.45-Caliber Desperado

by Peter Brandvold

  He had a feeling that the de Cava riders, as canny as the rest of the bunch, were stealing up slowly, probably afoot, to the bank of the dry, rocky riverbed. That’s what Spurr would have done, expecting a bushwhack. Again, he’d wrongly assumed they’d storm into the bed like wildmen, flinging lead every such way to try to bring their quarries to ground before they forted up in the rocks.

  Spurr had sent a telegram to the little New Mexico town, Cicorro, that lay somewhere south of here—he wasn’t sure how far. There was a cavalry outpost nearby that had been set up to handle the Mescalero Apache problem.

  Spurr had sent the telegram to the post commander, alerting the man of de Cava’s breakneck ride south on a course that would take him and his band to or within close proximity of the village, which was a little supply settlement for the mining camps in the mountains owning the same name and looming tall in the northwest. He wanted like hell to reach the town and the dozen riders Captain Wilson had promised to have waiting there. As it was, out here, Spurr’s trio was badly—one might even say hilariously, terminally—outnumbered.

  A gust of windblown sand slithered along the riverbed from Spurr’s left to his right. When the tan-colored curtain had passed, Spurr spied movement on the opposite bank—just the quick jerking movement of a hatted head and a rifle slanting down from a low boulder and a snag of juniper the wind was wildly beating, smashing almost level with the top of the bank itself.

  There they were.

  21

  SPURR LOOKED AT Mason.

  The man was aiming his Henry just right of where Spurr had seen the rifleman. Mason didn’t see the shooter.

  Spurr picked up a small rock, side-armed it, bouncing it off Mason’s back. The sheriff turned with a start. His face was an angular brown smudge beneath his low-tipped hat brim, his mustache a slightly darker line beneath his nose.

  Spurr canted his head toward the opposite bank. Mason turned to look across the wash and hunkered lower, tensing. When he glanced at Spurr again, the old marshal gestured with his head once more, this time indicating up the wash on his left. He couldn’t tell if Mason had understood, because just then the wind threw more sand and grit between them. Just the same, Spurr stepped back from his boulder cautiously. He turned and made his way through the rocks, finding a circuitous route that roughly paralleled the wash for about thirty yards. Limping slightly on his gimpy ankle that wasn’t so gimpy now that he’d gotten some blood to it, he crossed the wash and pressed his left shoulder against the steep-cut bank.

  He blinked against the sand and tightened his grip on the Winchester. Damn hard to get your bearings out here in this dry prairie blowup. He was liable to waltz right up to one of the de Cava men before he knew it, get himself gut-shot.

  Swallowing back his apprehension—he hoped to hell he wasn’t losing his gravel along with his health and his youth—he climbed the slick, eroded clay bank, grabbing roots and then a shrub at the top to help hoist him up. Slowly, he made his way back along the wash.

  He hoped Mason had gotten his message and wouldn’t spy his movement and drill him. The de Cava men were enough to worry about.

  Setting each moccasined foot down carefully and holding his rifle straight out from his right hip, Spurr walked twenty yards, then thirty. He meandered around buckbrush clumps, prickly pear, and rocks.

  A rifle barked in the distance, the report swallowed almost instantly by the wind.

  Spurr stopped. There were two more quick shots, then another and another. Was that a man’s shout? The sounds were swirled and tormented by the hot, demonic wind, but they seemed to be coming from the wash’s opposite side, possibly farther back in the rocks than where he’d left Mason and Joseph. Spurr’s mouth dried, tasted like stale tobacco. He moved forward, quickening his pace.

  A rifle bellowed from nearly straight in front of him. The sound, so loud and close on the heels of the more distant though no less menacing reports, caused him to nearly leap out of his moccasins.

  The rifle exploded twice more, and Spurr saw the blue-red flames stab in the direction of the wash on his right. They were flashes in the blowing grit. Just then there was a lull between gusts, and Spurr saw a big man hunkered in the brush at the edge of the bank. About six feet in front of Spurr. He wore a duster. A felt hat hung down his back by a leather thong. He had thin, sandy, sweat-matted hair, a bright pink, bulging forehead and a yellow-blond beard.

  Spurr racked a fresh shell into his Winchester’s breech. The ejected cartridge arched toward Spurr and dropped in the gravel in front of him.

