.45-Caliber Widow Maker

by Peter Brandvold

  He looked back to see Renegade nibbling wheatgrass a ways off down the crease, then put two fingers to his mouth and whistled. The horse lifted its head with a start and, rippling its withers, stomped up the slope to the pool.

  “Just like a damn dog,” one of the prisoners chuckled, barely audible above the falls.

  Cuno left the old marshal reclining, out like a blown wick, against the boulder while he got up and cut the body of the younger lawman free of Renegade’s rump. He eased the body down in the grass, then retrieved his saddlebags and bedroll, setting each down beside the wounded marshal, and began fishing around in the pouches for a bottle of whiskey and wool scrap cloth he’d wound around a flat stick.

  Fashioning a couple of poultices from whiskey, rich black mud he scooped out from beneath a rock, and shredded pine bark sticky with fragrant sap, he packed both the old marshal’s entrance and exit wounds. He secured the poultices to the wounds with cloth wrapped under and over his arm, then several times around his chest.

  That done, he returned the unconscious man’s arm to the leather sling, then spread out one of the bedrolls he found in the wagon, and eased the man onto it, resting his head against the grain sack. He drew an extra blanket up to the man’s chin, then gathered wood and started a fire to keep him warm.

  Soon, when the inevitable fever set in, he’d shake like a leaf in a prairie cyclone.

  The next chore in the order of importance was to cover the wagon’s tracks leading off from the main trail, and that’s what he did, ignoring the prisoners’ gripes and threats as he tramped off down the crease. He cut down a cedar sapling and, starting back at the main trail, used the tree to wipe out the wagon and horse tracks as he backed down the crease. He used a deft hand on the tracks, knowing that any good tracker would quickly spot the ruse though maybe not before Cuno detected their presence.

  “Hey, junior bub,” said Blackburn as Cuno, tossing away the cedar tree, approached the wagon, sweating from his labors in the heat of the mid-afternoon. “It’s pretty obvious you’re just bound and determined to be a Good Samaritan to that slow-rotting badge toter over yonder.”

  Cuno paused by the wagon to remove his neckerchief. He looked at Blackburn, King, and Simms staring at him through the wagon’s bars, sitting with their backs to the walls. As usual, Fuego sat sort of off by himself, back against the front wall, that dreamy, sinister look in his blue-green eyes as he played with the hair on one arm, beneath the rolled sleeve of his sweat-soaked, buckskin tunic. The silver ring dangled from his lone ear.

  “We fellas talked it over,” said Colorado Bob King, a grin spreading his thin, pink lips back from his gold teeth and slitting those slanted demon’s eyes. “We’re prepared to give you five hundred dollars to open that fuckin’ door and remove these manacles.”

  Mopping his forehead with his handkerchief, Cuno grunted and continued toward the falls.

  “How ’bout a thousand?”

  Cuno turned back to the wagon. The three members of the Karl Oldenberg Gang stood on the near side of the cage, grinning at him through the bars.

  Flies buzzed. One of the mules brayed softly, as if sensing Cuno’s anger and consternation at not only being held up and probably losing his freighting contract, but at having to listen to the ceaseless caterwauling of these half-human lobos.

  Rage boiled up in his head, pushing a red haze over his eyes.

  Before he knew what he was doing, his .45 was in his hand, and he was crouching and fanning the hammer.

  The Colt leapt and roared.

  The prisoners stumbled back, jaws dropping and eyes snapping wide as the .45 rounds clanged, barked, and sparked like lightning off the welded iron bars.

  When he’d fired all six rounds, Cuno stared through the wafting powder smoke. All three of the gang members were down and cowering on the wagon’s stout wooden bed, snarling and grunting as they shielded their heads with their arms.

  Cuno straightened slowly, slowly lowering the Colt, a wry smile pulling at his mouth corners. He thumbed open the loading gate and removed the spent shells as the reports continued to echo around the box canyon.

  A foolish move, probably, but it was too soon for the Oldenberg Gang to be anywhere near.

  Besides, the .45-caliber tantrum had relieved the tension like an iron piston rammed up his spine.

  When he’d thumbed fresh bullets into the Colt, he spun the cylinder and couldn’t resist the temptation to spin the gun on his finger before dropping it into its well-oiled holster.

  He regarded the men still cowering on the wagon bed. Only Fuego was grinning, showing his stubby, rotten teeth under his mustached lip, peering at Cuno from low in the cabin’s front corner.

