Hanging Fire

by Eric Red

  Sitting in her saddle, Bess took off her hat and shook her hair loose. She carefully slid out of her stirrups, placing her good leg onto solid dirt, carrying the yellow wildflowers with gentle care with both hands. It hurt to walk but she wasn’t about to use a repeater rifle as a crutch while visiting her father’s grave, because that was not respectful.

  Feeling her eyes begin to water the moment she stepped through the gate, Bess Sugarland was wiping tears by the time she reached the handsome granite headstone ten paces inside.

  NATE SUGARLAND

  Born 1837–Died 1888

  Loving father and dedicated lawman.

  It was here Bess stood, shut her eyes, and breathed her father in the smells of fresh air and mud and grass and sunlight where he rested. As always, she could smell his skin and hair and leathery scent in those natural outdoor aromas. For her, now he was near.

  And she could talk to him again.

  Somewhere her father was listening, she felt in her heart.

  So Bess spoke to him as she did when she needed to, when she came out here alone.

  “Hi, Pop. It’s me, Bess. I miss you and think of you every day. Think what you would do. Try to do what you would do. Make you proud of me. Gosh, I been U.S. Marshal of Jackson two whole months and they ain’t fired me yet. Guess I must be doing something right. It’s all the women in the council that keep me in the job, I reckon, ’cause they like having one of their own wearing a badge. Owe ’em for that, I figure. You’d have hated these ladies, Pop. Talk-too-much women always drove you crazy. But I wouldn’t be marshal without them. And I wouldn’t be anything without you, Pop. You set such a good example and were always there for me and . . . it’s hard, sometimes it’s so hard you not being here to talk to . . . and it gets so lonely like the weight of the world is all on my shoulders. Pop, you ever feel this job was too much for just one soul to handle? I feel that way sometimes, yes, I do.”

  Bess began to sniffle as she bent down and placed the pretty yellow wildflowers on Nate Sugarland’s plot, near the headstone. All of a sudden, a big cloud passed from the sun above and a wall of golden sunlight fell over the cemetery and Bess felt its warmth as if in answer. She smiled, wiped her tears, and rose.

  “I know. You always told me nobody does it alone. You had me. I had you. Then, ever since, I have Joe Noose. Yes, I do. I’m lonely today, that’s all, feeling sorry for myself, being foolish. It’s just ’cause Joe is gone. Joe will be back. And if he don’t come back, I’m gonna go after him, Pop. Because Joe Noose ain’t alone, neither. He has me.”

  Bess kissed her fingers and pressed them against the warm marble of the tombstone. Then she saddled up. Bess rode at a hard gallop away from the cemetery, shrinking in the distance as she sped in the direction of Jackson. There was an empty plot right beside her father’s. Hers when the time came.

  She wanted to be buried beside him.

  CHAPTER 12

  “You think you killed him?” It was a breathless question from Bonny Kate.

  “I don’t know,” Noose tersely retorted, lifting his head to peek over the rock around the curving, steep trailhead and the sweeping vista of forest. “Keep your head down.”

  “You think we lost ’em?” she asked querulously. “Those others behind us, I mean.”

  “Not likely.” Noose reloaded his Henry rifle, then his Colt pistol, with rounds from his belt and pockets in a clatter of rifle bolts, clink of different-caliber cartridges, and whirr of revolving cylinders. “They come this far.”

  “What are we gonna do?”

  “Stay down, I said.” Noose pulled Bonny Kate lower behind the rocks they took cover behind, away from the potential line of any fire. “What do you care? Same end for you there as here. Might be quicker for you with a bullet.”

  “Maybe I want to make the most of the time I got left. I like breathing.”

  “I do, too.”

  “So what we gonna do?”

  “This ain’t what I signed up for,” Noose groused. “This whole thing has gotten a hell of a lot more complicated than I figured. All I thought I had to worry about was you.”

  “Welcome to my world, Joe Noose.”

  “I’d like to have skipped the visit.”

