Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
PETER BRANDVOLD
PETER BRANDVOLD
Berkley titles by Peter Brandvold
WE’VE GOT COMPANY
The river grew brighter before him, the dusty cottonwoods looming larger and larger. A breeze rattled their branches. Behind Cuno, Arguello groaned and leaned more of his weight against the young freighter’s broad back and shoulders.
“Hold on, Christiano,” Cuno urged. “We’ll get you a cold drink of water soon.”
A cracking sound rose in the distance ahead of Cuno. It sounded like branches being broken over a knee. Then louder pops sounded as well, as someone at the head of the outlaw pack screamed.
Another man shouted.
A horse whinnied shrilly.
Cuno squinted to peer over the heads of the other riders. Several of the lead riders were checking down their mounts and raising rifles.
Amidst the trees along the river, smoke puffed on the heels of the spattering gunfire.
Cuno’s heart thudded, and his lips mouthed the dreaded word.
Ambush!
PRAISE FOR PETER BRANDVOLD AND HIS NOVELS:
“Lots of action . . . If you thought they didn’t write ’em like this anymore, this book is for you.”
—Bill Crider
“Brandvold creates a fast-paced, action-packed novel.”
—James Reasoner
“Action-packed . . . for fans of traditional Westerns.
“—Booklist
“Recommended to anyone who loves the West as I do.”
—Jack Ballas
“A writer to watch.”
—Jory Sherman
“ A natural born storyteller who knows the West.”
—Bill Brooks
Berkley titles by Peter Brandvold
The .45-Caliber Series
.45-CALIBER DESPERADO
.45-CALIBER FIREBRAND
.45-CALIBER WIDOW MAKER
.45-CALIBER DEATHTRAP
.45-CALIBER MANHUNT
.45-CALIBER FURY
.45-CALIBER REVENGE
The Bounty Hunter Lou Prophet Series
THE DEVIL’S WINCHESTER
HELLDORADO
THE GRAVES AT SEVEN DEVILS
THE DEVIL’S LAIR
STARING DOWN THE DEVIL
THE DEVIL GETS HIS DUE
RIDING WITH THE DEVIL’S MISTRESS
DEALT THE DEVIL’S HAND
THE DEVIL AND LOU PROPHET
The Rogue Lawman Series
GALLOWS EXPRESS
BORDER SNAKES
BULLETS OVER BEDLAM
COLD CORPSE, HOT TRAIL
DEADLY PREY
ROGUE LAWMAN
The Sheriff Ben Stillman Series
HELL ON WHEELS
ONCE LATE WITH A .38
ONCE UPON A DEAD MAN
ONCE A RENEGADE
ONCE HELL FREEZES OVER
ONCE A LAWMAN
ONCE MORE WITH A .44
ONCE A MARSHAL
MANHUNT
Other titles
BLOOD MOUNTAIN
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
.45-CALIBER DESPERADO
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley edition / September 2011
Copyright © 2011 by Peter Brandvold.
Cover illustration by Bruce Emmett.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without
permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the
author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ISBN : 978-1-101-54387-0
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Once more, for Aunt LaVerne,
who loves chatting about the old days
as much as my mother did.
1
THE BALD GIANT’S fist was a battering ram.
As it flew toward Cuno Massey’s face, it grew as large as a wheel hub in the young freighter’s eyes. It glowed like solid brass in the sunlight hammering the dusty prison yard. Black hair curled against the bulging knuckles. Grease and grime lay like mud chinking beneath the clamshell-thick thumbnail.
Cuno had feinted left when he should have feinted right, feet spread, hips pivoting. He was caught off balance. His father, who’d taught him to fight, would have clucked reprovingly.
The fist disappeared an eighth of a second after it had become all that Cuno could see. For a full second after that, the world went dark. It filled with the tolling of cracked bells. Beneath the ringing, there was an explosion. Beneath the explosion, Cuno could hear grinding sinew followed by the racking agony of an Apache war lance rammed
through his nose deep into his brain plate.
Warm blood oozed across his cheeks and dribbled into the corners of his mouth. It was thick as molasses, but it tasted like copper. He inhaled some of it, blew it out in a sneeze-like cough, brushing a fist across his mouth.
