“It’s not easy.”
“Still got your deputies?”
Claudia had taken over the law-dogging duties in Sonora Gate three years ago when her father, Pedro Morales, had been ambushed out in the desert. She’d hired as deputies her uncle, Gustavo Morales, and a burly former cavalry sergeant from Fort Huachuca—a stocky gent with a thick Norwegian accent.
“They are dead,” Claudia said coolly, nuzzling Sartain’s ear, causing his blood to rise and his balbriggans to grow tight in the crotch. “Murdered in the desert, just like Papa.”
Sartain stopped, dropped her feet to the floor, standing the town marshal of Sonora Gate up before him. “What happened?”
Claudia moved to a door on the right side of the dingy hall, threw it open. She strode inside, doffed her hat, and tossed it onto a dresser.
“Stock thieves,” she said as Sartain moved into the room behind her. “Or maybe the men who’ve been robbing the stagecoach from Tucson. Take your pick. I don’t know. Who knows? It’s the border, Mike.”
The room was as dingy as the hall. She went to a window flanking the bed and raised the shade, allowing in the pasty yellow light. The wind was still blowing like a hundred warlocks stomping around the town on a mission to chill as much blood as possible. The dirt ticked against the glass panes of that window and the one Sartain raised the shade over on the other side of the brass headboard.
“’Trouble country,’ they call this,” the girl said, turning to the mirror over the dresser and lifting the heavy locks of her lustrous hair. She let the beautiful mass spill onto her shoulders and then swung around to face the Cajun. “I asked you a question. What brings you here?” She arched a brow and slid her lips slightly back from her teeth. “Me, perhaps?”
“A fella’d be a damn fool not return to . . .”
Sartain let his voice trail off. Beneath the moaning wind, hooves clomped in the street. He turned to stare out the window. Five horseback riders, all wearing sombreros, the brims basted against their foreheads, were trotting down the street from Sartain’s left to his right. They were lean, dark-skinned men in calico and leather, with billowy, brightly colored bandanas.
Riding high-stepping horses with Arabian blood, not unlike the horses of the men who’d bushwhacked him and Buffalo, they were heavy with guns on their persons and jutting from their saddle scabbards. Sartain felt a not-unpleasant scratching at the back of his neck as he watched the riders ride off down the street to his right, behind the shifting curtains of windblown sand and dirt.
One of the men’s horses shied at a tumbleweed, and when he got the startled mount checked down, the rider galloped after the others, who’d turned down a side street to disappear behind the sprawling, white-washed adobe of the Santa Cruz Mercantile and Drug Emporium. Beyond the Emporium, in the direction in which the riders had disappeared, a church flaunted a sand-colored bell tower.
“Friends of yours?” Claudia’s voice rasped in Sartain’s ear.
He glanced at her. She stood close behind him, peering into the street from over his right shoulder.
“You recognize those Mescins?”
“Si,” the girl said, nodding. “They are Don de Castillo’s men. I recognize the brand of Hacienda de la Francesca on their horses. I’ve seen a few of them in town. Too frequently, but at least they require me to keep my edge.”
“Would that brand happen to be an ‘H’ and an ‘F’ in a circle?”
Claudia arched a brow. “I’m smelling trouble on you, Mike. Like sex on a cheap whore.”
He canted his head toward where the riders had disappeared. “Pistoleers?”
Claudia nodded. “The don hires such men to protect his holdings, as well as his gold. He’s a rich man. A vile man. It’s his men, possibly one of those hombres, I suspect of my father’s killing, as well the murders of my deputies.”
“How so?”
“Don de Castillo doesn’t care for the settlers on this side of the border, a large stretch of which at one time was part of his family’s land grant. That stretch included Sonora Gate. He gives his men free rein over here.”
Claudia paused.
“Mike?”
Again, Sartain turned to her. She studied him skeptically from over his shoulder. “Please tell me you are not here to tangle with de Castillo.”
