“Who in their right mind faces down the fastest gun hand in the entire West?” Rollie puffed out his chest. For the first time Luke saw him up close and realized how short the man was. That added to the false image of the killer being boyish, younger than he was. While much of his face was still hidden in shadow because Rhoades had chosen to put his back to the growing dawn, tiny wrinkles showed at the corners of his eyes. He had to be ten years older than Luke. That made him old, really old, in his forties.
Luke tensed at that revelation. Nobody rode the outlaw trail as long as Rhoades and reached such an advanced age by being careless. Or stupid.
“You and me. We shoot it out,” Luke said.
“Why not? It’ll do my reputation good that I cut down a man trying to steal another’s wife a second time.” Rhoades shrugged and moved his hand to rest on his holster.
Luke saw the tension in the man’s fingers, curling slightly, but none in his face. The mocking smile remained. And those eyes bored straight through to his soul.
“You keep saying that. I don’t know what you mean. I’m here to take my wife back.”
Luke sensed rather than saw the outlaw draw. Never in all his born days had Luke witnessed a man with such snakelike speed. Rollie Rhoades cleared the holster and brought his gun up before Luke began his draw. A white puff of smoke curled from Rhoades’s muzzle. Luke winced as the bullet ripped past his head, cutting the top of his ear.
Then his far slower hand pulled out his Schofield. The world moved as if everything had moved underwater. He saw with utter clarity where he wanted to aim, to shoot his round. His gun slipped free, his hand thrust out and he fanned off a shot. He imagined he watched the leaden slug make its way through the air and Rhoades’s vest turn inward in just the size of a .45 caliber bullet. The cloth stretched on Rhoades’s chest began to turn red with blood. The outlaw took a step back and then crumpled, as if his legs turned to water.
Before the other gunman hit the ground, the world snapped back for Luke. He lowered the aim to the writhing outlaw. Rhoades moaned. If his eyes had been open, Luke could not have stopped himself from putting a bullet between them. Those dead pits remained hidden, and that saved his life.
“You shot Rollie. That’s not good,” Audrey said, coming up behind him.
He batted her hand away from the pistol holstered in the gun belt dangling from his shoulder.
“You’ll hurt yourself,” he said, knowing that wasn’t what he meant at all. He stared hard at her. “What’d he mean that I was stealing another man’s wife? You’re not married to him, are you?”
If she’d said yes there’d have been no way to stop him from putting five more slugs into the outlaw’s body.
“Don’t be silly. Rollie’s not the marrying kind. We were in cahoots, and I double-crossed him. That’s all. We were in business together. Our spell in Chicago never went beyond him forcing me to fleece marks.”
Luke hardly believed that.
“He forced you to steal for him, isn’t that it?”
“He—”
The thunder of a galloping horse spun him around. He saw the rider coming on strong. Luke raised his six-gun but the rider opened fire first. His Winchester barked harshly and tore a new hole in the cabin wall.
“Get in. Now. Get in!” Luke shoved Audrey so hard she stumbled and fell. He stepped over her, grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and heaved. Muscles protested and his leg threatened to give way, but he got her out of the line of fire. Three more bullets tore through the dawn.
He put his weight against the flimsy door and shoved it shut. It fit even more poorly than before. The top hinge had pulled free, causing the door to sag and leave a large gap. He used this space to peer out. The rider halted amid a cloud of dirt and rocks kicked up by his horse’s hooves. Through the dim light and debris floating in the air came a face that had haunted Luke’s nightmares for long months.
“Benedict!”
“Mal? Is that Mal?” Audrey tried to push past. He batted her away. She stumbled back into the cabin and sat in a rickety chair by the table.
“Stay down. He’ll blow your head off, given half a chance.” Luke poked his six-gun through the gap and got off a couple shots. He spooked Benedict’s horse and forced the outlaw away from his boss, who still moaned on the ground. Where Crazy Water Benedict had taken refuge was something of a mystery since there wasn’t any obvious hiding place nearby.
“I know. That’s the way he is.”
