.45-Caliber Desperado

by Peter Brandvold

  The woman didn’t lift her head toward Cuno but kept her attention on her work. She was getting ready for the stage. Cuno kept moving westward along the street and stopped after another block.

  He was nearly at the west edge of town, where the soggy street became a soggy trail angling off through the sage and greasewood. On the left side of the street was a boarded-up general store with a faded green sign announcing LOGAN’S DRY GOODS.

  A broad boardwalk ran the length of the place’s log front wall, and on the far west end of the boardwalk, facing a rain barrel, a man was hunkered on one knee, holding his head down while reaching across himself, toward his left shoulder, with his right hand—obviously in some sort of distress.

  Cuno canted his head to one side, studying the man with furled brows.

  A rifle lay on the boardwalk right of the man’s right, moccasin-clad foot. In the dense, morning quiet, Cuno could hear the man’s raspy breathing, his desperate grunts and sighs. Cuno recognized the man’s shabby, broad-brimmed slouch hat with a rawhide chin thong hanging down his hickory workshirt. He wore patched, smoke-stained buckskin trousers. His hair was brown and gray, and it hung several inches over the collar of his deerskin jacket. Cuno could see only the man’s right profile, but he’d know the rest of his craggy, saddle-brown face when he saw it.

  Cuno lowered his Winchester from his shoulder and, snugging the butt against his right hip, tramped across the street.

  The man must have heard the wet sounds of Cuno’s boots in the mud, but he did not turn his head toward the young man approaching him. He was fooling with something in his right hand. It was a small hide pouch, and he was trying to bite the drawstring open with his teeth. His left hand appeared uselessly curled at his side.

  As Cuno stopped beside the man, aiming his Winchester at him one-handed, the man whom Cuno would have drilled through the chest if the riled rattler hadn’t sunk its teeth into the young freighter’s arm popped something into his mouth.

  He tossed his head back, and the stone-sized Adam’s apple in his leathery neck bobbed as he swallowed. It was like a rock being shaken in an ancient deerskin sack.

  He turned toward Cuno. His lilac blue eyes narrowed at the maw of the Winchester aimed at his neck.

  “Hold it right there,” Cuno said.

  The old gent who had a deputy U.S. marshal badge pinned to his shirt, just visible behind the flaps of his jacket and deerskin vest, lifted his implacable gaze toward Cuno’s face.

  “What can I help you with, sonny?”

  “Don’t call me sonny.”

  “What should I call you?”

  “Cuno Massey.”

  The old man’s shrewd, pain-sharp eyes held Cuno’s stare. He was breathing hard but now after taking his pill he seemed to be in less distress than before.

  “Who’re you?”

  “Call me Spurr.”

  The old man sagged down onto his left butt cheek and pressed his back up against the wall of the abandoned drygoods store. The rain barrel was to his left. His rifle lay near his moccasins, and he gave it a faintly longing look.

  “Deputy U.S. Marshal Spurr Morgan, that is. Most folks just call me Spurr.” He glanced at the maw of Cuno’s rifle once more and scowled angrily. “If you’re gonna shoot me, younker, go ahead and pull the trigger and get it done with.”

  “It’d be so damn easy,” Cuno said softly. “A hell of a lot easier than back in them badlands.”

  Spurr raised his eyes to the young freighter’s face once more, and he narrowed an eyelid shrewdly.

  Cuno said, “That was me who peppered that rock dust into your cheek. A diamondback saved your hide.”

  Spurr nodded slowly, pursing his lips in fateful disgust. “Like I said, if you’re gonna finish the job you started, go ahead and finish it.”

  “Where’s Mason?”

  “Who?”

  Cuno smiled without humor. “I seen Mason with you and the other gent. I would have drilled him first but I had an easier shot at you.”

  “You won’t get an easier shot than this one, kid.” Spurr spread his arms and looked defiant, challenging. “Might as well kill me now. Mason ain’t here; he rode out to the Hackberry Creek outpost to get some soldiers. Should be here anytime, though.”

  Cuno considered that for a moment, then remembered what Frank Skinner had said about the washes around Diamondback being filled with rainwater. He shook his head slowly and sucked a heavy breath. “After that rain? I doubt it.” He hardened his jaws and raised the Winchester butt to his shoulder, aiming down at the old lawman’s forehead. “You tell Mason he’s a dead man. Cuno Massey’s going to kill him.”