  “So now you’re gonna insult me? That’s your big answer to everything when there’s bullets flying everywhere and there’s guys trying to kill us—”

  “—You. You’re the one everybody wants to kill, remember?—”

  “—Kill us because you’re with me, and all you can do is insult me instead of getting me to Idaho so they can hang me like you swore a duty to do!”

  Noose shot Bonny Kate a cocked-eyebrow scowl. “So you get killed there instead.” He shook his big head. “You don’t make no sense, lady. Nothing that comes outta your pretty mouth does.”

  Tossing her red hair like a fiery mane, Bonny Kate shot him a defiant and challenging glance. “Well, I say I prefer to be hanged, I do! If I’m gonna die then that’s the way I choose to go! A person should be able to choose their way of dyin’, I say.”

  “Don’t often work out that way.” He smirked. Noose swung his fierce bird-of-prey gaze left and right, looking up and down the pass, squinting into the blankets of trees above and below, scouting for any sign of movement. There was none for the moment. The mountains had gotten very quiet all of a sudden. Too quiet, his expression read.

  “Are you even listening to me, Joe?” Bonny Kate rolled her eyeballs in naked exasperation. “Do you hear a word I say?” She glared at him in a blaze of her intense blue eyes.

  Continuing to ignore her, Noose rubbed his stubbled jaw on his unshaven granite chin, assessing their surroundings. “Your voice carries,” he responded in a preoccupied voice—still thinking, now deciding.

  “I ask you again,” the lady outlaw said quieter as she caught her breath and regained a semblance of composure even as she switched her glances around herself skittishly. “What are we going to do?” she half whispered, half hissed.

  “We’re going to get off the pass, is what we’re going to do.”

  At that, she just gaped, looking awestruck up at the sheer rock faces and perpendicular slopes rising into cyclopean peaks of rugged, untamed wilderness. The trail they were on was primitive and dangerous enough, but the uncharted woodlands rising on all sides appeared completely impassable. “How?” Bonny Kate choked.

  “Didn’t say it would be easy.” Noose took the woman by the hand and pulled her away from the stack of boulders, both of them crawling on their hands and knees, deeper into the woods away from the trailhead, until they were out of view of anyone who might want to take a shot at them. Then, when they reached safe cover, Noose rose to his feet, clicked his teeth, and Copper trotted over beside him. Bonny Kate’s Appaloosa remained standing near the trail, uneasy and shifting from hoof to hoof. Noose, good with horses, spent a few minutes gently whistling to it and making eye contact, and finally, reluctantly, the other horse advanced and stood beside Copper. The lady outlaw carefully got to her feet and brushed the dirt and gravel off her skirts. She was still scared out of her wits.

  “Saddle up,” Noose barked, picking up Bonny Kate by both shapely hips and depositing her onto her horse. Then he got a boot in his stirrup and swung into the saddle of his own bronze stallion. Keeping the Henry rifle ready for action in one fist, he gripped the reins tightly in the other and rode out in front into the woods.

  Noose reined Copper to the edge of the gravel trail where it met the grassy, muddy mountainside. Tilting back his hat, he studied the topography of the incline between the trees, charting a possible trail. “Think I can see a way through this first part at least.”

  “Our horses can’t—they won’t make it.”

  “They don’t, we don’t.”

  The woman was speechless. He rode up alongside her and looked her square in the eye, his voice calm and steady. “Look, Bonny Kate. Listen good. We’re sitting ducks back there on the trail out there in the open. The sheriff and his p
osse back there, they’re gonna figure we’re ahead on the trail because nobody in their right mind would ride up into these hard mountains.”

  “Nobody in their right mind would.”

  “So they’ll keep following the trail and I don’t think they’ll follow us. Don’t even think they’ll know where we went. Keep in mind they’re strangers here. Men unfamiliar with this country. I’m not. We get a little lucky, our horses don’t break their legs, I best believe we can forge a trail up through this hairy range.”

  “Okay, okay.” She nodded, studying him with growing confidence. “With Bojack that may work. But he ain’t the only one gunning for us. There’s Johnny Cisco. What about him?”

  Noose just shrugged in response. “I don’t know. Got no measure of the man except he’s a crack shot. You know him better than me. He a good tracker?”

