“Ah, hell, Jack,” Kimball said, licking blood from his lower lip. “Why don’t you leave him alone?”
“He’s a killer, you old fool,” Decker said through gritted teeth. “He killed soldiers from his own regiment, and he’s continuing his vigilante ways. No tellin’ how many men he’s murdered.”
“I don’t know,” Kimball said. “I got me a suspicion he ain’t killed nary a soul who didn’t have it comin’. Seems to me we need a feller like that. Someone who evens the odds for the little guy...or gal...who’s been wronged by someone much bigger and can’t do nothin’ about it.”
“What you’re condoning, Mort,” Epps said, “is vigilantism. Plain and clear.”
“Maybe so,” Kimball said, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, holding his reins lightly in his hands. “But maybe we got a need for it.”
He knew he shouldn’t vent the thought, the anger, that he was venting, but he couldn’t help himself. He was too damn old to care much about consequences anymore, and he’d be damned if he hadn’t found himself genuinely liking the man known as The Revenger—Mike Sartain.
He liked him a hell of a lot more than he liked Bradley Decker, that was for damn sure.
“Take that Olivia Rosen, now,” the postmaster continued, brushing his tongue across the cut on his lip. “Her five-year-old child was taken from her by one of the vilest creatures to roam this earth—Lute Lawton. And then to heap on even more misery, they...Ah, hell, why go into it? You know what happened to that poor woman. Now, I know you boys rode out after that bunch, but the truth is, you weren’t able to catch or kill even one of those men. In fact, you ended up ridin’ back to Rio Rosa with three of your posse members riding belly down across their saddles.”
“They left the county,” Epps said. “The rode out of our jurisdiction. It’s up to the U.S. marshals to go after them now. That’s how this works, Mort, and you know it!”
“I know that’s how it works,” Kimball said. “But maybe it don’t work as good as it should. And because it don’t work as good as it should, maybe it’s good we got a feller like Mike Sartain. Hell, The Revenger ain’t stopped by county lines or any other line, far as I know. What I’m sayin’ is, yeah, maybe it’s good we got us a man like Mike Sartain. Maybe you boys should just ride back to Rosa and leave him alone. Let him do your jobs for you, because it sure as hell looks like you can’t do them yourselves worth spit!”
That last, he just couldn’t help. Anger had been rising in him throughout the tirade because the more he continued, the more his ire got stoked and the more certain he became of the aptness of his words.
He looked sharply at Decker, who had started to put his horse back up to the wagon, glaring red-faced at Kimball.
His voice low but quavering with emotion, the postmaster said, “Mister Pinkerton, sir, I’m going to warn you that if you try assaulting me again with those reins, I’m going to pull my pistol out of that old rag on the floor at my feet, and I’m going to blast you out of your saddle!”
Decker stopped his horse. Staring at Kimball from over his mount’s twitching ears, he gritted his teeth.
“Is that who the single rider was who followed you and Sartain out from town?” This from Jack Tatum, who was leaning slightly out from his saddle, staring at something amongst the tufts of sage, rocks, and small, crusty snow patches on the ground. He straightened and narrowed a suspicious eye at Kimball. “Olivia Rosen?”
“You got me?” Kimball disengaged the wagon brake. “I reckon if she wanted somethin’ decisive done about what happened to her boy and her, she might have ridden this way. She obviously wasn’t gettin’ no help in town.” He gave a phony smile. “Now, if you’ll forgive me, gentleman, I’d best be gettin’ back to the office.”
Epps put his horse directly in front of Kimball’s horse. “Where is he, Mort? Where’s he holin’ up?”
“You followed my tracks from town,” Kimball said. “They must be plain enough, then. Just keep followin’ ‘em, and you’ll run into Sartain, all right.” He shook his head. “And God help you fools when you do!”
Kimball threw his head back and laughed as he shook his reins over Sam’l’s back. As the horse lunged forward, drawing the wagon along behind, Sheriff Epps turned his horse sharply to keep from being plowed over.
