.45-Caliber Widow Maker

by Peter Brandvold

  “Go on, git!” The beefy saloon owner lashed out with his left boot once more, making his belt buckle jingle. But the girl had already scuttled out from under the desk, sobbing, her curly red hair flying about her head.

  “I’m goin’! I’m goin’!”

  Bare feet slapping the rough-cut floorboards, she sprinted toward the door, her pale, pear-shaped breasts jiggling. She didn’t so much as glance at Shepherd as she lunged for the doorknob, threw the door open, and ran into the hall, leaving the door standing wide behind her.

  “Shut the goddamn door!”

  Oldenberg’s deep voice boomed around the room like the echoes of crashing boulders. His heart leaping, Shepherd turned abruptly and slammed the door. When he turned back to the desk, his boss was stumbling to his feet as he wrestled his longhandles and jeans up his hips, his big, silver belt buckle clanking against the desk.

  His little mean pig eyes burned into Shepherd’s quivering chest. His long, stringy hair continued dancing about his cheeks as he wrestled with his pants. “Now, let me get this straight—you’re all that’s left of the six I sent out?”

  Shepherd dipped his chin and swallowed down the large, dry knot in his throat. “I reckon that’s right, Boss. Pepper had his girl with him, and she mighta made it. I don’t know . . .”

  “Goddamnit!”

  “I apologize, Boss, but . . .”

  “You were bushwhacked?”

  “By some big, towheaded fella. Built like a boxer or wrestler. Blond-headed. Come runnin’ down that mountain in deerskins, slingin’ lead every which way. We’d sent ole Manover to flank the old marshal, and the blond-headed fella—”

  “So Bob, Simms, and Blackburn are still in the jail wagon?”

  Shepherd drew a deep breath. “That does seem to be the sum total of it, Boss. I knew I couldn’t do much with this here neck of mine, so I hurried back fast as I could. Knew you’d want to put a new posse together, go after that wagon.”

  Oldenberg grunted as, with his pants finally up, he leaned forward to buckle his belt and stare under his bushy brows at Shepherd. “I don’t suppose you got close enough to the wagon to find out where Bob and the others hid the strongbox?”

  Shepherd sighed again and wagged his head sadly. “’Fraid not, Boss. Sorry about that. Ain’t likely any o’ them fellas woulda told us, anyway.” He tried a laugh but it came out sounding more like the squawk of a rusty hinge. “They prob’ly woulda figured—”

  “Woulda figured, being the suspicious sons o’ bitches they are, that if they told us where the strongbox was before we sprung ’em, we wouldn’t spring ’em.” Oldenberg shook his head. “If ya can’t trust members of your own group, who can you trust?”

  Eyes snapping like Mexican firecrackers, Oldenberg walked out stiffly from behind his desk, which had little on it but a lamp, a pen, a corked stone jug, a shot glass, and one leather-bound account book. “Goddamnit, Lyle. I thought I was sendin’ two of my best men. How in the hell did Pepper and McDonald let this happen, anyways?”

  Before Shepherd could open his mouth to respond, Oldenberg said through gritted teeth, his eyes shiny with unfettered emotion, “You realize what’ll happen if that goddamn jail wagon makes it Crow Feather?”

  “I reckon . . . I reckon . . .”

  “You reckon right. They’ll hang those bastards without my ever learnin’ where they hid the strongbox holding the most money we ever took down in a single job in this country, Canada, or Mexico.”

  “Want I should pull a posse together, round up some o’ the fellas from the ranch?”

  “Why don’t you do that.”

  “Would it . . . would it be all right if I got a drink and had my neck sewed first? I don’t know how much blood a man holds to begin with, but I think I mighta lost a good half of mine.”

  Oldenberg studied the underling, his fleshy, whiskery face menacingly inscrutable. Slowly, he dipped his head. “Sure, you just git yourself a drink. Sit down an’ enjoy it. Hell, sit down and enjoy half a bottle while the pill roller sews you up. Maybe you’ll want a girl, too?”

  Shephered swallowed. His heart was pounding like the hooves of a dozen Cheyenne war ponies. He chuckled again though this time it sounded more like a sob. “Nah. I’ll just have a drink and get my neck sewed. Then I’ll fetch the boys from the ranch. The whole damn crew.”