  The man must have sensed or glimpsed Spurr a half second after Spurr had nearly stumbled over him. He rolled onto his left shoulder, bringing his rifle to bear, yellow teeth flashing, yellow eyes widening and brightening.

  He screamed with shock and savage fury. But Spurr had him.

  The old marshal’s aged Winchester barked three times, the spent cartridges flying back behind Spurr’s right shoulder. The big man fired his own Winchester one handed, kiting the slug over Spurr’s head. He fell back hard, then slid headfirst down the bank to the wash, his spurs grinding against the clay.

  Rifles continued thundering in the windy distance across the wash. Spur could see no movement, only ragged, obscure glimpses of the rock wall and ledges through the blowing grit.

  He moved ahead quickly, but when he figured the other three de Cava men were no longer on this side of the wash but had attempted the same maneuver that Spurr had tried in reverse, he dropped down the bank and lit out running toward where he’d left Mason and Joseph.

  He lost his bearings, and it took some time to find where his cohorts had been. They weren’t there. Only the body of a short, stalky gent, his silver eyeteeth showing in a death grimace. Spurr’s heart thudded. The gunfire had fizzled to only sporadic bursts originating from somewhere deep in the stone corridors. It echoed eerily. Spurr tried to hone in on it and stole down a gravel-floored hallway with slanting walls and a slanting ceiling.

  From ahead emanated the rotten-egg odor of burned powder. Something lay on the ground against the right side wall.

  He slowed his pace as he approached, then crouched over Ed Joseph. The bounty hunter’s rifle lay beside him, one hand on his belly, the other over the rifle barrel. Blood bibbed the black-haired man’s shirt and his silver crucifix. His dark eyes stared sightlessly at the stone ceiling, blood trickling from a corner of his mouth.

  Spurr heard another shot from somewhere ahead. He continued forward and followed a right-angled dogleg. Ahead, another corridor intersected Spurr’s. Wind blew sand through it, pelting the gray stone wall beyond. A shadow slid across the wall. Spurr stopped, dropping to one knee and extending his Winchester out from his shoulder.

  A dark, man-shaped figure appeared—short and wiry and wearing a calico shirt and a bleached-yellow Stetson with a torn brim. The man turned toward Spurr. His eyes widened, and just as he started to swing his carbine around, Spurr shot him through the brisket.

  The thunder of Spurr’s rifle in the close confines set the old marshal’s ears ringing.

  The slug plowed through his target’s chest and spanged off the stone wall behind him, painting the wall with blood. The man fired his carbine into the ground at his boots, stumbled back against the wall, then dropped straight down to his rump. His head sagged to one side, eyes squeezed shut. Holding the rifle across his knees, the man let his head drop to the gravelly ground and shook violently as he died.

  Spurr ejected the spent cartridge, heard it cling to the gravel at his boots. He rammed the lever home, seating a fresh shell, then freezing there and pricking his ears to listen. There was only the moaning of the devil wind in the sky above the gray stone walls, the occasional sift of sand down the walls around him. The walls themselves were absolutely still and dumbly silent.

  No more shots sounded. No more cries.

  Spurr continued forward, hearing now the soft crunch of gravel beneath his moccasins. In here, the wind’s cries were farther away, muf
fled, but just as eerie. They seemed to be taunting him. Jeering. He heard something just as he approached the dead man at the intersecting corridor. It came from his right. He held his Winchester steady, then stepped around the corner, spreading his feet and tightening his trigger finger.

  He held fire.

  Another man lay facedown on some stone rubble littering another gap on the corridor’s left side. Thick blood was gushing out around the rocks beneath his body and head. His right hand was draped over one of the rocks, squeezing it desperately. Otherwise, he was still.

  Beyond him, Dusty Mason sat againt the corridor’s right wall. Mason’s hat lay beside him. One of his legs was stretched out wide, the heel of the other one curled under the knee. His chest rose and fell sharply as he clamped his left hand over a bloody hole low on his right side. He had a cocked pistol in his right hand, but when he recognized Spurr in the rocky shadows, he depressed the hammer and cursed raspily.

  Spurr moved forward. “How bad?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “You ain’t never been shot before?”

  “Nope.”

  Spurr looked at the man wagging his head against the wall behind him. “Really?”