  “Now, how ’bout a little peace and quiet,” Cuno grunted as he turned and continued tramping up to the pool where the old marshal was sawing heavy logs.

  Behind him, he heard Colorado Bob say softly, “Son of a bitch is packin’ a widow maker!”

  8

  LYLE SHEPHERD CLUTCHED his bloody neck as he put his black gelding up a switchbacking trail in the northwest corner of the Mexican Mountains, cursing under his breath and sucking pinched drafts of air through his clenched teeth.

  Another hundred yards up the ridge, the town of Helldorado, jokingly named by the drunken prospectors who’d founded the place not two years ago, swam into view along the broad shoulder of the pine-clad Breasted Butte—also named by the pie-eyed prospectors for the obvious reason that, from a distance, the bluff resembled a woman’s bosom.

  The stench of overfilled privy pits, goat pens and pig-pens, and Chinese cook fires was already so strong that Shepherd wanted to lift his neckerchief over his nose. But that would have required the use of the hand he was using to stem the outpouring of his body’s vital fluids.

  Blood oozed down his neck and under the collar of his pin-striped, collarless shirt because of the meddling son of a towheaded bitch who’d appeared out of nowhere with a Winchester to foil his party’s plans to free their three amigos from the jail wagon.

  Damn that younker’s exasperating hide. When Karl Oldenberg sent more boys out after that soon-to-be-sorry bushwhacker, they’d bring him back in a half dozen separate bags and throw him to Mrs. Hoavig’s hogs. Then they’d pass a jug and bend a couple of whores over rain barrels, in grand celebratory fashion, while the snorting, malodorous pigs thoroughly stuffed themselves.

  Shepherd gigged the tired horse up the last switchback. Swerving around several slow-moving prospectors’ wagons and a rickety firewood cart, he jogged into the smelly cesspool of a boomtown.

  Weathered tents and crude log shanties pushed up on both sides of the rutted, pitted road down the middle of which snaked a narrow trench for carrying away rain and excess waste water. Several dead chickens, a dog, and a goat moldered at the bottom of the deep cut—the same ones that had been there two weeks ago.

  Shepherd pushed the black through the rollicking, buckskin-and-denim-clad crowd, and drew rein before the largest building on the main drag. The three-story, unpainted, whipsawed-board affair with a broad porch on two sides and real glass windows on the first story was called, in Helldorado’s customary ironic tradition, THE WICK-DIP SALOON AND DANCE HALL with a lesser sign tacked below announcing TITTY SHOWS NIGHTLY!

  Snarling and groaning, Shepherd swung down from his saddle, tossed his reins over one of the several hitchracks fronting the place. Still clamping his hand to his oozing neck, he climbed the four steps to the porch.

  Halfway to the batwing doors, he heard a low snarl and the patter of padded feet and claws, and he turned to see the spidery, yellow mongrel that lived under the porch bolt toward him from behind a rain barrel, teeth showing, hackles raised.

  “Goddamn your mangy hide, dog!” Just before the mutt could clamp its jaws around his right ankle, Shepherd wheeled and kicked. “Don’t you bite me, you black-hearted bastard!”

  Shepherd’s boot only grazed the dog’s head, but the cur yowled, wheeled in a blur, and yelping as
though it had been peppered with buckshot, galloped down the porch and around the side of the building, its little feet slipping on the heel-polished boards.

  “Son of a bitch mongrel never did like me,” Shepherd grumbled as, pushing through the batwings, he moved into the saloon’s cool, brown shadows tainted with the smell of tobacco, spilled beer, and vomit.

  The place was nearly deserted except for three scantily clad girls practicing dance steps atop the stage in the far back, beyond the stairs. Two wizened prospectors arm wrestled at a table to Shepherd’s left, under the marble-black eyes of a six-point buck whose head was tacked to a stout ceiling joist.

  The two bearded gents in duck coats and suspenders grumbled and cursed and gritted their teeth as their clenched, arthritic fists leaned first one way and then the other only to inch back in the other direction again. Their chairs creaked beneath their shifting weights.

  To Shepherd’s right, a sleepy-looking blonde stared at him from atop the bar. She wore a thin purple housecoat over a camisole low-cut enough to reveal nearly all of her ripe, creamy breasts. She arched a blonde brow, and the corners of her full mouth rose in her sexy, heart-shaped face.