  Clamping the bloody rag firmly against his neck, he turned slowly toward the door, keeping his eyes fixed on Oldenberg who stood in front of his desk, arms crossed on his broad chest.

  When Shepherd had turned full around, he reached for the doorknob. His back crawled as though with a thousand scuttling spiders, and the hair along the back of his neck pricked straight up beneath his collar. Behind him, Oldenberg was horrifically silent.

  Gritting his teeth, Lyle turned the doorknob. He wanted nothing more than to bound into the hall as quickly as the mangy, yellow cur had bolted toward Shepherd’s ankle not fifteen minutes ago, but belly-churning fear and dread had turned his muscles as hard as new saddle leather.

  He watched his hand wrap around the knob, turn it.

  The door opened, squawking and brushing the top of a swollen floorboard. Before the door had cleared the threshold, a low, nearly silent grunt sounded behind him. At the same time, there was a soft snick and a rustle of heavy cloth.

  Shepherd did not turn his head to see the Arkansas toothpick, which his boss had just shucked from the hard leather sheath dangling down his back, leave Oldenberg’s flicking wrist to tumble through the air, end over head, and make a beeline for Shepherd’s back.

  But Shepherd heard the hornet-like whistle and, knowing it was coming, froze in his tracks and squeezed his eyes closed.

  Fishhh-took!

  The seven inches of razor-edged steel plunged hilt-deep in Shepherd’s back, between his shoulder blades, just left of his spine.

  Shepherd screamed and flew forward against the door, which his weight, in turn, slammed back into the frame with a bark of wood and a click of the latching bolt. He sagged against the door, groaning against the blistering sting of the blade embedded in his back and tickling his heart.

  Cheek pressed against the wood, he dropped the rag and clawed with both hands at the solid door panel, as if to scratch his way through the wood and into the hall to freedom.

  But he hung there, quivering like a bug on a pin, as Oldenberg’s boots clomped across the floor behind him.

  The burly, long-haired outlaw leader shucked his toothpick from Shepherd’s back with his left hand and leaned close to Shepherd’s quickly blanching face.

  “On second thought,” he rasped in the underling’s ear, “I’ll take care of it myself, Lyle. If there’s one thing I’ve learned here this afternoon, it’s never send a boy to do a man’s work. You shoulda stayed with them fellas, kept fighting. They’d’ve done the same for you, you unforgivable wretch!”

  He wiped the blood from the savage-looking blade on Shepherd’s hat, then grabbed the man by his collar and yanked him brusquely back into the room. Shepherd hit the floor with a pinched sob drowned by a heavy thud.

  Oldenberg spat on Shepherd’s soon-to-be carcass as he went out, leaving the door open behind him, and clomped down the stairs.

  The last words Shepherd heard, lying there belly up on the floor with his blood pooling all around him, were: “Betty, tell Dewey to fetch that mangy carcass out of my office, will you?”

  “You mean Lyle?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Betty laughed her squealing, chortling laugh. Her laughter stopped abruptly. “Hey, did you see my bar rag?”

  9

  IT WAS GROWING dark by the time Cuno had buried the younger marshal, Chuck Svenson, in the hard, rocky soil away from the camp. Sweaty and exhausted from the hard labor, he tended his own horse and the mules, rubbing them down with dry grass, swabbing their ears and nostrils, and picketing them all together in deep grama along the box canyon’s back wall.

  He found several pounds of salt
pork in one of the burlap bags on the wagon. When he had some of the pork and a pot of beans cooking over his glowing, popping cookfire, he scrounged around in the sleeping Bill Landers’s pockets until he came up with a ring of three rusty keys.

  After some fumbling to determine which key fit the cage’s padlock, he opened the back of the jail wagon to let the shackled and manacled prisoners out to tend nature and to scrub their dusty, sweaty faces in the stream a ways down canyon from the pool.

  “How ’bout you take off these cuffs and leg irons?” Blackburn said when he and the others had all worked their way out of the wagon, trailing the four-foot lengths of chain connecting their ankles.