  “First time.” The sheriff winced then pounded the ground with his pistol. “Hurts good, too. Hot.”

  “Let me see.”

  “What the hell can you do?”

  “I can look at it,” Spurr growled in irritation.

  “I think it musta cracked a rib or two. It hurts like holy hell to breathe. Feels like my ribs on that side are gonna splinter apart.”

  Spurr set his rifle aside then leaned forward, pried Mason’s hand away from the bloody hole above his right hip, and examined the wound. He couldn’t see much but blood. The sheriff was losing it fast. Spurr tipped him forward.

  “Ouch! Goddamnit, Spurr—what’re you . . . ?”

  Spurr pushed Mason back against the stone wall. “Can’t tell if it went all the way through or not. If it’s still in there, it’ll need to be dug out.”

  “Not by you!”

  “No, hell, I wouldn’t dig around in your yaller guts!” Spurr brushed a pensive fist across his nose and looked around.

  “Joseph?” Mason asked him.

  Spurr shook his head. “We’re gonna have to get you to Diamondback. Probably a sawbones there of some kind. At least a butcher.”

  “Ah, fuck.” Mason lifted his chin and glared at the fine line of washed-out sky above the cavern. “Don’t take me to no butcher, goddamnit. My old man was a butcher.” He laughed bizarrely—a high-pitched chortle through clenched teeth. “Shit, I think I’d rather you did it.”

  “You’re gonna have to get up. Can’t sit here all day. I think Diamondback is just south of here—a couple miles is all. I’m gonna go out and fetch our horses, and then I’ll come back and help you out to ’em. All right?”

  Mason sniffed and nodded, his jaw hinges dimply.

  “Stuff your neckerchief in the hole there so you don’t bleed out before I get back.”

  Mason reached up with his right hand to untie his dirty red neckerchief. He wadded the cloth in his fist and pressed it gingerly against the wound.

  “Harder.”

  Mason pressed harder, making a face.

  “Harder than that.” Spurr reached over and pressed the cloth down hard.

  Mason stiffened his legs, arched his back, and screamed.

  “Like that!”

  Spurr turned to fetch their horses.

  “Spurr,” Mason shouted in a weird, pain-wracked voice that echoed around the corridor. “I hate your cussed old guts!”

  Spurr snorted.

  He had the devil’s own time running down Cochise and Mason’s strawberry whose name he didn’t know. If it even had a name; Mason didn’t seem the type of man who named his horse. Most men weren’t. Horses died too damn easily, so it was best to not get too attached.

  After wandering half blind in the storm for twenty minutes, Spurr found one of the four bushwhackers’ mounts not far from the riverbed. It stood with its tail to the wind, and seemed so frightened by the storm that it didn’t lurch away when Spurr approached nor when he grabbed its ground-tied reins and mounted it.

  He used the horse to run down his roan, which he found nearly a mile up the riverbed, having doubtless been hazed there by the harassing wind. Cochise was sheltering himself in a little alcove in the high, stony ridges. He nickered with seeming relief when he saw his rider materialize from the dust storm, the old lawman wearing his bandanna over his nose.

  Spurr released the killer’s claybank, and astride Cochise he found Mason’s horse nearby, on the other side of the riverbed. The horse was so unnerved by the storm that he ran as Spurr approached, and the marshal had to throw a rope on him and dally him in.

  He’d marked the spot where he’d left Mason, with a handkerchief tied to a stick, but the stick had blown down, so Spurr overrode the spot and wasted another half hour finally locating the place once more. When he got back to the sheriff, he thought the man was dead; he was slumped forward, chin drooping to his chest.

  Spurr called his name.

  Mason lifted his head, blinking. “What?”

  “Damn—you’re alive. I thought my life was gonna get a whole lot easier.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  Mason doffed his hat and tried pushing off his left knee. He groaned and nearly fell sideways, but Spurr grabbed the sheriff’s arm and, wrapping his other arm around his waist, hauled him to his feet. They staggered like two sentimental drunks down the craggy corridor and back out to the riverbed, where Spurr had tied both mounts to sage shrubs.

  Spurr had the devil’s own time again getting Mason mounted. He wasn’t as strong as he used to be, and Mason was too weak and in too much pain to lift his leg into the stirrup. Finally, Mason stumbled over to a rock, which he managed to step onto, and then onto his saddle. Spurr turned away from the wind and heaved a sigh of relief.