“Goddamnit, Kimball,” Epps shouted as Kimball continued to laugh as though at the funniest joke he’d heard in a month of Sundays, “I done changed my mind. As soon as I get back to town, I’m gonna have the judge draw up a warrant for your arrest. You’re finished as Rio Rosa’s postmaster, you smartass old son of a buck!”
As the wagon rattled into the northeastern distance, Kimball glanced over his shoulder. “If you get back to town, you do that, Sheriff!” He laughed again, and he continued laughing as horse, wagon, and postmaster dwindled into the distance.
* * *
“What happened to me?” Olivia Rosen asked Sartain.
“Yeah,” Sartain said. “To you. What happened next...after they killed your boy?”
Olivia Rosen sat back in her chair and stared at The Revenger levelly. She spoke with an off-putting calm which was eerie, given the horror of what she related. “Lute Lawton snatched me away from little Edgar, hauled me kicking and screaming off the train, and while his men were looting the express car and robbing the passengers, he...” She stopped, loudly cleared her throat, and stared at her hands in her lap.
She looked again at Sartain, drew a deep breath as though to steel herself. “He raped me in the shrubs beside the tracks.”
Sartain felt his heart drop like a snowball.
Olivia Rosen continued with, “Then he tied me to his horse and forced me to ride with him for the next three days. He raped me repeatedly, Mister Sartain. Raped me, made me do unspeakable things. Lucky for me, I guess, that he wouldn’t allow any of the others to have me, or I would have been raped by the entire savage bunch. In fact, Lawton shot one of his own when that man challenged Lawton for me.
“Then, when he was finished with me, he simply threw me off his horse. When I looked up, I saw him aiming a revolver at me and grinning. He would have shot me, but just then the gang realized that a posse was closing on them, and rather than give away his position with the shot, Lawton laughed at me, mocking me, then holstered his pistol and rode away. I was picked up a few hours later by the posse, and some of those men brought me back to Rio Rosa.”
She glared at Sartain, almost as though she was confronting her boy’s killers, her captor, and rapist. “Lawton’s face at that last moment, as he laughed at me as though I were no more than a pathetic, starving dog in the street, is blazed into my brain, Mister Sartain. I will never forget what that man looks like. What he smells like...feels like.”
She gave a shudder, shook her hair back from her face.
“So...what is your answer, Mister Sartain? Will you help me exact vengeance for my son?”
“I made up my mind several minutes ago, Miss Rosen. I decided to help you after hearing about your boy. Hearing about what happened afterward only sealed the deal.”
Miss Rosen leaned toward him, eyes wide with determination. “Wait. There’s more to my request, Mister Sartain. I want to ride along with you. I want to be there when you kill Lawton.” She reached across the table, wrapped both hands around his right forearm, and squeezed as though she were trying to kill a snake.
Her voice was fairly quaking with emotion. “I want to be there, to see the fear in their eyes, when you kill each one of the gang. But I especially want to be there when you kill Lawton himself.”
The Cajun raised his hands. “That’s out of the question.”
“It can’t be. It’s part of the deal.”
“Miss Rosen, you would only slow me down. Besides, it’s dangerous. I’ve heard of the Lute Lawton bunch. Hell, they’re wanted nearly as bad as I am. And last I heard, there’s nigh on a dozen of them, which—”
“There are thirteen,” Miss Rosen said. “I had three days to coun
t them, to memorize their faces. There are thirteen devils running in Lawton’s pack.”
“Which means that this is going to be one very dangerous endeavor.”
“I don’t care how dangerous it is. I don’t care if I die. All I care about is being there when you kill each one of those men. Especially—”
“Yeah, I know. Especially Lute Lawton.” Sartain shook his head, obstinately. “It’s out of the question.”
“I can’t pay you in money, Mister Sartain, so—”
“I don’t do this for money, Miss Rosen.”
“I know that. I’ve followed you in the newspapers. You help those seeking revenge merely for the satisfaction of exacting it for them.”
“That’s right.”
She placed her hands on his arm again, squeezed again but not as hard as before. Her cheeks flushed slightly. It was the first time he’d seen any color in them. “If you take me along, I will pay you. I have no money, but...I will...sleep with you. Lay with you.”
