.45-Caliber Desperado

by Peter Brandvold

The girl turned reluctantly from the door and looked up at him. “You do that a lot, do you? Shoot . . . men . . . ?”

  “Only when they try to shoot me first, especially while I’m bathing. I don’t take baths all that often, and when I do I consider it a private affair.”

  Spurr took the bottle from the girl, who still appeared shocked by the dead man in the hall though girls in her profession should be accustomed to such experiences. Brothels were colorful places.

  “I do apologize for my appearance, but I’m clean enough.”

  He set the bottle on the dresser that was missing its mirror, a brick propping up one short leg. “I’d dress if we was goin’ to an opry or somesuch, but, since . . .”

  He grabbed a mineral-stained water glass, splashed whiskey into it, and threw it back. He shook his head against the delightful burn and raised a hand. It shook. He frowned at it, troubled. Killing men who’d tried to kill him first usually didn’t trouble him. So why was he shaking?

  Why, too, did he suddenly feel as hollowed out as an old corncob pipe?

  He backed up to the bed, sat on the edge of it, and gave a phlegmy sigh. “Shit.”

  The girl was unlacing her corset and watching him curiously. She had amber eyes. Her hair was nearly as gold-yellow as sunflower blossoms. “You all right, Mr. Spurr?”

  Spurr watched the corset fall away from her breasts. Her tender, pale, pink-buttoned bosom spilled forth, but the wonderfully shaped orbs could have been a blank wall for all the feeling they evoked in Spurr’s nether regions. He admired the girl’s breasts as one might admire a beautiful oil painting or a sunset, but his dong did not stir.

  “You look sorta pale,” the girl said, the faintest concern in her voice as she stepped out of her stockings while keeping her sheer, powder-blue wrap draped across her shoulders. Her full breasts swayed behind it.

  “Must be the hot bath.” Spurr threw back the whiskey. “I’ll be all right in a minute.”

  The girl, naked now except for the wrap, walked toward him, rolling her hips slightly, staring at him with a coquettish little smile on her ruby lips, cupping her breasts in her soft hands. “Sure you will. Most fellas feel all right when they get under the sheets with Miss Lilly.” She stopped before him, slanting a sparkly-eyed look at him while continuing to cup her breasts.

  She was a professional, this girl, and she’d overcome her distaste for what she’d seen in the hall to earn her keep here at May’s. She was a right beautiful girl, but Spurr had liked her better before she’d put the phony lust behind her eyes.

  He was old and ragged, big-boned but stringy as jerked beef, and everywhere the sun seared him he was the color of old saddle leather. Where it couldn’t find him, he was white as talcum. His face was unshaven and the texture of a falling-down chicken coop, with brown moles and droopy eyelids.

  Of course, he repulsed her. Age was beauty’s nemesis. It was natural to shy away from it.

  But you couldn’t tell by her slightly parted lips, the tip of her pink tongue poking out between them, nor by the way she enticingly kneaded her breasts, shoulders rising and falling as she breathed. He usually liked older women, but this girl, at twenty, was as old as they came here at May’s. She’d have to do.

  Spurr held his glass out to her. “Pour me another drink. Then lets you an’ me pound the pillow, darlin’.” He cracked his own phony grin, trying to drum up some of his old, rakish charm, and reached behind her to squeeze one of her plump butt cheeks.

  “I bet you can really pound it, eh, Mr. Spurr?”

  “It’s just Spurr. And no, I can’t really pound it. But I can give it a tap or two.” Spurr chuckled as the girl filled his glass. When she’d swung around from the bed, enough of her hair had slipped out from beneath the choker to reveal her right ear.

  Or what had been her right ear before most of it had been hacked away, leaving little more than a ragged pink stub.

  “Good lord,” Spurr said softly, rising up from the bed in shock, “what happened to your ear?”

  The impulsive exclamation had escaped his lips before he’d realized it. He’d always been one for sticking his boot clean up to its mule ears in his mouth. The girl jerked her head toward him, flushing and covering her ear with her hand.

  “Don’t look!” she squealed, slamming the bottle back down on the dresser, then dropping her chin to her chest in horror. “You’re not . . . no one’s supposed to see! Miss May warned me—word gets out, she’ll fire me!”

