.45-Caliber Widow Maker

by Peter Brandvold

  Unaware of the other men filing out of the yard behind him, his eyes glued like twin rifle sights on the quivering woman in the street before him, Bob continued over to Alva, stopped, and stared gravely down. He thumbed back the Colt’s hammer and angled the barrel toward the tufts of blond, curly hair poking out around her night sock.

  “Where’s the other half?”

  Still holding her hands over her bloody butt, Alva lifted her chin toward the open doors of the livery barn. The tall, hollow-eyed man in suspenders who’d been adding the fresh paint to the sign over the doors now stood on the ground, beneath the ladder, using it to shield him from the trouble his dark eyes were now riveted to.

  He held a paint can in one hand, his brush in the other.

  “Billy Borden!” Alva bellowed. “Him an’ me both found it. He took half!”

  The woman’s words were like grapeshot peppering the dumbfounded man standing behind the ladder. He jerked back, wincing, eyes widening, and dropped his paintbrush in the dirt.

  Bob glanced at the freshly painted sign, which read WM. L. BORDEN LIVERY AND FEED, then up at the new roof. He dropped his gaze once more to drill a withering stare at the man still stumbling straight back into the barn shadows.

  “Where’s the money?” Bob grumbled.

  He’d taken one step toward the barn, raising his gun, when something hot hammered into his upper right arm. The whip-crack of a rifle echoed from down the street to his right.

  Racked with sudden, excruciating misery that dimmed his vision and set bells tolling in his head, Bob stumbled left and grabbed his arm with the hand still holding the gun. His knee shook uncontrollably and for a moment he thought it would buckle. He felt the thick, heavy wetness of blood pouring from the ragged hole in his shirtsleeve.

  “That’s right, Bob!” a man shouted. There was the metallic rasp of a cocking lever ejecting a spent cartridge and seating a fresh one. “Where’s the money?”

  Bob trailed the voice with his eyes, to the heavy bulk of Karl Oldenberg standing atop the mercantile’s loading dock. The two ranch hands and their wagon were nowhere to be seen, likely having lit a shuck out of town. It was only Oldenberg up there, staring down his Winchester’s barrel, the stock pressed to his cheek, his long sandy hair falling from the brim of his shabby black bowler hat.

  Wincing and breathing hard as the blood from his wounded arm leaked out through his fingers, Colorado Bob glanced at Simms and Blackburn standing about thirty yards behind him, in front of the whorehouse. Both men were frozen, crouching and staring at Oldenberg, hands on their holstered revolvers.

  Behind them, the screams of several girls emanated from the upstairs whorehouse windows.

  Fuego.

  Blackburn kept his head turned toward Oldenberg but rolled his eyes sharply, inquiringly toward Colorado Bob.

  The fat madam, Alva, lay belly down in the street, cupping her hands over her wounded butt cheeks, groaning.

  There was another loud, tooth-gnashing rasp of a cocking lever. Bob jerked his head toward the left front corner of the barn. A man he recognized as Dewey Ordinary stood there, half concealed by the barn wall, his red neckerchief blowing out in the wind as he squinted one light blue eye down the Winchester’s oiled barrel.

  Ordinary was known for keeping his guns well oiled. He was downright obsessive about it. When the killer from South Carolina wasn’t screwing or looking for banks to rob or stages to hold up—the man did not drink or gamble—he could be found sitting back in a chair, drinking coffee and oiling his weapons.

  A soft whistle rose from the direction of the whorehouse. Bob wheeled clumsily, knees wobbling, and almost tripped over his own feet.

  Another Oldenberg rider—Ike Grayson—knelt in the whorehouse’s front yard, in front of the porch. He held a brass-breeched Henry rifle negligently across his knee, a challenging grin spreading the clean-shaven cheeks of his moon-shaped face. He opened and closed his gloved hand around the rifle’s stock, just behind the hammer, as if he were daring Bob or the other two men to fire on him.

  The breeze plucked at the brim of his high, tan sombrero and lifted dust around his face.

  “You’re surrounded, Bob,” Oldenberg called from the mercantile’s loading dock. “Toss the iron into the street, a good ten feet away if you can make it that far, and tell Blackburn and Simms to stand down. I got me a real uneasy feelin’ they ain’t takin’ orders from me anymore.”

  The gang leader’s voice rose with shrill offense, and his teeth flashed whitely above the barrel of his leveled Winchester. “Looks to me like all three of you done double-crossed ole Karl. Tell me it ain’t so, Bob. After all I done for you—got you back on track, got you makin’ a good livin’ again, with plenty of cooch and hooch and pistol poppin’ to keep you interested. Tell me ya ain’t done me that way, goddamnit, Bob!”