Sartain looked at her skeptically.
She squeezed his arm again until it hurt. “Every night, if you want. I will please you. I know how men are. I know their needs. If there’s one thing I learned from those three days with Lute Lawton, I certainly learned about a man’s needs.”
Sartain peeled her hands off of his arm. “I am not Lute Lawton, Miss Rosen. I am not a rapist.”
“You wouldn’t be raping me. I’d be giving myself to you.”
Sartain gave a wry chuff. “It would amount to the same thing.”
Her lips trembled. Suddenly, tears shone in her eyes. Tightly, she begged, “Please!”
Sartain had just opened his mouth to speak when he spied movement out the window behind her.
“Down!” he bellowed, closing his hands over the edge of the table and ramming it into her while throwing himself over it.
Chapter 5
Miss Rosen gave a shrill scream as she flew backward in her chair, hitting the floor with a hard thud. Sartain crashed to the floor beside her, just ahead of the table.
At the same time, there was the dull ping of breaking glass. The bullet whined past Sartain’s right ear. As the slug thumped into the wood at the back of the room, there was the crack of a distant rifle.
“Goddamnit, Decker!” a man shouted. “I told you to wait for me!”
Another rifle cracked. Then another. As the bullets plunked through the windows and thudded into wood, Sartain grabbed his rifle off the floor beside him and turned to Miss Rosen cowering to his right.
“Keep your head down and crawl over to that wall and stay there!”
She nodded and snaked her body along the floor, heading for the saloon’s north wall. At the same time, Sartain racked a cartridge into his rifle’s action and began crawling quickly to the front of the room.
Outside, several rifles cracked. The bullets broke more glass out of the already broken windows and chewed wood slivers from the frames to stitch the air over Sartain’s head. The Revenger pressed his shoulder against the saloon’s front wall, left of the window.
More slugs chewed slivers from its frame while still more bullets were being hurled into the saloon from each of the three other directions. Sartain doffed his hat and edged a look around the frame of the near window.
A man dressed nearly entirely in black, with a black string tie curling back around his neck in the breeze, was on one knee behind a stock trough on the other side of the street. He raised the barrel of his Winchester repeater to cock it. Sartain poked his rifle out the window, hastily drew a bead on the man’s chest, and fired.
The man jerked back as though punched. As he dropped his rifle, he looked down at the blood geysering out of him.
Sartain fired three more rounds. When the black-clad man sagged back against the crumbling boardwalk behind him, Sartain withdrew his smoking rifle from the window and pressed his back against the wall.
As bullets continued to rain into the saloon from the other three directions, Sartain looked at Miss Rosen. She sat with her back against the window on the room’s north side. She was resting her right cheek atop her knees and was staring vacantly into space.
Despite the bullets chewing wood from the window frame above and to her right, shredding the ratty curtains and making them dance, she didn’t look one bit frightened. She almost looked at peace. She could have been lounging, bored, in a train station, waiting for a flier to pull in.
Her calm was curious, vaguely off-putting.
Beneath the crackling of the rifles outside, a man yelled, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”
The shooting dwindled to silence.
A man shouted, “Sartain?”
A pause. The shouter was awaiting a response.
When one didn’t come, the man continued, “You’re not getting out of there alive, Sartain! You might as well give yourself up! You’re only going to get Miss Rosen hurt!”
Olivia Rosen lifted her head from her knee. She looked at Sartain, tightening the muscles of her face in defiance.
Sartain motioned to her to lie flat, and she did.
He pulled his head down beneath the window and crawled under it, crabbing along the wall, heading toward the south side of the building, keeping to the room’s dense shadows. The shouter was north of the building. Not far away, judging by the volume of his voice.
“The place is surrounded, Sartain!” the man shouted again. “We got every door and window covered. You’re not going anywhere!”
Sartain glanced toward Miss Rosen. She lay flat against the base of the opposite wall. She was mostly in silhouette, but he could see her glistening eyes as she watched him.