He shuffled a half-dozen feet straight back as he heard the prisoners yelling through the doors of their cells stacked in three tiers around him. Others, released from their cells for Fight Day to view the proceedings in the roped-off arena in the prison’s main yard, were nearer the fight but were also being silently warned back by many guards wielding sawed-off shotguns.
Some of the crowd was cheering. Those who’d placed their bets on Cuno were booing. There were damn few of those, as the bald giant’s reputation as a bare-knuckle fighter was second to none at the Arkansas River Federal Penitentiary outside Limon, Colorado Territory.
Somehow, though blood continued to dribble from his nostrils, and the yard with its buffeting American flag and roofed guard towers and three-tiered cell barracks pitched wildly around him, Cuno managed to set his feet in the finely churned dust. He did not fall. The bald giant, with a mustache as large and sweeping as a raven’s wing, narrowed his hawkish yellow eyes in amusement.
Amusement turned to resolve as, clenched fists raised, he grinned confidently and sidestepped forward, the muscles in his massive chest and belly ridging and writhing like snakes beneath sweat-slick skin tanned to the golden brown of a roasted chicken.
Like Cuno, Mule Zimmerman was clad in only the black-and-white prison pajama bottoms that dropped like knickers to just below his knees. His feet were bare.
“Ya should’ve gone down, kid. Should’ve gone down and stayed down.” Zimmerman winked tauntingly, bobbing and weaving, moving his fists, poising himself for the final blow. Cuno could barely hear him above the roar of the crowd comprised of both reveling prisoners and armed guards. “Mighta gone easier for you if you’d just passed out. This way, see—since the warden’s lookin’ on an’ all—I’m gonna have to kill ya.”
He jabbed his left fist.
It was a weak punch meant only to drive Cuno’s face into the big man’s right. It didn’t work. A red haze had bled down over Cuno’s eyes when he realized the gravity of his situation and, flicking a glance to the second story of the barracks on his left, he saw the smugly smiling countenance of Warden Henry Castle flanked by two beefy guards in their tobacco-brown uniforms holding Henry repeaters up high across their chests.
In his straw boater, bow tie, and shiny black brogans, and holding a braided rawhide quirt over the rail before him—he was leaning there like some tony cad admiring the girls as they passed in their summer-weight frocks—Castle resembled a smaller, dapper version of Mule Zimmerman. His face was waxy, his mustache polished to sharp ends that swept upward around and to either side of his pale, slender nose. His teeth were large and white beneath his curled upper lip.
Cuno set his jaws. His eyes dulled with a cornered animal’s decisive fury as he stared at Zimmerman, who stood two inches taller than Cuno’s five-ten, and a good thirty pounds heavier than his own lean two hundred. Just as the big man’s fist flew toward Cuno’s nose once more, his yellow eyes softening with shrewd confidence, Cuno ducked.
The fist made a sharp whush! as it slashed the air over Cuno’s head.
Zimmerman grunted.
The roar of the crowd softened slightly. Cuno heaved up off his heels and, no slouch himself when it came to bare-knuckle savagery, hammered the big man’s hard belly once with each fist. It was like pounding a muddy sandstone wall.
Zimmerman grunted again, voiced his indignation with a curse, and shuffled backward.
“Well,” Cuno heard the warden say as he stood leaning over the balcony rail fronting his sandstone, bar-windowed office.
Zimmerman roared, narrowed his eyes, and bunched his lips. He started to raise his hands, but Cuno, swallowing the pain of his broken nose while aware that both eyes were swelling shut, used his quickness to his best advantage. He brought his own large fist up and hammered away at the big man’s cheeks and jaws.
Zimmerman swayed, staggered, tried to raise his fists.
Cuno kept his own fists swinging, hearing his own grunts with each of the savage blows he brought up from his heels to smash against the big man’s brick-thick skull. When he saw and felt the man’s nose give and turn sideways against his face, he stepped back, feeling the warm spurt of the man’s blood against his own bloody cheeks and chest.
He stepped in with his left foot, cocking his right arm back, but before he could release the jab, Zimmerman twisted around in a complete circle, stumbled, and fell on his back. Dust wafted around him.
The crowd fell almost deathly silent.
From one of the guard towers came the squawk of a Gatling gun being turned on its swivel base. This was a decisive time for the guards. In the wake of the weekly bare-knuckle matches, almost always fought to the death on the warden’s orders to temporarily relieve the man of the boredom of his lowly station at this remote federal outpost when he believed he was worthy of so much more, riots were always a threat.