He hardly paid attention to her. He feared shifting his attention for even a split second gave the killer a chance to rush the cabin. As the sky lightened with dawn, Benedict’s hiding place would be obvious. All Luke had to do was stay alive long enough to pull the trigger. He pulled his pistol back and broke it open. Four spent rounds. He ejected them and reloaded, then stuck the gun into his holster.
He had three captured six-shooters to empty before returning to his trusty Schofield. If luck favored him as it had in the gunfight with Rhoades, all he’d need was a single shot.
As if refuting his optimism, wet rivers ran down his neck and soaked into his shirt. He touched his ear and cried out in pain. Rhoades’s bullet had ripped off the top of his ear. A fraction of an inch to the left would have blown his brains out.
“I was doubly lucky,” he muttered. “I’d better not be running low now.”
“You make your own luck,” Audrey said somewhat bitterly. “That’s why I always end up like this.”
“We’ll get away. I shot Rhoades, didn’t I? You said he was fast, and he was. His aim was off just enough. Mine wasn’t.” He dabbed at the blood still flowing from his blown-off ear. It had been a dull ache. Now sharp pain lanced into his head, causing his vision to blur enough to throw off his aim.
Audrey came over. He thought she wanted to patch him up. Instead, she stood on tiptoe and looked out.
“Yup, you ventilated Rollie real good. But he’s still alive. See how he’s crawling away?”
Luke drew a bead but shooting a man, even Rollie Rhoades, in the back as he crawled off wasn’t in him. He saw where the road agent tried to take cover. In the growing light he saw a small woodpile. This had to be where Benedict had taken cover.
He ran his sleeve over his lips. Nerves got to him now. Facing Rhoades had come fast and the gunfight ended even faster, not giving him time to think about it. Now he realized how much depended on him. He was all shot up, weaker than a newborn kitten, not seeing clearly, and more than his own life depended on getting away. He had come to the end of his hunt and found his wife.
“Can you knock out a board in the back wall and get away? No, no, don’t do that. You’d be on foot. If Benedict is here, too, the others in the gang are roaming around and would catch you.”
“They intended to kill the rest of the gang and keep the gold for themselves,” Audrey said. “Since Mal’s out there now, the others are dead.”
Hornets buzzed in his brain. He tried to make sense of her words. A certain logic warned him he missed something, but Audrey had to be right. The only roadblock between them and a life together crouched behind the woodpile. That obstacle’s name was Crazy Water Benedict. And he was going to kill him rather than run away.
“He’ll find you, no matter where you run,” Audrey said, as if reading his mind. “One or the other of you’s got to die.”
Luke poked his captured six-gun out and sighted in just above where Rhoades still inched toward safety. He fired at the same instant that Benedict popped up, only the outlaw appeared on the far side of the woodpile. One rifle bullet after another blasted splinters from the door. Luke emptied the six-gun, dropped it and drew another. By the time he chanced to look out again, he saw Benedict looking over the woodpile at his boss.
“Pull me to safety, Mal. I can’t move anymore. It’s gettin’ dark, cold.”
“Won’t be that way where you’re g
oing, Rollie.” Crazy Water Benedict leaned over the woodpile and fired point-blank into Rhoades’s back. The outlaw leader jerked once and died, his spine blown into smithereens.
Luke tried to do the same to Benedict. All six shots went low, into the wood barricade. He tossed the pistol down and drew the third one. By the time he had it in action, Benedict had disappeared. Audrey pressed close to him, peering over his shoulder. She chuckled.
“Mal took him out. That’s more for us.”
He started to ask her to reload the pistols he had dropped, then thought better of it. He hesitated to give her a loaded gun. He tucked the one he used into his belt and reloaded the ones he had dropped. One took its final six cartridges. The other from the belt slung over his shoulder had several more reloads left. Still, he and Audrey were pinned in the cabin, whether she was right or not about Benedict killing the rest of the gang.
No matter the truth in that, he had killed Rollie Rhoades.
“It was an act of decency I didn’t expect from him,” Luke finally said. “There wasn’t any way Rhoades survived the bullet I put into his chest.” He traced the piece of shrapnel in his own chest. His finger left bloody tracks. His ear wound still dribbled a stream of blood. It refused to cake over properly to stanch the flow.