  “He was just doing his job, son.”

  “And my job is to kill the son of a bitch responsible for locking me up in that goddamn hellhole of a federal prison. I’m gonna kill both you sons o’ bitches for tryin’ to take me back.”

  “You killed marshals, boy. Where’d you expect ’em to put you?”

  “I killed those men because they had it coming. Mason wouldn’t listen to any of that. I was no cold-blooded killer.”

  Again, Cuno spoke slowly through gritted teeth, narrowing an eye as he stared down the Winchester’s barrel. “But I am now. And Mason’s next on my kill list. You tell him that. Tell him if he wants me so bad, sees it his mission in life to lock me up again, he’s got another think comin’. He can either find me or I can find him. But sooner or later, we’re going to meet. And I’m gonna kill him.”

  Cuno lowered his rifle, pressing the butt again to his right hip. He backed slowly away, keeping the gun on the old marshal.

  Unbridled fury blazed in him. He knew he should kill this man called Spurr, but he needed Spurr to relay his message to Mason. He wanted Mason to know that he was now the one being hunted.

  Besides, Cuno couldn’t kill a man who had no chance at all. Especially an old one with a weak ticker. He didn’t know why, but he couldn’t. He’d likely regret it later, and he had to learn to kill when he had to, but he just couldn’t kill the old man now.

  When he was half a block away, he turned around and tramped back in the direction of the hotel.

  28

  BECAUSE OF THE flooded washes left in the wake of the storm, the stage was delayed by three days.

  Luther Haines, a Yankee desperado from Abilene, Kansas, lowered his field glasses and turned to Mateo de Cava. “Here she comes, Boss.”

  “Alabar a Dios—es sobre tiempo!” Praise god—it’s about time!

  Mateo was hunkered down behind a rocky scarp with Cuno, Camilla, Luther Haines, and Frank Skinner, using a Green River knife to trim his fingernails. He looked like a man waiting for a train. Cuno could smell the hooch on him, and on Haines as well. Their eyes were bloodred. “How many men are guarding it?”

  Haines lifted his field glasses again to gaze through a slight notch in the lip of the black-rocked scarp that humped just beyond a wash that was nearly dry again after the storm. Cuno lifted his head to follow the man’s gaze.

  He saw the stage moving up from the south across the distant desert, following the meandering stage road behind a brown blotch that was its six-horse hitch. With his naked eyes, he could see a couple of the outriders in front of the stage, but none behind it. They were still too far away, and the cedars and junipers were thick amongst the boulders that some glacier had dumped here eons ago.

  Haines drew his lips back from his teeth as he stared through the glasses. “Holy shit—there must be six.” He narrowed his eyes and moved the glasses slowly from left to right, tracking the stage through the chaparral. “No . . . seven.” He lowered the glasses and turned to Mateo. “Seven outriders. One shotgun messenger.” The gray-eyed man grinned. He wore a gold stud earring and a snakeskin armband. “She’s comin’ in heavy, Boss!”

  “Seven outriders, nine men total,” Frank Skinner said, sitting with his back against the scarp a little ways from Mateo. “How many we got now?” Quickly, he counted them off on his gloved fingers. “Mateo
, Camilla, Cuno, Calderon, Azuelo, Nervo, Luther, and myself. Eight.”

  He pooched his lips and arched his brows as though he thought the odds weren’t so bad that the job wasn’t doable. Challenging but doable.

  “Eight left of nearly twenty men,” Camilla said awfully, shaking her head and eyeing her brother who continued to trim his nails with the obscenely large, razor-edged knife. “My god, Mateo—we should have headed straight for the border.”

  “We did head straight for the border,” Mateo said with a bored air.

  “I mean we should have headed straight for the border without stopping in that railroad town so you could fuck whores and get half your gang whittled away by bounty hunters!”

  Mateo snapped his dark eyes to his sister, his chest heaving. Before the outlaw leader could respond to his fiery-tempered sibling’s tirade, Cuno said, “No point in arguin’ over that now. What’s done is done.” He took the field glasses from Haines but cast an admonishing look at Camilla who was still staring, flushed with fury, at her brother. “Now we’d best get into position to take that strongbox.”

