Hanging Fire

by Eric Red

  Joe Noose grinned savagely, knowing the outlaws were unhorsed. They were trapped in town in his killing range and none of them was getting out of here alive.

  Hearing the barrage of gunfire coming in a steady fusillade from the gunfighters who had taken cover behind a row of barrels and crates on the sidewalk, Noose ducked into the open barn where one horse remained.

  Copper looked happy to see him.

  * * *

  It was Comstock who first saw the last horse bolt out of the corral. The ragged outlaw saw the bronze stallion come galloping through the gate, fully saddled, and knew it was his damn lucky day. The horse looked magnificently golden as if it were armored in metal, and the steed was fifty yards off, coming his way, hooves kicking up dirt, so the hired gun broke cover and ran to intercept it. It was the last horse in town, his one chance. Comstock was hurt bad, his side bleeding all over the place from the marshal’s bullet that had just broken his ribs, but this horse was his ticket out—the coward pushed past the pain as he ran flat-footed in his bloody cowboy boots, holstering his near-empty pistol and reaching out both desperate hands ahead of him for that big saddle and pommel so he wouldn’t miss his chance. Behind him, Comstock heard the angry yells and curses of Bonny Kate and the rest of the gang and with every step toward that hard-charging horse he expected a bullet in the back but it never came. This gunfighter Noose was too damn dangerous and it was every man for himself if any of them were going to get out of here alive. The stallion was coming straight for him and Comstock’s eyes were singularly focused on that saddle nearly within reach of his big mitts and then he felt leather in his hands and had good hold of the saddle as the horse galloped past. Using the steed’s charging velocity to heave himself off the ground, the outlaw dug a spurred boot into the stirrup and swung a leg over the other side of the saddle, the physical stress of this activity and sitting upright sending a stab of agony through the bullet wound in his side as his busted ribs ground together. But then Comstock was on the horse, galloping the hell out of the meat grinder the town had become, and for a blessed second or two he felt relief.

  Until he looked over the left side of the horse and saw Noose clinging to that side of the saddle where he had been hiding, looking Comstock straight up in the eye right up the barrel of a Winchester lever-action repeater he one-handed aimed right between his eyes.

  The last thing Comstock saw and heard was the explosive muzzle flash that loosed the .45 caliber round that blew a hole through the front of his face and took the back of his skull off, ejecting him from the saddle, but his boot caught in the saddle so instead of flying off the horse he hit the ground like a bag of meat and was dragged by the one shattered leg at full gallop down the gravel-and-dirt street, smearing a snail trail of bright red blood and brains in his wake like a stripe of red paint.

  Bonny Kate saw the whole thing from her hiding place with her three surviving gang behind the barrels and started cussing in frustrated rage, watching from her place of concealment the fast horse dragging her second-best man like a tattered rag doll—

  —until she realized the horse was now in full view as it passed the barrels and crates on the street, which meant she and her men were now exposed on the boardwalk, which was Joe Noose’s plan all along.

  Right as Noose swung upside down beneath the horse from his perch on the other side of the saddle, Comanche-style, opening fire with his Winchester rifle, blasting and levering off round after round at Bonny Kate and her three gunfighters, who were hit by a storm of lead slugs fired between the stallion’s legs by Noose as he rode past.

  Varney took three in the chest and was flung backward through the window of the grocery store, his chest blossoming like rose bushes as he collapsed inside in a shower of shattering glass fragments, dead as it gets.

  A little quicker than the rest because she saw it coming a fraction of a second earlier than her men did, Bonny Kate flattened herself against the boardwalk footboards.

  Hanging upside down under Copper, his legs gripping the side of the saddle, Joe Noose aimed under his bronze horse’s belly at the figures blurring past on the sidewalk, making a split-second decision. His shot at the woman wasn’t clean so he levered and jacked another round into the chamber and shot dead-eyed into the biggest target—the fat outlaw’s big belly.

  Spewing a mouthful of blood, the obese Mad Cow Hondo looked down at his blown-out stomach spilling all over his boots and it was a mess as his shotgun barrel dropped in his hand as his finger tightened on the trigger by reflex, blowing both his own feet off as the scattergun emptied into the ground.