Cuno stared down at Zimmerman.
The man was all blood, sweat, and dust. Only the top of his bald pate appeared unmarred and unstained. His blood-sodden mustache was stretched wide, showing yellow, crooked teeth also stained with blood dribbling down from his nose. His eyes were pinched down to little diamond chips of misery as he stared seemingly sightless up past Cuno toward the brassy Colorado sky.
His enormous chest expanded and contracted like a bellows.
In the sudden, funereal silence of the prison yard, the giant set his big hands palm down against the ground and lifted his head, trying to rise. He couldn’t even lift his back. With a great, ragged sigh, he collapsed, causing more dust to waft up around him.
A soft snick sounded to Cuno’s right.
He turned his battered head, rubbed blood and sweat from the corner of his right eye. The warden’s bowie knife with its ivory-gripped handle protruded from the clay-colored dust at an angle. The glistening steel blade had been stropped to a razor edge. Cuno shifted his gaze to the balcony of the nearest brick barrack. The warden stood there, wrists and ankles casually crossed.
“Finish him,” Castle said.
Cuno glanced at the big knife again, wondering how many throats that steel had slit here in the prison yard. So many, he knew, that the desert sand around this area of the yard was dark red with the spilled blood of fallen fighters. Some had likely had no business fighting; they hadn’t been trained for it. Warden Castle didn’t care. He chose his entertainment according to whim, like a perverted moron snickering as he chose which rats to feed to his pet diamondback.
“I said finish him,” Castle repeated, louder.
Cuno looked at Mule Zimmerman lying groaning at his feet and shook his head. “You want him dead, you come down here and finish him yourself.”
Fire blazed in the warden’s eyes as he scowled down at Cuno for a full fifteen seconds. The entire yard had fallen silent as a cellar at midnight. The only sounds were the blacksmith’s hammer clanging down at the smithy’s shop near the barns, stock pens, and other outbuildings that supported the prison.
Several of the guards, holding their shotguns high, swung slow, ominous glances at Cuno, quirking their lips with the expectation of more entertainment.
Murmurs rose around the yard. Cuno held the warden’s stare, but he could feel the Gatling guns boring hot spots into his sweating body, imagined the fingers of the eager guards twitching and drawing taut against triggers. They were likely flicking glances at the warden, awaiting Castle’s deadly signal.
Cuno felt himself jerk with a start when the warden suddenly yelled, “Shackle him. Shackle both of ’em and haul ’em down to the Pit!”
The murmuring around the yard grew, the other prisoners turning knowing glances at each other—some scowling, some grinning at the prospect of two of their brethren being sent to the warde
n’s notorious Pit deep under the prison. Few men emerged alive from the place. When some did manage to keep breaths in their bodies, and make it out of that deep, stony, rat- and snake-infested hole, it was only to be led off to the prison gallows on the other side of the yard, beyond the three-deep cell barracks.
That was their last, long walk—the few feet from the heavy timbered door to the Pit on over to the gallows fifty yards away. Not all that long. But in the three months Cuno had been here, sentenced to life for killing four deputy U.S. marshals, he imagined quite a few lifetimes would pass during the walk.
Two guards handed their sawed-off shotguns to two other guards, then ran over to one of the stout wooden boxes arranged strategically around the yard. One unlocked the heavy padlock, threw the lid wide, and dragged out two sets of leg irons and manacles. Chains rattled and squawked as the two guards, one a Mexican, one a tall Englishman with a red spade beard and cold green eyes, came over and got busy throwing Cuno down on his belly and trussing both him and Zimmerman.
The big man appeared to have regained his senses, and now he just looked wary as he shuttled his gaze from the warden to Cuno and then to the two men brusquely shackling them both. Cuno met the giant’s gaze, saw the fury there. The gaze told Cuno that Zimmerman would have preferred his throat been cut than to be sent to the Pit.
Most men would. Cuno, however, wasn’t in the business of killing innocent men, even one who’d been forced by the whims of a blood-hungry warden into nearly killing Cuno himself. Cuno had killed the four marshals, all right, but only because they’d been intent on raping the girls Cuno had been leading to safety from an Indian raid across the Rawhide Mountains.
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