  He raised the glasses to his eyes and stared off through the chaparral. As he brought the stage up in his magnified field of vision—a big Concord painted green with yellow doors on which GILA TRANSPORT CO., LAS CRUCES, NM. TERR. was stenciled in gold letters, Mateo said, “Frank, signal the others.”

  Skinner rose and walked out to the far edge of the scarp, keeping the mound of flat, black boulders between himself and the oncoming stage and its seven outriders. He held his rifle up high above his head and waved it three times. Cuno turned his field glasses on another scarp about a hundred yards north and west of his position, saw the return signal—a rifle waved three times above Mariano Azuelo’s sombrero-clad head.

  Azuelo was hunkered in the rocks on the side of that distant escarpment with Enrique Calderon and Franco Nervo. A good bit of loose rock clung to the scarp just beneath them, and when they received a second signal from Skinner, they were to kick the rocks down the incline to pile up in the trail below, sealing off the stage’s trail to Diamondback, three miles north.

  Skinner as well as Cuno and Camilla had convinced Mateo to effect the robbery out here, away from town, where there was more open ground and no danger of townsmen involving themselves. Cuno liked the idea, too, because there was was less chance of innocent people being killed. He wondered now if the old lawman, Spurr, had followed the gang out here with Sheriff Mason. In that regard, Cuno felt conflicting emotions.

  On the one hand, he wanted to kill Mason. On the other hand, he didn’t want to endanger the gang, which he had already done when he’d chosen not to inform Mateo of his run-in with the deputy U.S. marshal known as Spurr. He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t told them, as he felt a strong allegiance to Mateo, despite the man’s obvious carelessness and cold-bloodedness.

  But without Mateo and Camilla, Cuno would have been hanged that day that now seemed so long ago but was only a month or so back; he’d have been tossed without ceremony into a mass grave behind the Arkansas River Federal Penitentiary, where so many other prisoners had been discarded like food scraps from the dining hall tables.

  He didn’t know why he hadn’t told Mateo about Spurr. Maybe his allegiance to the killer wasn’t as strong as he thought. Maybe he didn’t want to see the old lawman with the weak ticker killed, which Mateo would certainly have seen to if he’d known of the man’s existence. He’d have had his men scour the town for him and show him no mercy. No mercy to anyone the lawman was holed up with.

  Maybe Cuno’s belly had rebelled at that possibility, and not wanting to face it, he’d merely kept his own counsel.

  Now, wondering if Spurr and Mason had followed him and the gang out here, Cuno swept the surrounding terrain with the field glasses. Under the climbing sun, he saw nothing out here but sand-colored cliffs and spurs and broad stretches of gravelly flats bristling with bear grass, thickets of mesquite and catclaw, and some scrubby oaks.

  “Why are you so interested in the east?”

  Cuno lowered the glasses and looked at Mateo, who narrowed a suspicious eye at him. The outlaw leader rolled his bloodshot eyes toward the southwest, waving at the savage Green River. “The stage is that way, gringo. That way!”

  “Doesn’t hurt to look around,” Cuno said. “Never know if someone might have followed us out of town.”

  “I kept an eye on our back trail,” Mateo said. “I’m no fool. If anyone had followed us out of Diamondback, they would be dead by now and the coyotes would be tearing them apart and dragging them off. You just keep an eye on the stage, and when it is close to those rocks, you tell Skinner to send the final signal.”

  Cuno glanced at Camilla. Sitting with her back to the scarp, she looked at Cuno from beneath the brim of her straw sombrero skeptically. She had a .45 in her hand, absently, nervously turning the cylinder. Her eyes acquired a question she did not give voice to, but she and Cuno had become close enough that he knew what that question was: “What troubles you, gringo desperado?”

  Yes, Cuno thought, what troubles me? He turned the glasses back on the stage that was a hundred and fifty yards away now and closing at a full gallop, the six-hitch team lunging deeply, dust broiling out behind them.

