bowed legs and mule-eared boots spread a little more than shoulder-width apart.

  Beaudry looked at Utter but addressed his men coldly, with obvious threat to the two aging lawmen. “I reckon we go on back to the Triple 6 and tell Mr. Metalious these two old fossils just will not listen to reason.”

  Beaudry’s horse jerked its head up, trying to toss its bit. Its rider checked it down angrily and, keeping his dark gaze on Utter, swung the mount around and booted it back hard in the direction from which he’d come. The other two riders followed suit, both glancing with black menace at the two lawmen watching them go.

  The three galloped back around the dogleg and out of sight, the thuds of their horses quickly being replaced by the strains of a banjo and a woman singing softly in Spanish while, on the east side of town, a dog barked and a baby cried.

  Utter turned his own bleak gaze on Rubriz, who stepped forward, cradling his rifle in his arms.

  “You finish your rounds?” Utter asked his deputy.

  “Si. The first one. Maybe I better walk around some more, uh? They might swing back.”

  “Yeah, I reckon. You want a cup of coffee first?”

  Rubriz shook his head and turned eastward. “Senora Haggelthorpe has provided two cups already. And Senora Evelyn will offer another.” He looked sidelong at Utter and gave a little stress-relieving grin. “She puts molasses in it.”

  Utter looked off up the street once more, where the dust of the three riders was still sifting like a thin, tan curtain in the darkness. “Yeah, you go have your coffee with Senora Evelyn. But you watch your back out there. I don’t trust that Beaudry as far as I could throw him uphill in a stiff Texas wind.”

  “Si, si. If they come around from the north, signal me with a pistol shot. I will come running.”

  “Ah, shit, Ivano,” Utter laughed overloud, “you haven’t run a lick in thirty years, and that was when that Don Lopez-Vargas from Monterrey caught you with his daughter’s fancy festival basque pulled up to her chin. Ha! Remember that?”

  “How could I not remember?” Rubriz said, showing his large, yellow teeth beneath his mustache. “I left a good Allen and Wheelock rifle behind when I ran.”

  The two laughed for a time, and then Rubriz drifted off up Brush Street, his thin, bandy-legged figure dwindling almost silently in the lantern-slanted shadows. He did not wear spurs when making his night rounds. Utter wheeled himself back into the office for a cup of coffee.

  Blanco was grinning at him through the bars of his cell door. “Don’t worry, Utter. They’ll be back. With my pa, most likely. And he ain’t gonna like to be called off the ranch on a fool errand like this.”

  “Fool’s errand,” Utter chuckled as he splashed coffee into his chipped stone mug. “I’ll say it is at that.”

  “That’s real funny, Sheriff,” Blanco said, sagging down onto the edge of his cot. “You go ahead and have you a last good laugh.”

  Utter chuckled again, then, sitting near the stove with his shotgun across his legs, facing his desk, he blew ripples on the surface of the piping hot brew and sipped. In the distance, a rifle cracked. Utter tipped the coffee mug up with a start, burning his lips, then jerked it back down, grimacing, his pulse quickening.

  Two more shots fired quickly, angrily.

  Blanco’s cot squawked as he rose and came back to the cell door, squeezing two bars in his fists, his gray-yellow eyes alive with mockery in his wax-pale face. “What the hell you suppose that’s all about, Sheriff?”

  The outlaw fingered the whiskers that hung like cream threads from his pointed chin.

  “Don’t know.”

  Utter leaned far to his right to set his cup down on the edge of his desk, then wheeled himself around toward the door, which he’d left open a foot so he could open it all the easier when he returned to the porch, which he did now in a hurry, leaving the door open behind him.

  He’d just gotten his big back wheels over the door jam when a scream rose over the dark town. A man’s scream. A scream of bald terror and fury.

  There it came again, pinched at the end, as though the man were struggling for his life.

  The rifle barked again, louder now that Utter was outside. It came from a few blocks to the south and west, likely near Bayonet Wash, which had been where Ivano had been heading when Utter had last seen him.

  A man laughed. It was a victorious howl, like those you could hear on Friday nights after the cowhands had been paid or during a rodeo and one of the punchers was riding that big seed bull of Denny Lomax’s into a hefty payoff.

  A horse whinnied and there was the loud scuff of shod hooves before another laugh and then, seconds later, a groan.

  Utter’s heart raced. Leaving his shotgun across his legs, he grabbed the rope that hung down the post on the right side of the steps and used it to ease himself and his chair down the ramp to the street.

  “Ivano?” he called, hearing the brittle fear in his own voice.

  Working hard and panting with the effort, he wheeled himself through the ground dirt and dung of Brush Street, heading south down the middle of the rutted drag. By the time he’d gone two blocks and was heading around the dogleg, he was out of breath and his arms were on fire.