  “He’s a good everything. You’re tough. He’s tougher.”

  “Suppose we’ll find that out and see what we’ll see. Meantime, savvy we need to get our behinds off this trail directly and up into those hills. It ain’t gonna be a picnic. I need your cooperation. Do I have it?”

  She nodded. “Yes. You do. Lead the way.”

  “Don’t put a bullet in my back.”

  “I don’t have a gun.”

  “Wouldn’t put it past you to keep one somewhere nobody would look.”

  Bonny Kate laughed coarsely, loud and pleased. “You make me laugh, Joe Noose.” She turned her horse to follow him as he flipped the reins and started up a narrow hundred-degree draw off the pass and into the mountains. “Don’t think I ain’t done it in the past, mind you,” she quipped.

  “I wouldn’t put it past ya.”

  “Thing was, the whore that taught me that trick, one day she farted and the gun went off and she’s doing different work now.”

  It was Joe Noose’s turn to laugh.

  Their horses disappeared into the upper elevations of the tree line as their laughter shrank into the distance, carried away by the wind.

  * * *

  The posse was not far behind.

  Back less than a quarter of a mile east below their quarry on the winding declination of track carved out of the mountain and tracing the edge of the gorge, the Arizona sheriff and his three deputies cautiously rode their weary horses around a sheer cliff wall, moving at a slow trot, guns drawn and held at the ready, anticipating shots to come in their direction at any moment as they rounded the towering bend in the rough-hewn trail. Bojack rode in the lead, letting his men know he was the first to take a bullet if any had their name on it. His hard, keen eyes were fixed straight ahead, studying the imposing mountain face beyond as more of it was revealed to his field of view around the corner of the granite wall they rounded; the marshal could be anywhere, lying in wait, targeting them now, for all the sheriff knew. He was ready, but a man could be only so ready. Because his attention was fully focused on what lay ahead, Bojack did not see his three perspiring deputies, Jed Ransom, Fulton Dodge, and Clay Slayton, exchanging furtive and doubtful glances on the horses straggling behind his own.

  “I ain’t so sure about this, Sheriff,” Deputy Jed Ransom finally piped up.

  “Sure about what?” Bojack shot back.

  “All of it, sir . . . This.”

  “Didn’t your mama teach you English, Deputy? You got something to say, spit it the hell out.” Sheriff Bojack gave Ransom the side-eye as the posse struggled to get their horses up the narrow draw, one behind the other. The footing was treacherous, and the loose rocks and pebbles toppled under their stallions’ tentative steps. Fact was, Bojack knew what was on Deputy Ransom’s mind. It was the same thing on all of his men’s minds the last few hours, from the doubtful, worried looks and glances Ransom, Dodge, and Slayton gave one another when they thought Bojack wasn’t looking. From the whispers that had started when they thought he was wasn’t listening or too far ahead. Hell, Waylon Bojack heard everything. Had been blessed with sharp ears ever since he was a kid. It was a blessing and a curse: a blessing when he was tracking a villain and could hear a twig crack at four hundred yards, a curse when he could easily overhear the dissension in the ranks of his deputies as he had been clearly overhearing now—the hushed talk had been getting worse the last few hours since Ned Hodge had been gunned down in front of them and death became real. Then Billy Joe Shaker’s bloody demise little more than an hour later made it even realer.

  The surviving deputies were facing the genuine prospect that some of them might not make it home, and the fun and games were over. If Sheriff Bojack had been deaf as a post, he could not have helped but feel the tightening garrote of tension in air. Best just deal with it. Get it all out in the open. Let them air their concerns. These deputies were good men. His men. He owed them that much.

  “Speak your mind, Mr. Ransom,” the lawman said, pulling up his horse.

  They all cast furtive glances up and around at the their towering surroundings, walls of granite and slate and conifer, but the area seemed secluded enough that they were safe for the moment . . . safe enough to talk.

  The Arizona posse pulled their horses into a tight circle formation and kept their voices down by professional training and habit.