  “How ya doin’, Lyle?”

  “How’m I doin’? How’s it look like I’m doin’, Betty?”

  “Git stung by a bumblebee, did ya?”

  “Yeah, a lead bumblebee. Toss me a rag, will ya, so I can try to get some of this bleedin’ stopped before I sieve dry and turn pale as those two big titties of yourn.”

  Betty frowned as she slumped against the bar, letting the edge of the zinc-covered mahogany push her breasts up under her neck, revealing all but the nipples. “I ain’t got no spare bar rags you can bloody all up, Lyle. I just did my wash for the week.”

  “Ah, for chrissakes!” He lunged for a rag lying halfway down the bar, near the large free-lunch spread upon a blue china serving platter.

  “Oh, no, you don’t!”

  The girl made a dash for the rag, but Shepherd got to it a half second before she did. She slapped her plump little hand down on the damp zinc countertop, where the rag had been resting, as Shepherd shucked it up to his neck and plopped it down on his bloody bullet wound.

  “Thanks for the help, you miserable bitch.”

  “Buster don’t even like you.”

  “Buster’s a mangy-assed cur just like you and half the other whores in this dump.”

  Shepherd dropped his chin to inspect the wound he’d been dabbing the cloth at. He couldn’t see the bullet burn, for it was too far up on his neck, but a quick look into the back bar mirror told him it was a long, nasty-looking gash that had missed his carotid artery by about two cat whiskers.

  Friggin’ dry-gulchin’ bastard. And Shepherd had to be the one to inform his boss of the dark turn of events—four men dead and three others still confined to the jail wagon heading for the hangman in Crow Feather.

  “Where’s Karl?”

  “Upstairs,” Betty said, wrinkling her nose and standing back to cross her arms on her matronly bosoms, denying Shepherd the continued privilege of her pricey wares. “Said he don’t wanna be disturbed for anything but an extreme emergency.”

  Shepherd gritted his teeth. “Wouldn’t you call four men shot deader’n last year’s Christmas stew, and me nearly gettin’ my head blowed off my shoulders, an emergency?”

  Betty turned her head to one side and hiked a shoulder. “Since it’s Karl givin’ the orders around here, it don’t really matter what I’d call an emergency, does it?”

  “Jesus Christ,” Shepherd grumbled as, holding the damp bar rag to his neck, he stomped down the bar toward the stairs on the other side of which the three scantily clad dancers were quietly practicing their kick steps, arm in arm and barefoot. “What the hell am I doin’, standin’ around talkin’ to a damn whore dumber’n that damn cur she throws scraps to under the porch?”

  Angrily, he climbed the stairs, boot heels thudding and spurs singing.

  Behind him, Betty yelled, “And you can wash that rag when you’re through with it, Lyle!”

  “You can kiss my ass, you fuckin’ bitch!”

  “I’m tellin’ Karl about the bad language you’re in the habit of employin’ on the premises!”

  “Next time I’ll just shoot ya.” Shepherd turned his lean, six-foot-three-inch frame at the top of the stairs and jutted his jaw back toward the bar. “How’d that be?”

  Smiling woodenly and keeping her left arm crossed on her breasts, Betty raised her right one high above her head, extending her pale middle finger.

  Seething, Shepherd swung away from the balcony rail and stomped down the wide hall, the thud of his boots softened by the deep pile carpet runner. On both sides of the hall, paintings of naked women—some frolicking with either naked men, mostly black, or horses—hung on the unpainted board walls, between the unlit bracket lamps boasting either pink or soft blue mantels and bowls.

  The building was silent, as it usually was this time of the day, with most of the girls getting their beauty rest in preparation for the night ahead. Shepherd could hear a couple of the girls sawing logs behind the closed, numbered doors. Horse clomps and a dog’s desultory barks emanated from outside, beneath the rustle-scuffs of Shepherd’s boots on the carpet runner.

  He paused by Oldenberg’s door, marked with a broad plank on which OFFICE had been painted in green. He took a deep breath and steeled himself for his boss’s anticipated wrath. Then he lifted his right hand and knocked.

  A strange voice, vaguely similar to Oldenberg’s, rose behind the door. “Go ’way.”

  “Mr. Oldenberg, it’s me—Shepherd.”