  When Cuno said nothing but merely stood back, aiming his .45 at the group from a good fifteen feet away, Blackburn flushed and held out his cuffed wrists. “Come on, junior. I wanna shit the way a man was meant to shit—alone. Get it?”

  Cuno narrowed an eye and thumbed back the Colt’s hammer with a dry click that sounded inordinately loud in the green evening silence. “If you don’t shut up and hurry along into the grass, mister, you’re gonna be shit outta luck.”

  Simms chuckled. Colorado Bob snorted. Blackburn cursed and hardened his jaws, but he clomped and clanked along with the others into the high brush away from the stream.

  Cuno’s peppering the jail wagon with hot lead had had the magical effect of turning the prisoners, for the most part, sullen and pensive rather than loud and belligerent. Blackburn’s mini-tirade was the last spoken about the chains.

  The four prisoners contented themselves with giving Cuno hard looks as, finishing their ablutions and fumbling their trousers back up to their hips, they clanked down to the creek to wash and drink before Cuno hazed them all back into the jail wagon.

  Rather, three of the prisoners contented themselves with hard looks and muttered curses. The bald, one-eared half-breed—Fuego—continued to smile mildly, almost serenely, as he wandered along with the others in a dreamlike trance, regarding Cuno occasionally as though he had a secret he couldn’t quite bring himself to share.

  Cuno had to admit the man’s attempt at putting him on edge was successful. The blond freighter kept the man in front of him and in total view at all times. The marshals had probably frisked each prisoner thoroughly—likely strip-searched them, in fact—but Cuno had the feeling Fuego was concealing a weapon of some kind.

  Or maybe that’s only what the big, kill-crazy half-breed wanted him to think, in hopes that Cuno would get close enough to search him.

  He exhaled a silent sigh of relief when he’d finally slammed the cage door and had thrown the locking bolt home. Holstering his .45, he went back to the fire and checked on the sleeping marshal. The man’s wound appeared to have stopped bleeding, and his breathing was regular though sweat beaded his forehead, glistening in the glowing light of the nearby fire.

  Cuno drew the blanket up tight to the man’s neck once more, then tended the beans and the salt pork sizzling in a large, cast-iron pan. When the food was done, he shoveled it onto four plates and hauled the steaming plates with spoons over to the jail wagon, handing each through the slit in the door.

  He had to make a separate trip for the coffee, silently grumbling to himself over having to play nursemaid to four killers due to hang by the end of the week, with Serenity waiting for him and the bank loan in Crow Feather.

  When Cuno had passed the last cup through the bars, Blackburn glanced toward the fading sky above the canyon’s steep stone walls. “Gettin’ dark soon.” Then, as if he were only speaking to his two companions, he added, “Shepherd shoulda got back to Helldorado by now—don’t ya think, fellas?”

  Colorado Bob and Simms sat side by side, spooning beans into their mouths. “Oh, yeah,” Bob said between chews. “He’s there, all right. And I’d bet my right nut that Karl Oldenberg is putting a posse together even as we speak.”

  Chewing, Colorado Bob grinned at Cuno, those bobcat-like eyes slitting and flashing yellow in the last light angling down over the canyon walls.

  “Eat up,” Cuno said. “We’ll be turnin’ in soon. Early day tomorrow.”

  He glanced once more at Fuego. The man was staring at him over his steaming plate, that dark look of bemused menace in his eyes. He was like a perpetually coiled snake, rattles hissing softly.

  Again, Cuno remembered the mountain-sized bounty hunter, Ruben Pacheca, who’d followed him across two territories. The bearlike savage had been on the hunt for the bounty a rancher from Julesburg had put on Cuno’s head after Cuno had killed the man’s son to save a sporting girl.

  Cuno turned away, feeling an invisible knife tickle his loins as he tramped back to the fire. He plopped a few sticks on the dying flames, shoveled food onto a plate, poured coffee, and sat on a rock bench back near the falls.

  Stretching his legs out before him, he crossed his boots and rested his back against a flat-edged boulder. He ate while listening to the oddly melodic rattle of the falls behind him, staring out across the fire, the pool, the marshal sleeping left of the pool, to the narrow mouth of the canyon a hundred yards beyond.