  Ransom tugged off his hat and wiped dirty sweat from his brow, his blue-eyed honest and direct gaze looking Bojack respectfully in the eye. The sheriff liked the young man and knew he was his natural successor, as his late son, Jim, should have been. The deputy spoke respectfully, choosing his words. “Sheriff, speaking for myself, I think we may be making a big mistake here.”

  Bojack just watched the younger man spit the words out with an unblinking eagle-eyed stare over his gray beard—plainly, the old man was listening and giving the boy his full attention but wasn’t going to make it easy for him.

  Ransom went on. “Sheriff, sir, we need to rethink this. That girl outlaw is being taken to be hanged and the deputy marshal taking her there is a man who knows his business. Justice is being served. I know you got good reason to be the man that pulls the trigger and ends her life, sir.” Deputies Dodge and Slayton nodded their agreement. “We all know that, because of what she done to Jim. But we’re breaking the law here. And we’re out of our jurisdiction. And we’re a long way from home. And mostly, we already lost Ned Hodge and Billy Joe Shaker. Two of us are dead.” Ransom broke Bojack’s gaze and swiveled his head to regard Slayton and Dodge in the posse, his steady face bearing a grim expression. “And I’m—we’re—getting a bad feeling about this.”

  Screwing his hat back on his head, Deputy Ransom shrugged, his piece said. His body language said he couldn’t speak for the others but that was how he felt. Bojack saw the other deputies’ eyes were on Ransom, not himself, so he spoke up. “You all know who Bonny Kate Valance is. You all know what the woman is. Seen it firsthand. Let’s say she doesn’t get to that hanging. Let’s say she shoots that deputy marshal who is of use to her now, protecting her against us. You know how this witch thinks. The first thing Valance will do when she thinks her ass is safe from us is kill that tough hombre she got protecting her and make her escape.”

  Looking at his men, Waylon Bojack saw doubt and uncertainty mingled with a return of the purposeful sense of mission they had started out with. He was getting through to them and suppressed a smile. “Let me point out to you men, if I need to remind you, another Goddamn good reason we gotta finish her.” The Sheriff pointed up into the mountains to the east, where the last shot had come from. “Johnny Cisco is up there trying to rescue her, come all this way after busting out of our jail, and we all know how dangerous this man is. We all know if Bonny Kate don’t kill that deputy marshal then her lover boy most surely will—unless we’re here to stop it and kill both of those outlaws first instead.”

  The posse of lawmen nodded—everyone except the one deputy who spoke up. Ransom just listened with a circumspect expression. Bojack settled his gaze on the young man and addressed him evenly. “Yes, Mr. Ransom, we are breaking the law. But there is what’
s legal and there is what is just and what needs to be done. Right and wrong is real simple in this here situation. What is wrong is Bonny Kate keeping her life. What is wrong is her getting away and living happily ever after with Cisco. What is wrong is them murdering that marshal up there. What’s right is us making sure that doesn’t happen. What’s right is making her dead and making sure she stays dead. What’s right is Bonny Kate Valance gone from this world.”

  “What if we wind up killing that marshal?” Ransom pointed out. “How is that right, sir?”

  Sheriff Bojack’s eyes clouded for he had no ready answer. Instead, after a pause, he said, “One thing I know is the same as you all do for damn sure . . . Bonny Kate Valance ain’t got no intention of getting hanged. That degenerate outlaw means to slip the noose. She’ll do what she has to do unless we stop her. It’s up to us. Each man here.”

  Sheriff Bojack looked his deputies in the eye, one by one. One by one they nodded—Slayton, Dodge, even, finally, Jed Ransom.

  Away they rode.

  CHAPTER 13

  She was full of surprises and he wondered what else she had in store for him.

  Joe Noose had suspected Bonny Kate Valance would be a mouthy handful the two days he had to get her over the pass but never doubted he could handle one unarmed woman. He’d expected her to try to make a break for it but she hadn’t tried to escape yet. This surprised him because it was the first thing he expected her to do. What he hadn’t been expecting was a posse of lawmen vigilantes all the way from Arizona to complicate things, let alone this rifleman trying to help her escape. A lot of surprises for one day. His plate was full with this woman.