  A throat clearing. Someone said something too low for Shepherd to hear. Then, in the same, only barely recognizable voice: “Awright, come in.”

  Shepherd turned the knob, pushed the door open, and stepped into the broad, barren office furnished with one massive desk on the far side of the room, fronting two open windows, and a single bookcase on which only two yellow-covered novels and a stack of old newspapers sat under a half-inch of dust.

  Against the right wall was a double-sized bed supported by four split pine logs and covered with a ratty quilt of yellow-and-spruce-green squares tied with red yarn. A white porcelain thunder mug peeked out from beneath the bed’s heavy frame, its lid on the floor beside it. Nothing adorned the pine-knotted walls—no pictures, paintings, game trophies, or even a gun rack.

  “Back so soon? Where’s Bob?”

  Shepherd turned back to the desk, from which the burly, bearlike growl had risen. Karl Oldenberg sat back in his chair, lower jaw slack. He was a heavy, thick-necked, raw-faced man in his early thirties, with long, stringy hair, muttonchop whiskers, and an untrimmed goatee and mustache.

  Like Shepherd and everyone else Oldenberg associated with, he’d been an outlaw practically since birth. But since purchasing the Wick-Dip and becoming a pseudo-respectable businessman, he’d affected a black clawham mer coat over a dark red, linsey tunic with leather ties at the deep V-shaped cut down his broad, fleshy but muscular chest.

  In spite of the muttonchops and goatee, he had an oddly boyish face, with a dimple showing through the goatee, and plump, dimpled cheeks. His close-set, light brown eyes were small, and they owned the perpetual belligerence of a schoolyard bully.

  Now, however, he had the dreamy look the girls got when they were high on marijuana or opium, which the town’s Chinese butcher supplied in return for mattress dances.

  “Sorry to say,” Shepherd said, sounding as though he had a cocklebur stuck in his throat, “that Bob ain’t with me. Fact, no one’s with me.”

  Oldenberg still spoke in that slow, garbled growl, and his eyes still seemed to own an extra, thicker lens as he said, “What’d you do to your neck, Lyle?”

  There was a soft, female grunt from somewhere below Shepherd’s boss and, aborting his attempt to answer the man’s last question, Lyle dropped his eyes below the desktop.

  Between the desk’s two encased dr
awer stacks, half concealed by the room’s deep shadows and further obscured by the bright, sunlit windows, a plump, pink, female ass hovered about a foot above the floor, the long, straight fold between smooth, fleshy lobes angled downward.

  Squinting his eyes and angling his head, Shepherd could see that the girl was on her hands and knees. Her ass was moving slightly as, up near Oldenberg’s chair and between his spread knees, her head bobbed as her mouth issued faint, crackling, sucking sounds, like the sounds a wheel hub makes when it’s getting greased.

  Startled, Shepherd lifted his eyes quickly and, pretending he hadn’t seen the girl beneath the desk, said after several throat clearings and lip smacks, “Took a bullet, Boss. But I reckon I got off lucky. Pepper, McDonald, Faraday, Manover, ole Heck Dawson—they’ve all gone under.”

  Shepherd winced as the bullet burn sent a pain spasm down his back and into his loins. He clamped the rag down harder on his neck.

  “We had them two badge toters dead to rights. I mean, they was ours, and we was a frog whisker away from springin’ Bob and the boys. But some kid right handy with a Winchester slithered down the far side of the valley and took us all by surprise. The damn younker shot Manover and then he took out Pepper and McDonald, too, when the boys tried to storm the damn wagon. I took this here ricochet after Faraday done got his own wick blowed.”

  Shepherd felt his gut clench as the eyes of his beefy boss regained more of their customary hardness as he stared across the room at his underling. Under the desk, the girl grunted anxiously, and the wet crackling sounds got louder. Her ass rose and fell sharply as she toiled in obvious futility.

  Oldenberg lurched back in his swivel chair and, scowling and flushing, dropped his hands to his crotch, his arms jerking as he pushed the girl’s head away. “Esther, goddamnit, can’t you see I ain’t in the mood no more? Get on outta here, now!”

  He shoved his chair back toward the window behind him and dropped in his seat a little as he kicked out with both feet. Esther gave a squeal, and Shepherd, still standing and holding the rag to his neck in front of the closed office door, saw the buck-naked whore twist around beneath the desk as she yowled and squealed against Oldenberg’s flailing boots.