  The rolling sage-covered hills, scarps, and rocky-sloped mesas were turning deep purple, and several stars kindled dully. Good dark would close down, black as a leather glove, in less than an hour. Soon, the hunt would be on all across the dark, silent land—night predators versus their anxious, scuttling prey.

  Cuno should be halfway to Crow Feather by now, angling down through Squaw Butte, heading for the Cheyenne Drum Hills and the little town nestled on the sage flats between the Crow Feather Mountains and the Little Snowy Range.

  Thirty yards beyond the pool, the jail wagon sat, tongue drooping, near the narrow brush-sheathed gully through which the stream snaked. Cuno saw the silhouettes of the four prisoners lounging against the barred walls. He could see only Fuego’s legs stretched out from the wagon’s front wall, against which the big half-breed reclined.

  They were all done eating, and the three Oldenberg Gang members were talking. Cuno couldn’t hear them above the falls, but he could see their heads turning and jaws moving, teeth showing intermittently between their lips.

  Probably planning a way out of their predicament. If their gang didn’t reach them soon . . .

  Annoyance reared up again inside of Cuno. How in the hell had he gotten into this bailiwick? These men were destined to die and he, because of the tricky winds of fate, had drawn the unpaid job of hauling their smelly asses through the Mexican Mountains to the hangman in Crow Feather.

  Even if he pushed the mules as fast as they could go, and didn’t have to worry about tending the wounded marshal as well as the four prisoners, and watching his back trail, Cuno would make Crow Feather at least forty-eight hours later than he’d intended.

  At least a day too late for the coveted freighting contract.

  He and old Serenity would end up spending the winter in loud, smelly Denver, swamping saloons and whore-houses or shoveling shit from livery barns.

  When he finished his meal, which he had no taste for, he threw out the last of his coffee and walked back down to the fire. The old marshal had rolled onto his side and, in the thickening darkness relieved by the umber light of the flickering flames, he shivered slightly, grunting and groaning softly.

  Cuno went over to the wagon for the prisoners’ plates and spoons, which they gave up without argument, regarding him owlishly through the bars. Fuego lay on his side, but it was too dark for Cuno to tell whether the man’s eyes were open or closed. Something told him they were open.

  When he’d washed all the plates, cups, and spoons in the stream, Cuno laid several heavy logs on the fire to keep the old marshal as warm as he could. Then he picked up his Winchester and tramped back out along the chuckling stream to the canyon’s mouth.

  He stood for a long time, staring across the high-desert plateau jogging out to distant peaks jutting along the horizon like the sharpened teeth of a saw blade.

  The sun was down in the west, but several
arrows of green-salmon light still streaked the plum-purple sky, small clouds like sand scallops silhouetted against it, and several stars like distant candles were beginning to spark. In the east, good dark had already pushed up from the horizon, the stars bold and lucid.

  A breath of cool breeze rustled the rabbit brush and wild mahogany. Beyond that, the night was eerily silent, like the calm before a storm though there was no sign of bad weather.

  Cuno spent the night hunkered atop a hogback just outside the canyon’s mouth, watching and listening. He doubted the gang would be able to track him this soon, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

  He dozed occasionally between long stretches of looking around and listening for any unnatural sound or movement. Several times he returned to the canyon to check on the marshal and to add wood to the fire. Both times, the old marshal shivered in a restless sleep, limbs jerking and teeth faintly clattering.

  Cuno mopped the man’s face with a cold rag soaked in the pool below the falls, drank coffee, then returned to his sentinel perch. He woke from a doze, his back snugged against a rock humping out of the hogback’s crest, to see a faint pearl wash over the eastern bluffs.

  He returned to the canyon and had just put a fresh pot of coffee on the fire and started breakfast when the old marshal, still cloaked in dusky shadows, said in a clear, crisp voice, “Marliss?”

  The man had lifted his head and was peering at Cuno from the other side of the fire. The flames leapt in his wide, glistening eyes.

  Cuno set the salt pork and pan aside and went over and shoved the oldster back down on his bedroll. “Cuno Massey. Remember?”

  Landers stared up at him, squinting, as though he were trying to remember not only who Cuno was but where they were and what had got them here.