  He cursed Beaudry and the bullets in his back that could not be removed without killing him, and ground his teeth and kept going.

  Five minutes later, he’d wheeled himself down the Bayonet Wash trail and put a
couple of hog pens behind him and saw the flares burning from their wooden brackets at the front of two adobe-brick cantinas that were suddenly eerily quiet even for a weeknight. The big cottonwood flanking the two Mexican watering holes churned in the night breeze, the bending branches jostling their leaves amongst the high, white stars.

  A groaning, rasping sound came from the shadows on the street’s left side where several whores’ cribs hunched in the ironwood and yucca. Utter, continuing to wheel himself along the track, had just made out an elongated figure in the shadows of one of the cribs when someone appeared from the darkness ahead of him, running toward him.

  The woman’s loose, black wrap flapped like bats’ wings and her black-and-red silk skirts billowed about her legs, jewelry flashing in the starlight, long, black hair bouncing about her shoulders.

  “Ivano!” Senora Evelyn screamed, her sandals slapping her feet as she angled toward the crib from which Utter had seen the figure. Her voice warbled and cracked as she screamed again, “Oh, Ivano! What did they do to you?”

  Utter increased his speed though his arms felt like lead. His heart pounded in his temples as the woman dropped to her knees in the shadows before the crib and gave a heart-twisting shriek of horror mixed with sorrow. “Ivano!”

  “Oh, Christ,” Utter heard himself say as he stopped the wheelchair near the woman. “Oh, goddamn them to holy hell!”

  He tried to push himself up in his chair, to make his legs work in spite of the bullets that had mostly paralyzed him. Finally, when he was on the verge of fainting, he let his bulk sag back down in the rawhide seat. Breathing hard, his heart hammering in his tight chest, he stared up in horror at Ivano Rubriz, who was still twitching, lips stretched back from his teeth, as he hung from the stout beam protruding from the side of the crib and from the end of which dangled an unlit lantern.

  Ivano’s neck hung at a grisly angle, pushed askew by the heavy hangman’s knot that bulged above his left shoulder. His eyes were open, dimly reflecting the light from the cantinas across the street. Blood glistened from his upper right chest and his lower left side. Only his right foot twitched now as he turned gently toward the crib, as though embarrassed by his predicament and no longer able to bear the gaze of his old friend and partner.

  As Senora Evelyn sobbed on her knees near Ivano’s dusty boots, her head down, hands on her thighs, Utter jerked his head toward the cantinas that sat side by side beneath the sprawling, gently churning cottonwood. Several dark figures stood there in the silent shadows, smoking.

  “For chrissakes, a couple of you get over here and cut him down!”

  The figures continued to smoke in the shadows. Two turned slowly and, coals of their cigarettes or cigars glowing dully, strode through the cantina’s arched doorway from which no music issued as it had a short while before. Only silence. One lone, short figure, partially hidden by a stout arch support, remained leaning against the cantina’s front wall, a sombrero tipped lower over his eyes.

  Utter cursed again. He saw where Beaudry had tied off the end of the hang rope to the bottom of a post that held up the straw roof of the crib’s porch. He wheeled himself past Senora Evelyn’s slumped, quaking figure, and stopped beside the post, grunting as he shoved a hand into a pants pocket for his folding knife.

  Hoof thuds and victorious whoops rose from the direction of the marshal’s office. Utter, who’d just fished the knife from his pocket, turned his exasperated stare toward Brush Street.

  “Those bastards,” he muttered as the yowls and celebratory shouts continued to rise in the quiet night over which the stars glowed and winked like jewels at the bottom of a vast, inverted bowl.

  “Here.” Utter tossed the knife in the dirt near Senora Evelyn’s knees. “Cut him down.”

  Ivano was dead. There was no helping his deputy, his friend, now. The bullet wounds alone would have killed him. Maybe Utter could pump some double-ought buck into Beaudry before he and his men rode out of town with Blanco.

  Utter wheeled himself back in the direction from which he’d come. He’d thought he’d expended the last of his energy, but from somewhere he summoned enough to get him back to the corner of Brush Street in time to see three figures step away from three horses in the street fronting the marshal’s office. Beaudry and his two hands moved negligently up the jail office steps, laughing, spurs ringing loudly.

  “You think so, do you, you son of a raging syphilitic whore?” Utter growled as he continued wheeling himself toward the office from which laughter continued to issue.

  The jail office door clicked, the hinges squawked. A wedge of yellow light spilled onto the front porch.

  The three shadowy figures stopped in the wedge of light, all three jerking their hands to their holstered revolvers, startled.

  Sharp light flashed inside the jailhouse, and the reports of the hastily fired pistol reached Utter’s ears about a sixth of a second after he saw each of the three flashes. Beaudry and the other two men screamed as the slugs fired from inside the jailhouse punched them back off the porch, down the steps, and into the street where they fell in heaps, frightening their three ground-tied mounts.