  Spurr rose and walked over to her. “What happened, honey?”

  The girl shook her head.

  “Come on—you can tell ole Spurr. What happened to your ear, dear girl?”

  She kept her head down, hand over the stub of her ear. “Market hunter. Crazy drunk. Decided to take a trophy, I reckon.”

  “Ah . . . hell. I am sorry.”

  “It ain’t your fault.” She looked up at him skeptically, searchingly, wonderingly. Then she dropped her chin again to speak to the floor near her plump, bare feet. “If you’ll turn away, I’ll cover it back up. If you want me to stay, that is . . .”

  Spurr’s heart swelled again. He choked back a sob. Christ, what a world . . . The blond girl he’d killed flashed through his mind once more, and so did the children the slavers had been hauling across the prairie. The dead killer in the hall had been a shaver once, lumbering around in swaddling clothes . . .

  He said thickly to Lilly, blinking back a wet sheen from his eyes, “A little thing like a torn ear don’t take nothin’ from your brand of beauty, sweet girl. If anything, it makes you purtier.”

  Spurr took his whiskey glass, turned away from her, and went back over to the bed. His throat was dry; it had a throbbing knot in it.

  He climbed onto the bed, leaned his back against the headboard. The girl had tucked her hair back down over her ear and secured it beneath the choker. She stood resting her hands on the edge of the dresser behind her.

  Spurr patted the bed beside him. “Come on over here, my beauty. Let Spurr have another shot of this who-hit-john, and then you can see if you can get my third old wooden leg up far enough to give you a ride on it. If you don’t mind climbin’ into the saddle, that is. Truth be told, my old ticker ain’t what it used to be, and . . .”

  The girl had walked over to him, shedding the silk wrap. She tossed it over a ladder-back chair and climbed up onto the bed, full breasts jostling to and fro. Her nipples were pebbling. Her smile had returned, as well as that lusty sparkle in her eyes. Only this time it looked a tad more authentic. Her amber gaze and ruby lips stroked the old lawbringer gently, warmly.

  “I can do that for you, Spurr.” She crouched over him and began using her hands to manipulate him, giving him a playfully admonishing sidelong glance. “Promise you won’t tell?”

  Spurr finished the whiskey, smacked his lips. “Your secret’s safe with me. As long as you keep mine.”

  “What secret’s that?”

  “I’m old and slow,” Spurr said with a sigh, setting the glass onto the bed beside him. “Though sometimes I’m old and way too fast.” He chuckled. “Tell no one.”

  He clipped the chuckle with a choking groan. Lilly’s hands were caressing him magically, unexpectedly sending little tendrils of desire through his belly.

  Lilly smiled. “Secret’s safe with me.” She lowered her head over his crotch.

  Spurr spread his hand out across the top of her head. “One more thing.”

  The girl lifted her head, wrinkling the skin above the bridge of her pretty nose.

  “I only paid for an hour, but I done changed my mind. I’d like you to stay the night. An old man gets lonely, don’t ya know.” He gave her chin a playful nudge with his thumb and tried once more to swallow down that consarned knot in his throat. “I’ll settle up with Miss May in the mornin’.”

  “You don’t need to do that.”

  “Yeah, I do. For me, not you. An old man gets spooky at night.”

  Lilly’s red lips spread wide, showin
g her small, white teeth in a genuine smile. Her eyes sparkled. She lowered her chin and closed her mouth over him, making soft sucking sounds. Spurr sank his hand into her hair again, soft as the first grass of spring.

  She moved her head around.

  Spurr sucked a breath and groaned louder as he discovered that, in the right company, he wasn’t so old and slow, after all.

  19

  IN THE SINGLE sphere of magnified vision, curtains of sand and gravel blew this way and that on the savage wind. Cuno adjusted his spyglass’s focus slightly until a ridge about three hundred yards away clarified slightly on the other side of a miniature badlands of broken rock and dry river courses carved through a spine of sandstone and limestone.

  Three riders appeared atop the ridge—so vague from this distance and through the fluttering curtain of sand that Cuno would not have recognized them had he not been looking for them. He would have thought them inanimate objects blowing on the wind—large tumbleweeds, a trick of the light, or cloud shadows.