  I’ve been waiting for this job. It not only means money and my ability to repay Camilla for all she’s bought for me and to pay my own way into Mexico. But it means I’ve now accepted this new life I’ve decided is my only option. After all, I became a convicted killer nearly a year ago, when the judge hammered his gavel in Camp Collins, sentencing me to a life in the federal pen. I became a desperado as soon as I escaped, and a cold-blooded killer when I shot that local lawman not a mile from the penitentiary.

  This is the only life I have left, and if I’m going to live at all, I have to accept it and show I can own up to it and live it despite what it means I’ve become.

  He was watching the stage round a curve and move directly toward him, a hundred yards away and closing fast. There were four riders ahead, all holding rifles either straight up or resting across their saddle pommels, and three riders behind. Cuno stayed low and sheltered the field glass lenses with his hands, as the four riders were swinging their heads around this way and that—all big men in dusters, cartridges winking from bandoliers or cartridge belts wrapped around their waists.

  The stage driver was a scrawny but tough-looking desert rat with a canvas hat and a big beard. He wore two pistols in shoulder holsters. The shotgun messenger held a sawed-off shotgun across his thighs; he had another barn blaster beneath the seat; Cuno could see it between his high-topped, mule-eared boots. Both men wore bandannas against the dust kicked up from behind the racing, thundering team.

  Cuno lowered the field glasses, and, keeping his head low to the ground, turned to look past Camilla and Mateo to where Frank Skinner stood on the scarp’s north end. “All right,” Cuno said, handing the glasses back to Haines and absently running his sweaty palms on his denim-clad thighs.

  He turned again to peer through the notch in the scarp just above his head. The first two riders galloped past the scarp, then the other two about ten seconds later. The stage came next, following the second set of lead riders about twenty yards behind.

  Cuno lowered his head again, turned to see Skinner come running at a crouch behind the scarp, for the lead riders were now in position to see him. Skinner doffed his hat and dropped to one knee, glancing at Mateo while reaching for his Spencer carbine with one hand. With his other hand, he unsnapped the keeper thong from over the hammer of his Remington .44.

  Cuno’s heart thudded when he heard a muffled rumble and knew that Nervo, Azuelo, and Calderon had caused the rocks to begin tumbling down the opposite scarp. It was their job to take out the four lead riders. The last three were up to Cuno’s bunch.

  “All right, amigos,” Mateo said with a desultory sigh, as if he’d rather still be whoring and drinking in Diamondback. He grabbed his Winchester and racked a live round
in the chamber. “You know what to do, uh?”

  Cuno drew a deep breath and looked at Camilla. She was standing now, glancing at him sidelong while running a hand down her Winchester’s barrel—an oblique look, half inquisitive, half accusatory.

  Cuno felt a ripple of annoyance as he grabbed his own rifle then followed Mateo, Skinner, and Haines out around the south end of the scarp, running at a crouch while the others took cover behind low boulders or barrel cactus. Camilla ran up behind Cuno, then dashed off to his right, taking cover behind a split, flat-topped rock.

  The clatter of the boulders continued to Cuno’s right as he dropped behind a gravelly shelf and a gnarled bit of catclaw.

  The trail was forty yards straight out from him. The stage was about sixty yards to his right, and now he could hear the driver and shotgun rider shouting as rifles popped and horses whinnied. The first of the three trailing riders were just now passing in front of Cuno, riding side by side and trotting their mounts, holding their reins up close to their chests with one hand, rifles in their other hand.

  The last pair of riders was about thirty yards to Cuno’s left and obscured by the stage’s broiling dust and cactus and shrubs.

  To Cuno’s left, Mateo’s rifle cracked. The outlaw leader gave a high-pitched, ear-rending shriek as he ejected the spent cartridge, seated fresh, and took aim at a second rider through his own billow of powder smoke. Cuno held his finger taut against his own trigger as he saw the second rider, who’d just turned toward him, blown out of his saddle by Mateo’s second shot.

  “Two down, amigos!” Mateo bellowed, racking a fresh shell and turning to his left.

  Haines had apparently already drawn a bead on one of the outriders, as a rifle barked in that direction. Out on the trail, a horse screamed shrilly.

  Then Skinner, Mateo, and Camilla were opening up, as well, and Cuno realized that he was still staring straight ahead, at the trail where the first two shot riders’ horses were fiddlefooting wildly, one apparently trying to rid itself of his own rider whose boot was hung up in his stirrup.