Sartain gazed back at her, thinking about the five men who’d just ridden into town. Thinking about Buffalo McCluskey as well as Phoenix and Jeff Ubek. He gave Claudia a thin, half-hearted smile and said, “I’m not here to tangle with de Castillo. But, just sayin’ I was . . . just speculatin’, mind you, where do you suppose those five are headed?”
Claudia turned her mouth corners down and sighed as she cast her gaze out the window in the direction of the bell tower rising from a rocky hill on the town’s far side. “That is the old Mexican part of town. They’ve gone there to stable their horses and to drink and visit the putas in the Mexican cantina owned by Senor Obregon. However . . .” she rolled her copper eyes toward the Cajun dubiously, “they don’t usually visit Sonora Gate this early in the week.”
“I s’pect they’ll be over here on this side of town in due time, then,” Sartain said, unbuckling his pistol belt.
“I’d say we got an hour or so.”
He grinned. “Best get to it, then.”
Claudia’s cheeks dimpled as she gazed up at him, her copper eyes sparking. “You like to keep it interesting, don’t you, amigo?”
“Why the hell not?” Sartain said, coiling his shell belt around the front bedpost.
Claudia stepped back, staring up at him lustily from beneath her tawny brows , removing her own shell belt and holstered Schofields. Sartain unbuttoned his shirt. When the girl began unbuttoning her own, he shook his head.
“Let me do that.” Lust was a wooden knot in his throat as he stepped toward her and began unfastening her shirt buttons.
Claudia lowered her hands and thrust her shoulders back, breasts out, as Sartain hungrily undid the buttons and then slid the sides of her shirt and vest back from the full mounds pushing out at him from behind a thin cotton chemise.
“Christ,” Sartain muttered, cupping the pointed orbs in his hands.
He and Claudia were making slow, sensual love when Sartain heard beneath the bed’s raucous clatter what he believed to be the squawk of a floorboard in the hall outside their door.
Chapter Ten
The first squawk of a floorboard was followed closely by another.
Sartain looked down at Claudia. “You hear that?”
She peered around him toward the door and nodded.
Sartain glanced over his right shoulder. Beneath the door, a shadow moved. There was another faint squawk.
Claudia stretched her lips farther back from her white teeth and said, “What’s the matter, Sartain? No follow-through?”
“Oh, hell!” He chuckled.
As though in another world entirely, he heard the doorknob turn ever so slightly. He glanced over his shoulder, saw the key in the lock. There was another squawk. This one louder.
Sartain glanced at Claudia. She was staring up at him, eyes bright, jaws hard. He rolled to the left while she rolled to the right. At the same time, there was a shotgun-like blast, and in the periphery of his vision, Sartain saw the door burst wide.
Another shotgun-like blast as the door slammed against the dresser.
Sartain hit the floor and reached up to grab his big pearl-gripped LeMat from the holster hanging from the bedpost. At the same time, he watched a burly man in a palm-leaf sombrero step just inside the room and stop the door’s bounce back toward the frame with his left foot.
He bellowed in Spanish, “A present from Don de Castillo, lovebirds!” Then there was another blast.
This blast was from the actual shotgun the man held in both his black-gloved hands—a sawed-off double-barreled gut-shredder that roared like an angry god, both barrels lapping crimson flames toward the bed on which Sartain and Claudia had been toiling
two seconds before.
As the buckshot slammed into the bed, causing an instant cornhusk snowstorm, both Claudia and Sartain fired their pistols from either side of the bed, their bullets, three apiece, thumping into the shotgunner’s chest. The man screamed and threw his shotgun in the air as he twisted around, for a second exposing a second man behind him.
Sartain and Claudia cut loose with a second barrage, and before the second bushwhacker could get his carbine leveled, he too was sent howling and stomping loudly back out of the room to bounce off the wall on the far side of the hall. He and his friend continued to stagger around, screaming and knocking into each other until their knees buckled and they piled up like two heavy sacks of cracked corn at the base of the wall smeared and flecked with the crimson of their blood.
Except for one of the dead men loosing a loud fart, silence fell over the saloon’s second story.