  Cuno blinked, and when he looked again the riders had dropped out of sight in the badlands. There was only the howling wind and the blowing sand now, and the bits of weeds and whole tumbleweeds and other debris that the fierce northwestern wind had been kicking up for several hours.

  Cuno lowered the spyglass and rubbed his cheek thoughtfully as he continued staring out across the badlands. Three riders. Could be part of Ed Joseph’s bunch—those that had survived the dustup in the fledgling railroad town.

  Or they could be lawmen.

  Cuno and the other members of de Cava’s gang had learned they were being followed nearly a week ago, when Mateo had sent an outrider to peruse their back trail and the man had come upon the still warm ashes from a recent cook fire and a recent set of shod horse hooves.

  Three days ago, Mateo had sent four riders back to wipe the shadowers from his trail, but the four riders had returned looking sheepish. They’d found no tracks where they were certain they’d spied the riders through field glasses, and found no more ashes from cook fires. It was as though the men had decided against their dangerous mission and simply gone back to where they’d come from.

  Or maybe they hadn’t been following the gang but were coincidentally crossing the same country. Other desperadoes, most likely, hightailing it toward Mexico.

  The wily Mateo had not been satisfied with that explanation, however. He’d kept a rotating string of men out flanking the main gang, scouting a broad area around the gang’s back trail. Cuno was one of those outriders today, and a half hour ago, around noon, peering through his spyglass from the ridge of a near bluff, he’d seen one of the riders cross a ridge—or what he’d thought had been a rider. Now, having seen all three from this ridge he now hunkered upon, between two cracked boulders, closer to the badlands, he was sure.

  The gang was being shadowed.

  He looked around at the vast country around him—distant mountains looming cool and blue in the west and south and northwest, dry washes scoring the nearer land bulging with bluffs, rocky spurs, and tabletop mesas on pedestals of red sandstone. Clay-colored boulders had been strewn around the rolling, sage- and greasewood-carpeted bluffs by ancient glaciers or sent to the earth’s surface by violent quakes or gradual upthrusts.

  They were somewhere in southern New Mexico, possibly skirting the Arizona line, not far from Old Mexico. It was impossible to know for sure, as they were following no beaten path, though they occasionally crossed a seldom-used stage road and even fainter Indian trail. Small, isolated mountain ranges cropped up everywhere.

  Cuno had never been through this country—maybe a northeastern corner of it when he and his father had hauled freight for the frontier cavalry several years ago. There were no near towns. One knew such country only by its landmarks.

  Cuno crabbed on his knees and elbows back down the hill. He heard something behind him, and twisted around, reaching for his low-slung .45.

  He froze, his hand over the gun’s carved ivory grips, and looked down the hill where Wayne Brouschard sat with three other gang members—Chisos McGee, “Dirty” Leo McGivern, and the squat man with the shabby bowler hat, little pig eyes, and silver eyeteeth—Eldon Wald.

  Brouschard leaned negligently forward, gloved hands on his saddle horn, his yellow eyes slitted devilishly. He’d mostly healed from the pummeling Cuno had given him, but the cut high on his jaw was a long, thick scab outlined in red.

  All four men were holding rifles. Wald held his out from his stout right hip, aimed at Cuno. It didn’t appear to be cocked. The apprehension that Cuno felt nip the back of his neck when he saw his enemy here, out here away from Mateo’s supervising eye, where anything could happen, settled to a mere prickling of the flesh.

  Brouschard had something else in mind, all right. That was plain by his cunning, shit-eating stare, as well as that of Wald and the others. Apparently, he wasn’t planning on back-shooting Cuno and throwing him into a deep ravine. The young freighter was a little surprised.

  “You seen ’em.” Brouschard made it a statement, not a question, lifting his eyes to indicate the northern distance beyond Cuno.

  “Yeah, I seen ’em.”

  Cuno closed his spyglass against his knee and heaved himself to his feet, brushing off his denims. Already they were soft and sun-bleached, the dust ground into the tight weave despite the cowhide leggings he’d bought—or Camilla had bought for him, to his nettling chagrin—in Mayville. “There’s three of ’em, all right. We’d best—”

  “Uh-uh.” Brouschard grinned and shook his head. He raised his voice above the howling wind. “Not we’d best. You’d best ride on over there and get shed of them three . . . whoever they may be. You go on. You showed you can fight with your fists all right. But out here cold steel’s the language spoken.”