He crawled to the south wall’s second window. He sat up and pressed his back to the wall, holding his rifle straight up and down before him. Very slowly, he chambered a round and waited.
“Sartain, do you hear me?” came the shout through the window just off Sartain’s left shoulder. “Don’t be a damn fool. You don’t want to get an innocent—”
The man stopped abruptly when Sartain turned quickly around to poke his rifle out the window. The shouter had been yelling from the window of an adobe building, an old hotel standing about twenty feet away from the saloon.
One half of the man’s torso and head were exposed. Sartain saw the sheriff’s badge on his coat. He also saw the man’s lower jaw drop and his eyes snap wide a quarter of a second before Sartain laid the Winchester’s sights on the man’s forehead just beneath the brim of his hat, and fired.
Sartain racked and fired, racked and fired, watching the bullets punch the county lawman back from the window. The sheriff fired his Winchester into the ceiling, from which bits of wood and plaster rained. As Sartain heard the sheriff hit the hotel lobby’s floor with a loud thump, he turned to press his back against the wall again.
Movement out the window on the far side of the saloon, near where Miss Rosen lay, staring. A man was stepping out of the door of the wood-frame building just beyond the window. He turned toward Sartain and snapped his rifle to his shoulder. Sartain jerked to his right as the shooter’s rifle blossomed smoke and flames.
The bullet slammed into the window casing to Sartain’s left.
The Revenger snapped his rifle to his shoulder and fired.
The shooter stumbled back against the door he’d just walked out of. “Hellkatoot!” he hollered, regaining his balance and raising his rifle once more.
Sartain racked another cartridge, aimed hastily, and fired.
The shooter’s head snapped back sharply to smack the doorframe behind him. He stood there, sort of quivering and grinding his back into the doorframe, as though he were having some sort of seizure. Sartain, who made it a habit to identify all of the local lawmen in whatever area he found himself in, recognized this man as the deputy of the Rio Rosa town marshal, Al Stanley.
Stanley opened his hands. The rifle dropped to the stoop at his feet.
The deputy, whose left eye beneath the brim of his snuff-brown Stetson
had turned to red jelly, slid slowly down the door until his head dropped out of sight. He had left a long, vertical streak of dark-red blood and white brain matter on the gray-weathered door.
Keeping his back pressed against the saloon’s south wall, Sartain slowly opened his Winchester’s breach. The spent cartridge slid out, smoking, to tumble onto the floor with a clank. Sartain could smell the rotten egg odor of cordite.
The Revenger replaced the spent shell with fresh, then, holding very still and pricking his ears, listening, he automatically plucked fresh forty-four rounds from his cartridge belt and thumbed them through the Winchester’s loading gate. When the rifle was fully loaded, he drew the hammer back and looked around.
No movement in any of the windows around him.
He looked at Olivia Rosen. She lay as before, her eyes open. For a moment, Sartain wondered if she’d taken a bullet and died, lying there, eyes open. But then she blinked.
From out in the street rose the thuds of running feet.
Sartain hurried over to the front window right of the door. Crouching, he looked out to see a man he recognized as the sheriff’s deputy, Riley Scudder, running from a break between two buildings on the other side of the street toward the saloon. The tall, lanky, bearded Scudder was holding a whiskey bottle with a rag dangling out of its neck.
Orange flames and smoke licked up from the dangling end of the rag.
Sartain poked his rifle out the window, aiming. Scudder saw him and stopped abruptly, his boots slipping a little in the remains of a dirty snowdrift. The man’s eyes widened in fear. The bottle slipped from his hands.
It broke at his feet, and the whiskey spread in a burning puddle.
Scudder gave a horrified yelp and leaped out of the flames. As he did, he raised the rifle he’d been carrying in his left hand, and switched it to his right, clumsily cocking the weapon and aiming at Sartain.
The Revenger fired just as Scudder leaped again to avoid the flames that were spreading toward him. The Revenger’s bullet tore across the upper right sleeve of the deputy’s duster. Scudder screamed again and lurched backward, triggering his Spencer repeater.
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