“I need to patch up my ear,” he said.
“Why bother?” She took a quick look over his shoulder. “Mal is a tricky snake. He’ll think of something pretty quick. He’s not going to let you go.”
After killing his boss, Benedict had a soaring taste for blood. What she said was too true. Worse, she seemed to know how Benedict reacted. Their time together couldn’t be a good thing.
Luke looked at the roof. He saw slivers of pale blue sky through it now. Sunrise betrayed how leaky that roof was. Bits of grass and mud showed where someone had done a poor job of patching it. The first real rain washed away the attempted repairs. Luke wished for rain about now to prevent an obvious tactic. A torch tossed onto the roof would send the entire cabin up in flames.
“With Rhoades dead, Benedict’s not likely to toss dynamite in here.” Luke realized he spoke out loud. “He’s not the kind to enjoy explosions. His tastes run more to watching a man die.”
“Rollie enjoyed his explosions, that I’ll grant him,” Audrey said. She stared at Luke, her expression unreadable. He vowed to never play poker with her. She cleared her throat and said, “I can go out and dicker with him. He won’t shoot me. At least, I don’t think he will.” She tried to push past, but he shoved her away from the door.
“He killed a man he rode with for years. If you’re right, he did it to get a bigger share of the gold. It must be a small mountain for him to turn on his partner like that.”
“Mal’s not a man to understand. He operates on, what do they call it? He operates on impulse. If something hits him right, he does it.” She gave her little chuckle. “If something hits him wrong, he does it, too. There’s never much thought that goes into anything he does.”
Luke spun the cylinders in his captured six-guns and then checked his own pistol, more to keep busy than because he doubted everything carried a full load. He took the time then to tie his bandanna around his head, pressing his bloody ear to the side of his head. The rag absorbed enough blood to glue it to his hair. For the first time since Rhoades shot him, the bleeding stopped.
“You really have gold dust all sewed up in your coat? Take it off and show me. I’ll open one of the seams, just to be sure it’s all there.”
“From the railroad,” he said. His belly turned over. Head spinning, he worried that the eggs she had cooked for him were bad. It was always better to sop up the yolk with a biscuit. He tried to remember Audrey ever fixing a meal. He sank to the floor when his legs gave way.
“You’re in a bad way,” she said. She stood.
“Stay there. Where you are. Sit in the chair. Table.” He lifted the gun in a surprisingly steady grip. He felt as if one foot kicked dirt into his own grave, yet he drew a bead on his wife. That made no sense, but nothing made sense to him right now.
“There’s no need to go all crazy on me.”
“Crazy. Crazy Water. That’s what they call him. Because of the drugs in his water that turn him loco.”
“I got a bottle of his popskull around here. You want a sip? It’s not for the weak-spirited. Mal drinks with the best of ’em, and you don’t have the look of a man able to hold his liquor.”
“Sit!” Luke cocked the six-gun and pointed it at her. He edged up, using the wall as a support. Something worried him. It took a few seconds for him to figure it out. “Where’s Benedict? He stopped shooting.”
“I told you. Mal’s sneaky. He might have shot Rollie as a diversion, then snuck off to do something else. Rollie was the one who enjoyed blowing things up, but Mal can be a quick learner. Maybe he found some of Rollie’s dynamite.”
Luke snapped his legs stiff and walked around the cabin perimeter, looking through cracks in the wall to be sure Benedict hadn’t circled to attack from a side or the rear. The morning light cast long shadows that’d shroud a clever man. They also made certain approaches more difficult to hide. Long moving shadows. Luke hunted for them. That’d be Crazy Water Benedict.
“I don’t see him.”
“That’s because he’s back behind the woodpile. I see his head bobbing around.”
He pushed past Audrey and leveled his gun. She wasn’t lying. Trying to guess where Benedict would pop up was a fool’s game. Luke fixed his aim dead center of the woodpile, ready to move either left or right when the outlaw decided to show himself.