  Cocking his pump shotgun Jim Gannon showed some guts at least as he broke cover and ran out into the street, diving onto the ground to get a clean shot at the man under the horse running past. As he drew a bead, catching a glimpse of Noose before Gannon could pull the trigger, there was a flash of lightning from the upside-down marshal’s weapon. The single. 45 round drilled through the top of the outlaw’s skull into his brain like an oil derrick gushing blood instead of crude, and Gannon’s face sank in a puddle of it.

  Bonny Kate watched her last man die in the dust.

  Her eyes were ice-cold.

  Her gun was loaded.

  Down the notches of her pistol, Noose was dead to rights. It was an easy shot.

  She aimed at the horse.

  * * *

  As the bullet slammed into Copper, the horse let out a bellow of pain and fell violently sideways. Noose was tossed from his precarious perch on the saddle and hit the ground hard at the speed of a full gallop. The world spun around and around as he saw his beloved horse toppling onto the ground and lying on its side in the middle of the street in the settling dust.

  “Nooooooooo!” Noose screamed.

  The sound of his own scream strange to his ears, Noose staggered upright on his boots only to stumble down to one knee beside his wounded stallion. Without realizing it, Noose had automatically drawn his gun, prepared to put his horse down if a mercy killing was required. Noose wasn’t a praying man but he prayed the gunshot wound was not fatal—fingers feeling, touching, tracing the blood, finding where the bullet hole was.

  Not a head wound. Good, the horse wasn’t dead.

  Not a leg wound. Good, not lamed.

  It had been just the one shot.

  Noose felt around Copper’s huge, panting, shivering, prone mass until finally he located the bullet wound under the pad of his fingertip. It was a shoulder wound: big, messy, and seeping—but not life threatening. Copper wasn’t going to die. It would take a good veterinarian but his horse would eventually recover. Noose willed it to be so.

  Shooting a fearsome glance over his fallen steed, Noose caught a quick flash of a flapping shirt as Bonny Kate Valance ducked out of there around the corner of the building toward the town square.

  Perfect, thought Joe Noose savagely, run toward the gallows, and the thought curled his mouth as a cruel smile came to his lips. Because that’s where this ends, lady.

  “Good boy,” Noose said softly, reassuringly patting Copper, who looked miserably up at him. The horse’s breath came in panting gasps. “You’re gonna be fine. Gonna get you fixed up. Right as rain. Just got to leave you for a few minutes then I’m coming right back. You got my word on it, old friend.”

  Noose cocked his Colt Peacemaker.

  “Got me a piece of business I got to put paid to.”

  Noose stood and strode like a force of nature in the direction the female outlaw fled.

  Entering the town square alone, Noose reloaded his revolver, standing in plain view.

  The street was empty.

  Nearby, the gallows stood tall and grim, austere in the blowing dust around the creaking wood platform. The rope noose swung in the wind.

  Hefting his gun, Noose switched his keen gaze in both directions, looking left and right.

  A shot rang out and a bullet clipped his arm, tearing a rip in his shirt. Noose quickly ducked behind a wood pile by the boardwalk. Gripping hi
s pistol with the long barrel up by his face, he snuck a peek through the piled wood and saw movement in the empty square.

  Bonny Kate Valance stepped out from behind some barrels, holding a little pigtailed girl across her chest as a body shield. One of her hands clutched the sobbing kid by the throat, the other clenched a Winchester rifle with the muzzle pressed against the girl’s head. The lady outlaw walked boldly out in the open in the middle of the square near the gallows.

  Bonny Kate’s eyes were wide with vicious, savage fury. “Come on, Joe! Shoot me! Go ahead! You’ll hit the girl, though! ’Cause even you ain’t that good a shot!”

  Joe Noose stepped out, his empty hands raised, his holsters empty. “Let her go, Bonny Kate. Even a woman as low as you don’t want to kill no child.”