As Sartain tripped the lever on his LeMat, engaging the sixteen-gauge shotgun shell residing in the short, stout barrel beneath the main one, a man’s hatted head slid into the doorway, low on the right side. He shoved a pistol into the room. Sartain jerked his LeMat toward the third shooter as Claudia’s Schofield barked to his left. The third bushwhacker triggered a round into the wall behind the town marshal a quarter-second before Claudia’s round thunked into his right cheekbone, laying him out flat with the other two drygulchers.
Again, silence.
Claudia said coolly, quietly, “How many more amigos did you invite to the fandango, Mike?”
She was answered by the blast of another shotgun out in the hall. A squash-sized hole appeared in the wall left of the door. Plaster and lath blew into the room. There was another blast, and another similar-sized hole appeared in the wall eight inches right of the first one.
Sartain aimed his LeMat just left of the two holes in the wall, and a little above, and triggered the shotgun shell. The LeMat thundered, flames lapping from the stout shotgun barrel, the sixteen-gauge buckshot tearing through the wall and into the hall, evoking a stunned yelp.
Sartain tossed the empty, smoking pistol onto the bed. He grabbed his Henry repeater and, forgetting that he was naked save for the bandage around his left thigh, yelled, “Hold your fire, Marshal!”
“Crazy Cajun!” the woman screamed behind him as Sartain ran through the door and across the hall, ramming his right shoulder into the wall and casting his gaze toward where the twin shotgun blasts had come. A short, stocky gent in deerskin charro slacks and green brush jacket over a white shirt was shambling toward the window at the far end of the hall.
He clutched his left arm with his right hand. A shotgun lay on the floor behind him.
Sartain shouted, “Turn around or take it between the shoulder blades, you drygulchin’ son of a bitch!”
The drygulchin’ son of a bitch swung around, screaming and raising a Remington revolver. Crouching against the wall, Sartain fired and levered the Henry.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
The empty cartridge casings clanked off the wall, dropped to the floor, and rolled.
Claudia screamed, “Mike, drop!”
Sartain dropped belly-down on the musty floor runner, his empty cartridge casings warm against his thigh. Claudia’s pistol barked three times, evoking a yell from the other end of the hall near the stairs.
Sartain looked behind him through wafting gray powder smoke in time to see a man retreat down the dingy stairwell. His boots and spurs were thumping and changing loudly as he descended the steps.
Sartain heaved himself to his feet. Claudia was down on one knee in the open doorway of their room, the first two dead men piled up bloody before her. She was naked and lovely, wearing only her hat, breasts bulging beneath her arms. She held both her Schofields in her fists.
“Did you get him?” Sartain asked, holding his Henry high across his bare chest.
“I thought I saw the bastardo flinch.”
“My turn,” Sartain growled.
He ran past Claudia, who stood and yelled behind him, “Mike, what did you do to make Don de Castillo so angry?”
“Your guess is as good as mine, chiquita!”
Sartain ran down to the first landing, stopped, crouched, and stared into the saloon hall, which was all misty blue shadows against the gray windows running along the front of the room on either side of the wind-jostling batwings. A shadow moved—a man raising his hatted head over a table about two-thirds of the way down the room.
Red flames lanced from a pistol barrel. The slug tore into the rail to Sartain’s left.
The Cajun snapped up his Henry and fired three quick rounds at the spot where he’d seen the gun flash. The man’s head sank down behind the table. There was the loud thud of a gun hitting the floor.
Sartain ejected his last spent cartridge casing, rammed a fresh one into the rifle’s action, and waited.
The shadow moved again—jerking, halting movements. Sartain held fire as the shooter gained his feet heavily, turned, and began dragging the toes of his high-heeled boots toward the batwings. Chaps flapped against his thighs. Silver spurs flashed in the dull light.
The drygulcher didn’t get far before his knees struck the floor with a boom. He knelt there, groaning and breathing hard, keeping his head up, back straight.
The Cajun descended the stairs and walked along the bar. He stood over the kneeling Mexican.
The man’s round, pockmarked face was framed by thick, black mutton-chop whiskers. He wore a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee. He’d lost his hat, and his long, oily black hair tumbled loosely about his shoulders.
Blood stained his calico shirt in several places.