  Utter wheeled himself at an angle across Brush Street, blowing out his cheeks as his breath rasped in an out of his old, ragged lungs. Sweat streaked his pocked, fleshy cheeks. Before him, Beaudry lay belly down in the dirt, bending one leg in agony as he groaned. Blood darkened the dirt beneath the Triple 6 segundo’s chest and belly.

  “Goddamn crazy bitch!” Blanco Metalious shouted from inside the jailhouse, spitting as though relieving himself of a gag.

  Utter stopped his wheelchair as Beaudry gave his last grunt and died. The marshal looked toward the jailhouse door. A blond-headed silhouette moved through the doorway and down the steps, taking long, measured strides. A wool skirt swished about long, supple legs.

  Louisa Bonaventure stopped at the bottom of the porch steps, the pearl butts of her twin Colts glowing in their cross-draw holsters on her hips. She kicked one of the men over on his back, and the light from the jailhouse’s open door caught the blood issuing from the quarter-sized hole in his forehead.

  “No offense, Marshal.” Louisa lifted her hand to adjust the angle of her hat on her head. “I thought you could use some help, that’s all.”

  She turned and walked away in the darkness.

  15

  PROPHET HAD FINISHED dragging his latest set of dead owlhoots off into the scrub and was vaguely awaiting the inevitable carrion eaters when boots crunched outside the bunkhouse’s open door.

  “Rose,” the girl announced herself softly.

  Standing at the table, Prophet was closing the flap on one of his saddlebag pouches. The girl stood in the open doorway, looking gaunt. She’d started to help him drag the bodies away but then, gagging, she’d stumbled off in the brush.

  He’d heard her out there, violently retching.

  “You don’t look so good. I’ll get some more coffee goin’, soon as we get settled in.”

  “We’re not staying here?”

  Prophet shook his head. “Best not. Never know what the shootin’ will attract, and I reckon we could both do with a good night’s sleep. I spied a low ridge over yonder. Probably be good cover there. Don’t look like rain or nothin’.”

  The girl sniffed as she ambled into the shack and placed a hand over her belly. “Sorry about that.”

  “It’s all right.” Prophet hefted his saddlebags over a shoulder. “I was getting worried, seein’ how easy it was for you to shoot that claim-jumpin’ scalawag. Not that he didn’t deserve it. But I reckon it wasn’t so easy, after all.”

  “Maybe it means I’ve never done it before.” Standing near where she’d piled her gear on a top bunk, she placed a hand on the cap-and-ball hogleg riding in the holster on her right hip. “But it don’t mean I didn’t ride with Blanco’s bunch.”

  “Ah, hell, you ain’t a bad sort, Rose. I can tell.” Prophet walked over and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, pulled her tow
ard him gently. “You had you a good reason for being in Nugget Town. And most likely you got a good reason for carryin’ that old horse pistol and bein’ right handy with it. Look at Louisa. That girl’s pure hell with the fires out, but if she knows a man’s bad, she’ll kill him as like to bid him howdy-do.”

  Rose smiled up at him. Some of the color was beginning to return to her cheeks. “Thanks, Lou. I reckon I’d know if I was bad, wouldn’t I? I’d feel bad, rotten inside. And I don’t.” She grabbed her saddlebags and bedroll from off the bunk. “I wonder if I’ll ever know for sure.”

  “I’ve heard say,” Prophet said, as he ducked on out of the bunkhouse, “that folks who lose their memory on account of a blow to the head can often get it back with another blow. Maybe you just need to knock your head on somethin’.”

  “No, thanks,” Rose said with wry chuff, walking along behind him as they headed for the corral. “The way my luck’s been goin’, I’m liable to forget everything I remember after wakin’ up and seein’ you and Louisa in Nugget Town.”

  “Like as not.”

  Spying its rider heading toward him, Mean and Ugly gave an excited snort, then nipped the claybank’s ass as it ran over to the corral gate. “All right—stand back, you owly son of a bitch.”

  Prophet lifted the latching wire over the front corral post and opened the gate just far enough for him and Rose to enter. Mean and Ugly ran up to Prophet, stomping and flicking his ears playfully and bobbing his head as though he were about to take a nip out of Prophet’s hide, as the horse was wont to do for no better reason than he was simply mischievous and contrary.

  “Why do you put up with that horse, Lou?” Rose said, grabbing her saddle blanket off the top corral post. “Seems I heard somewhere that a horse is no good if you can’t turn your back on him.”

  “Well, some would say the same about me, Rose,” Prophet said as he threw his saddle over Mean’s back, then jerked his arm up just in time to avoid a painful nip. “Ornery goddamn cuss!”