  Jamming the barrel of the rifle harder against the little girl’s skull, the feral female gunslinger used the muzzle to describe circles in her hair. Bonny Kate grinned sadistically, her lips sickeningly moist. “Oh, Joe, you ain’t got a brain in your head. I killed lotsa kids. Age don’t matter to me none. Hell, I shot my big sister when I was no bigger than this young ’un is. Let me see those hands. Up.”

  Raising them higher, Noose fixed his gaze on the piece of the side of Bonny Kate’s head that showed behind the bawling, hysterical child’s face.

  That was when Bonny Kate Valance made her move. She was quick, almost too quick, as she swung the barrel down from the kid’s head in a straight, lowering, swift arc, aiming it across the space at Noose’s chest—and as she did her head moved an inch out from behind the little girl’s and when that happened Noose dropped to a crouch, his hand whipping behind his back to his belt where he had his Colt Peacemaker stowed and hidden—he had his gun out, fanned, and fired so fast Bonny Kate never had time to get a shot off before his .45 caliber lead slug drilled a bloody red trench along the left side of the lady outlaw’s head and blew her left ear off in a gory shower of flesh.

  With a horrific high-pitched screech of horror, Bonny Kate Valance was blown off her feet and hit the ground hard. She dropped the little girl, who landed in a screaming heap. The child had not been hit. By then Noose was on the move, running as fast as his boots could carry him for the helpless child, his revolver aimed straight-trained on Bonny Kate, careful not to fire and hit the kid. Wailing like a banshee, Bonny Kate clutched the side of her head, holding on to the ragged stump of skin that was all that remained of her shot-off ear, her tousled red hair glistening with redder wet blood, trying to hold the ear that wasn’t there on, and she had already grabbed the Winchester rifle off the dusty ground, had her finger around the trigger, and loosed an enraged shot at the oncoming Joe Noose. “You took my ear! You took my ear, you dirty, miserable son of a bitch!”

  He was at least twenty paces from the little girl in the cloth dress up on the ground, covering her head and screaming—the dress was splattered with blood but Noose saw it was from Bonny Kate and the child had not been hit.

  Not yet.

  The first rifle shot buzzed past his face as he ran, so close he felt the wind of the passing slug.

  Noose dodged left to right in a zigzag movement to throw Bonny Kate’s aim as she levered the repeater rifle with the bloody hand she pulled away from her head, loaded, and fired again just as Noose veered in the other direction, coming on relentlessly. Taking aim with his Colt Peacemaker, Noose saw he had a clean shot as the lady outlaw on the ground wormed her way across the dirt, bending at the waist, inching herself toward the safety of the alley while she levered the Winchester again—he fired, but missed, the bullet exploding an inch from her head, showering her bloodied, twisted face with pebbles, and when he aimed again it was at her boots scrambling behind the alley wall.

  It was a clean shot—Noose could have blown both of Bonny Kate’s feet clean off at the ankles and that would have slowed her progress some and she’d have bled out and died in minutes—but he had a split-second decision to make: he had reached the little girl and all he could think of was getting her to safety—the child was out of the line of fire for a few seconds while the lady outlaw pulled herself into the alley, and if Noose was going to get the kid out of there it had to be now.

  Scooping the little girl up off the ground in his arm, he holstered his pistol and covered her with his other big, muscled arm and upper body, turning his broad back on Bonny Kate in the alley and, with the rescued kid, running for all he was worth for the safety of an open barn a hundred yards away.

  He might get shot, but his body would shield the little girl from any bullets the lady outlaw fired, though just the same Noose hoped he wouldn’t be on the receiving end of any—that depended on how fast he ran and he ran fast indeed, reaching the barn in fifteen seconds and tossing the little body through the door onto a bale of hay shielded from gunfire as Bonny Kate’s first bullet rang out right as he dived chest first to the ground and slid and rolled twenty feet behind the wood pile where he had left his other guns a few minutes before.

  Leaning against the cords of lumber, Noose quickly knocked out his empty shells and slammed fresh loads into his Colt Peacemaker. He had two rounds. Then he was out of bullets.

  Bonny Kate had a lot more weapons. And on the other side of the square, an easy walk or crawl to her dead gang and their weapons that she could take from them. The lady outlaw’s voice shouted from across the square: “You took my ear, you no-good bastard! ”

  “You shot my horse, bitch!” Noose hollered back.