  “Now to find Diamondback,” he said as he swung up onto Cochise’s back.

  “Shit,” Mason grunted, pressing his spurs to his own mount’s ribs. “What about the rest of de Cava’s crew? They could be anywhere out here.”

  “Yeah, and the way our luck’s holdin’,” Spurr said, following the sheriff up the riverbank, “we’re liable to ride right into ’em.”

  22

  CUNO RODE HUNCHED in his saddle, his arm hanging down by his side, feeling like a twenty-pound slab of meat that was slow-roasting over a low fire.

  Camilla rode ahead. He felt too much the fool for having gotten himself bunged up again to let her lead him, so he held Renegade’s reins in his right fist and kept the horse just behind Camilla’s horse’s tail, which was blowing wildly in the incessant wind.

  He felt both hot and cold. Cold sweat dribbled down his cheeks in short streams that were dried or blown away by the wind. He straightened himself in his saddle and tried to stay conscious, but when he felt Renegade slowing, he opened his eyes to find himself slumped nearly to the paint’s buffeting mane that whipped his face like whang strings.

  Ahead, Camilla reined her mount to a stop. Beyond her, several riders materialized from the blowing sand, dusters or serapes whipping around them. Several of Mateo’s riders’ hats flopped down their backs by their chin thongs. Hatless, they were hard to recognize but Cuno could make out the lean, hard-chiseled, angular face of Frank Skinner riding beside Mateo. The gang leader put his horse up to his sister. They were in a crease between two sandstone scarps that tempered the wind but caused the dust to swirl like mini tornadoes.

  Mateo said something in Spanish that Cuno could hardly hear above the wind, let alone understand. Camilla glanced at Cuno. The young freighter heard the word serpiente . Mateo rode back to Cuno, who tried to straighten his back again but felt as though his spine had turned to jelly. He winced, tried to keep his eyes open, but the effort caused him to vomit more bile.

  Mateo’s horse starte
d at the violent upheaval. The gang leader shook his head and slid one of his big Colts from its holster.

  “He’s finished,” the man said in English, for Cuno’s benefit. He rocked the pistol’s hammer back.

  “No!” Camilla swung her horse around until its was angled toward the tail of Mateo’s Arab. “Put it away, Brother!”

  “You know the rules, mi hermana.”

  “He isn’t that bad. We’re forting up soon, right? He’ll be better tomorrow.”

  Mateo shook his head stubbornly. Cuno was too sick to care much if he lived or died, but he felt his own hand sliding toward the ivory-gripped Colt on his right thigh. It was on the opposite side of his horse from Mateo. He knew the gang’s rules and accepted them, but the instinct for self-preservation was too strong for him to go down without a fight.

  “He’ll slow us down,” Mateo said, swinging the long, silver-chased barrel toward Cuno’s head. “He dies.”

  “I said no, mi hermano!” Camilla whipped her serape above the handle of her own .44, and slipped the pistol from its brown leather holster with surprising speed for a girl Cuno had once known as meek and deferring.

  Aiming his revolver at Cuno’s head, Mateo glared fiercely at his sister and cut loose with a string of Spanish Cuno couldn’t keep up with. The only word he recognized was whore. Camilla parried the verbal onslaught with a fiercer one of her own that caused her brother to fall suddenly silent and just stare at her, eyes turning as hard as obsidian ore.

  She’d insulted his manhood. It was obvious from the deep cherry color rising in Mateo’s tan cheeks above his beard.

  “Hold on,” Frank Skinner said, putting his horse up to Camilla’s. “Why not give him a chance? We’re gonna need all the help we can get for pulling the next job, Mateo.”

  “Shut up, Skinner. This is between mi hermana and myself.”

  “No, it’s not.” Skinner smiled to offset his defiance. “If we’re gonna make it to the border, we’re gonna need guns and money. We’re already short-handed after the dustup at the whorehouse, and we ain’t seen Brouschard’s group of late, neither. I say give the kid till tomorrow. If he’s still pukin’ his guts up at first light, I’ll drill the hole in his head myself, save you from havin’ to do it and gettin’ any more on your sis’s bad side than you already are.”