  The big devil gritted his teeth and jerked his head in the direction of the badlands. “Go ahead. Show us what you got, freighter boy!”

  Eldon Wald, Dirty Leo Givern, and Chiso McGee all smiled, Wald keeping his Winchester aimed casually at Cuno. He had his thumb on the hammer.

  Cuno hooked his thumbs behind his cartridge belt. “Mateo order this?”

  “Mateo ain’t here. I’m here. I’m ordering you to ride on over there and wipe them dung beetles off our trail. You do that, and then maybe you got the right to strut some. Then maybe you’ve earned the right to be pokin’ Mateo’s sister every night.”

  Chisos McGee sneered and let his cold eyes rake Cuno up and down. “Thinks he’s some young bull in the studdin’ corral.”

  Wald laughed, spittle showing at his mouth corners.

  “All right.” Cuno walked over to where he’d tied Renegade to a sage shrub. “You’re the second in command, I reckon. I follow your orders, Brouschard.”

  He looked at the big man and grinned. Then he swung into the saddle. He was tired of Brouschard. He wished he’d killed the man when Mateo had sanctioned it. Now he was just tired enough of him to want to do what the big man obviously thought was a tall order, a damn near impossible challenge, and shove it back in the man’s face. It would be the best payback Cuno could think of.

  His voice was hard, toneless, his sunburned cheeks flushed with fury. “If they have badges, I’ll bring ’em back in about an hour or so. Sound good to you?”

  Brouschard narrowed a skeptical eye and said out of one side of his mouth. “You do that. Three tin stars.”

  “And what’ll you do for me?”

  Brouschard pressed his lips together.

  “You get off my back,” Cuno said, holding Renegade’s reins taut. “And stay off my back. And Camilla’s back. One more cross-eyed look at me, one more ogling look at her . . .” He shook his head darkly. “And I’m gonna drill you for keeps without one word of warning. One forty-five pill through your fat gut, and I’m gonna watch you crawl while your miserable life drains out.”

  Cuno turned the horse around and galloped off down a crease between the bluffs, heading for the badlands.

>   Behind him, the four devils stared after him. Brouschard’s nostrils flared.

  Foolhardy machismo had compelled Cuno to follow Brouschard’s order, to accept the challenge. He knew that, and he didn’t care. He had no reason not to kill the lawmen—if lawmen they were. Out here, if he didn’t kill them, they’d likely kill him. Besides, he’d already killed another lawman.

  They can only hang you once.

  Besides, lawmen or those who professed to ride on the side of the law were little better than Mateo de Cava’s pack of unabashed gun wolves. Lawmen had tried to take Cuno’s life away for no good reason. He owed them nothing.

  They’d made him a wolf, so he’d live like one. From now on it was kill or be killed. He’d live for himself and only himself and whatever girl was warming his blankets at night.

  He intended to kill the three men on his back trail, and it didn’t matter who they were—bounty hunters, lawmen, or three nuns who’d decided to take up bounty tracking to make a little money for the orphanage.

  They’d die however Cuno had to do it.

  And he’d ride back to Mateo’s camp, laughing like a banshee, and he’d toss those silver stars at Brouschard and relish the expression on the fat man’s scarred face.

  He found a game and cattle trail into the badlands that appeared to have once been an ancient riverbed, the water having wildly eroded the gray rock into bizarre and twisted shapes, with meandering corridors carved between sheer stone walls. From the cracks in the stone walls, brown, bristly tufts of brush grew raggedly.

  As Cuno put Renegade toward the broadest corridor he could find and which appeared to lead in the direction of the other side of the bed, he saw part of a stark, white cow skeleton. The skull had bits of hide remaining around the ears. Otherwise the carcass was completely nude, most of the smaller bones having been carried off by carrion eaters.

  Clucking to his horse, Cuno rode on into the corridor that was so narrow in places that both walls often scraped his knees. Mud swallows flitted and shrieked above his head. The wind here was cool and fresh against his face, drying the sweat on his chest and back, but there was also the tangy stench of mineral springs.