Sartain pressed the barrel of his Henry against the middle of the man’s forehead. “Why does your boss want me dead?”
The Mexican rolled his rheumy eyes up at Sartain, pursed his lips, flared his nostrils, and shook his head.
“What about Phoenix?”
The Mexican tried to spit, but saliva mixed with blood merely dribbled down his chin.
“All right, then,” Sartain said, holding the gun straight out from his right hip with one hand. “Go to hell.”
Boom!
The back of the man’s head splattered against the front of the bar.
Boots thudded at the back of the room. Sartain turned to see Claudia running down the stairs. She wore Sartain’s longhandles stuffed into the tops of her boots. She had her Schofields in her hands but lowered them when she got to the bottom of the stairs.
She stared toward the dead man and the naked Sartain, his Henry still smoking. “Dios mio,” she said wistfully.
The curtain behind the bar ruffled. The barman poked his head through it. He looked at Claudia and then at Sartain, and gave them a pained expression. “I thought I told you two not to bust up the place!”
* * *
Forty-five minutes later, Sartain picked up the heels of the dead man lying at the far end of the hall, near the window he’d been heading for when the Cajun had punched his ticket, and began dragging him down the hall.
“Sorry, O’Brien,” Sartain said to the barman, who was on his knees scrubbing one of the thick bloodstains on the wall across from Claudia’s room. “You can bill de Castillo for the cleanup and damages. From what I understand, he can afford it.”
The barman only grunted and shook his head as, smoking a loosely-rolled quirley, he continued scrubbing at the stain, causing soapy red water to run down the wall to the floor at his knees.
Sartain had dressed and retrieved all five of the killers’ horses, which had been turned into a livery barn on the Mexican side of town. All five mounts wore the de Castillo brand burned into their withers. Four of the men had been tied belly down over their saddles. Sartain dragged the last man to the end of the hall and on down the stairs, the man’s head making staccato wooden cracking sounds as it bounced off each step in turn.
At the bottom, the Cajun stopped, straightened to ease the crick at the small of his back, and then dragged the man alo
ng in front of the bar and on out through the batwings. Claudia stood on the front gallery, the wind blowing her hair.
The gale had let up a little and seemed to be gradually diminishing.
“You know what this means, don’t you?” Claudia asked, grunting as she helped Sartain lift the heavy dead man and half-carry, half-drag him to a waiting Arabian tied to the hitch rack fronting the saloon.
“That a man can’t get a little privacy in your town?” the Cajun said as he and Claudia hefted the man up the side of the fidgeting Arabian.
“I am talking about your sending these men back to Hacienda de la Francesca,” Claudia said, cleaning the blood off her gloves on the seat of the dead man’s pants.
Sartain gave a last loud grunt as he back-and-bellied the dead man over his saddle, legs hanging down the horse’s left side, arms and head hanging down the right side. “Yeah, it means he can’t accuse me of stealin’ his horses.”
Claudia waited until Sartain had used the dead man’s lariat to secure his body to his saddle and then said, “It means there will be more, pendejo. Many more.” Claudia faced Sartain, boots spread, fists on her hips. “He won’t rest until your bones are being cleaned by magpies.”
“He hasn’t seemed to be doin’ a whole lot of restin’ anyways.” Sartain walked up to her and kissed her on the mouth. “Got a piece of notepaper and a pencil?”
She wrinkled the skin above the bridge of her nose at him. Then she dipped into an inside pocket of her vest and pulled out a small pasteboard-backed notepad. From another pocket, she produced a dull pencil stub.
Sartain jerked his chin and grunted. Claudia gave an ironic chuff and then turned.
The Cajun placed the notepad against her back, touched the pencil stub to his tongue, and scrawled the briefest of notes: Two short words.
He tore the top leaf off the pad, returned it and the pencil to the marshal, wadded up the paper, and stuffed it inside of the last dead man’s open mouth. He removed the man’s neckerchief from around the man’s neck and tied it over his head, forcing his mouth closed, and tightly knotted the cloth beneath the dead man’s chin so the note couldn’t slip out.
The Revenger Page 7