A flash of white appeared left of the woodpile. Luke swung his pistol around and drew back on the trigger. Only decent reflexes allowed him to jerk the muzzle up and away. The bullet sailed off into the sunrise.
But he didn’t plug Sarah Youngblood.
“Get down!” Luke swung his gun back around. Benedict must be out there somewhere. The movement Audrey had seen was the crazy woman and not Crazy Water Benedict.
“She’s staying right where she is,” came Benedict’s taunting voice from hiding. “I knew she’d come in handy as a hostage. This is the time I play her as my trump card. What is she to you? Two pair? Three of a kind? Something more? A straight flush?” Benedict laughed harshly.
“Who is she?” Audrey pressed close to stare out past him. “I heard tell they brought another woman back to camp after the robbery, but I never saw her. Mal must have chained her up somewhere else.”
“I don’t know what she’s doing here,” Luke said. Bitterness tinged his words. Marta had escorted her away from the outlaw camp. Or she had tried. Sarah was clever, and giving Marta the slip if she wasn’t prepared was as easy as falling off a log. Warning the Pinkerton agent should have been his first chore.
Or had something terrible happened to Marta? He only heard secondhand how Rhoades and Benedict intended to kill the rest of the gang. His eyes darted to the gang leader’s corpse. Rollie Rhoades had paid for trusting Benedict. Were others similarly shot in the back or had Benedict allied with them against his former boss? Nothing mattered now other than escaping. Doing that became more complicated because of Sarah.
Unless he sacrificed her. Audrey pressed closer and laid her hand on his arm, the way she used to do. He and Audrey were married. He owed her a debt of both law and heart. The past months came crashing down in failure if he tried to save Sarah Youngblood and failed. He failed not only her in her ripped and filthy wedding gown but also his own wife.
It wasn’t as if he hadn’t taken lives. But they had been worthless, criminals, men who’d cut his throat as soon as look at him. Sarah was a free spirit, even if the shackles of insanity held her to a past that could never be broken.
“Shoot her,” Audrey said. “He can’t use her as a bargaining chip then. Or does she mean something to you?” She squeezed down on his arm. Her fingernails
dug into his flesh.
“I know her, but getting you away is what I’ve got to do. It’d be good to save her, too, but . . .”
“You aren’t including yourself on the list of those to be saved,” Audrey pointed out. “How heroic.”
He looked at her sharply. The sarcasm burned his ears as surely as the bullet had cut away half of one. She smiled up at him, angelic and as innocent as could be. This standoff had to end. Now. He made certain his pistols were close at hand and called out to the outlaw.
“She’s not part of our feud, Benedict. Me and you. Face-to-face.” Luke hardly expected Benedict to take him up on the offer, but anything that changed the stalemate seemed a good trail to take.
“Winner take all?” Benedict laughed harshly. “I’m looking at a dead man in the dirt.”
“You shot him in the back.”
“To put him out of his misery. I’d do that to a horse. He was my boss, and I owed him that much. You’re the one that shot him.”
“He did it in a fair fight, too!” Audrey yelled past Luke. She chuckled when he shushed her.
“You come on out and throw your six-shooter down or I’ll shoot her.” Benedict moved fast. His arm circled Sarah’s throat and choked her. He held his six-gun in his right hand. The muzzle pressed hard into her temple. “I’m not much for all that counting, not unless it’s twenty-dollar gold coins. So, I’m giving you to the count of three. Come out with your hands up or I plug her.”
Sarah wasn’t the least frightened. She might have been strolling along a quiet meadow. She began singing one of her songs, but Benedict choked it off by tightening his arm bar across her throat.
“That’s one, greenhorn. You fixing on coming out? I’ll let this one live if you come out. I promise.”
“He’s not big on keeping promises,” Audrey said.
“Get behind me.” Luke shoved her back. His mind raced. If he stepped out, he was a goner. Audrey’s warning that Crazy Water Benedict was a liar was unnecessary. He figured that out for himself. Any man who’d shoot a man on his wedding day and steal his bride had the sand to do about anything he wanted.
Tin Star Page 20