  “I was aiming at you!”

  “The hell you was!”

  “That’s no way to treat a lady, shooting her ear off !”

  “You’re a lot of things but you ain’t no lady!”

  “You shot my ear off and messed my looks up permanent and I’m gonna settle up proper with you for that, bet your ass on it, you son of a bitch!”

  “You got a date with the noose today, Bonny Kate. I mean to see you keep it.”

  “Want to repeat that? Can’t hear so good outta my left ear.”

  “You heard me just fine!”

  “That noose ain’t around my neck yet! It’s down to just us now, Noose! Just me and you! Been a busy two days! You killed that Arizona sheriff and his boys! You killed Cisco. You killed Tuggle and all my boys here. You killed everybody but me! You hear me, Joe Noose? I said you ain’t killed me! The butcher’s bill ain’t been settled!”

  “The bitch’s bill is about to get settled and I’m putting paid on it!”

  “I’ll see you in hell, Joe Noose!”

  Noose clenched his revolver and listened, taking cover behind the chunks of lumber. No bullets came his way. He didn’t hear her voice anymore. It was too quiet. As the seconds ticked by, Noose no longer sensed her presence in close proximity and sensed she had changed her position to a more advantageous one. Bonny Kate Valance was smart and only a fool would underestimate her. Joe Noose was no fool, but that would not make him any less dead if he didn’t stay one step ahead of his deadlier-than-male quarry.

  He checked the loads in his pistol. Two bullets left. His belts were empty.

  He knew that Bonny Kate would be counting his bullets—know he was down to a couple rounds. The only way to rearm was grab the guns and ammo off the dead gang members, but the lady outlaw had positioned herself between Noose and those weapons and already rearmed herself.

  Where was she?

  Two shots. Make ’em count.

  Peering through the space in the pile of lumber, Noose saw the town square was quiet and still. No sign of anybody. His eyes narrowed as he surveyed the surrounding buildings. Nobody on any of the rooftops.

  Nothing moved but the empty noose on the hanging rope dangling from the yardarm of the gallows platform, slowly swinging back and forth like a pendulum in the breeze.

  Noose needed an overview of his surroundings. He needed to get the high ground.

  There was only one place.

  Noose ascended the gallows.

  The shadow of the rope fell across his face. />
  CHAPTER 35

  Crawling up the ten wooden steps on all fours in a quick crab walk, Joe Noose flattened himself on the wooden planks of the gallows near the trap door and lever. He was twelve feet off the ground—the height the contraption was built to allow for the drop so the tallest man’s feet would not touch the ground, allowing their broken, stretched neck sometimes added a foot to their height. Noose knew he could not be seen from the town square and intersecting streets, just from the hotel across the street but nobody was up there. He could see, though. Lying on his belly, he had a 360-degree vantage point on the surrounding town.

  Cocking the hammer of the Colt Peacemaker in his fist, he watched the cylinder rotate the first of the last of the two rounds into the chamber with a solid click. Keeping the barrel pointed ahead, his fist clenching the stock on the planks, his other fist clutching his gun hand’s wrist to steady his arm, Joe Noose kept his eyes peeled on the lookout for Bonny Kate Valance to show herself. She was out there somewhere.

  The deafening pistol shot was so close and loud it caught Noose completely unawares as the fist-sized hole exploded through the planks of the gallows . . . from below! Sawdust sprayed him but the slug just missed.

  Rolling desperately out of the way, Noose caught a flash of movement of colored cloth in the gap between the planks and fired his gun at it. It was answered by a second shot up through the planks from Bonny Kate Valance, who had ambushed him from below, and this one clipped Joe Noose on the elbow and he leapt to his feet and fired his last round down at the hidden, unseen lady outlaw positioned beneath the gallows. The slug punched a big hole in the floor planks on the platform and showered splintered wood.

  When he heard her merry laugh, he knew he had missed.

  Noose crouched on the gallows platform and pulled the trigger of his Colt Peacemaker, knowing it was wasted effort.