  Bob dropped his bloody gun hand and, suppressing the hammering pain in his arm, stepped slowly back away from the barn.

  “How you wanna play it, Bob?” Simms asked behind him.

  Colorado Bob continued backing up past the still sobbing and groaning Alva, shuttling his gaze between Oldenberg on the loading dock about fifty yards away on his right, and Dewey Ordinary ahead and left. Both men stood statue-still. Bob didn’t think Ordinary had even blinked.

  Just softly for his own two men behind him to hear, Bob said, “Heed our asses, fellers. Oldenberg can’t shoot a long gun fer shit. I’ll worry about Dewey.”

  “What’s that you’re sayin’ there, Bob?” Ordinary asked tightly, aiming down his Winchester’s glistening barrel. “Thought I heard you mention my name.”

  “Yup,” Bob said, wincing as the pain bit deep into his arm. He was all blood from shoulder to elbow. “I just said I was gonna shoot you first, you pig-diddling son of a bitch!”

  He threw himself sideways, hitting the ground on his left shoulder. As Ordinary’s rifle roared, blowing a gob of dirt and shit up from the street where Bob had been standing, Bob rolled off his shoulder and extended his Colt.

  The gun roared. “God—!” Ordinary shouted as the bullet smashed into his left shoulder and threw him back against the livery’s gray wall.

  The report of Bob’s .44 hadn’t ceased echoing around the street before a veritable fusillade rose around him.

  As Bob drilled Ordinary a second time, he could hear Simms and Blackburn shouting while others grunted and cursed and guns roared and bullets smacked flesh and bone and wood, and one slug spanged off a rock in the street between Bob and the now-screaming, butt-shot Alva.

  On his belly, Bob turned toward Oldenberg.

  The gang leader was shouting curses as he jogged forward in his heavy-booted, bull-legged gait, ramming a fresh shell into his Winchester’s breech.

  Bob squeezed off a shot.

  The slug hammered through a mercantile window over Oldenberg’s right shoulder, making the big man jerk his head down, throw an arm up, and curse loudly.

  “Let’s get inside, Bob!” Blackburn shouted above the staccato pistol pops and the resounding whip-cracks of rifles.

  Several slugs plunked into the dirt around Colorado Bob. One burned his left calf while another blew his hat off his head and yet another traced a hot line across his cheek.

  As he scrambled to his feet, his wounded arm forgotten, he whipped a glance around and saw smoke puffing from several places along the street—from behind stock tanks, rain barrels, brush clumps, and rooftops.

  Yessir, Oldenberg had brought the entire gang—or what was left of it. Must be a good seven or eight cold-steel fellas, including big Karl himself, popping off shots at Bob and his two compadres. Just then he remembered Johnnie.

  Where the hell was Li’l Sis? Must be in the house somewhere, covering him and the boys from a window.

  Returning fire at the rooftop left of the livery barn, until his revolver hammer screeched down on an empty chamber, Bob beat a path toward the whorehouse.

  Simms was on the porch, bleeding from several bullet b
urns and directing his fire toward the mercantile. Blackburn was on one knee in the yard, shooting up the street to his left while slugs peppered the ground around him and chewed into the freshly painted porch rails and the whorehouse’s front wall.

  Ike Grayson lay jerking near Blackburn, a bullet through his belt and another through the right center of his chest. Colorado Bob winced as another slug tore through his right side, just above his hip, while another sizzled so close to his right ear that he could feel the heat of its passing before it shattered a whorehouse window.

  As Bob made for the porch steps, he caught a glimpse of Grayson’s head jerking back as a stray bullet hammered into the dying man’s temple. It blew Grayson’s brains out the back of his head and put an instant end to his suffering.

  Bob bounded across the porch and, as several slugs chewed slivers from the floor behind his hammering boots, thrust himself headlong through the open door. He hit the parlor floor on his wounded arm. Bellowing, a veil of yellow pain dropping down over his slanted eyes, he rolled onto his back to see Simms backing into the house behind him, flinging an empty, smoking Smith & Wesson aside while he triggered shots with another.

  When that gun hammer clicked empty, he stepped back behind the door frame. His face looked as though someone had struck him with three ripe tomatoes. Screaming, Blackburn flew through the door, materializing from the wafting smoke cloud like an apparition, Ike Grayson’s Henry rifle in his hand and several bullets chewing the outside door frame around him.

  When the short, blond gunfighter was inside and had slammed the door closed, Colorado Bob shoved himself up against a heavy wooden cabinet and looked around. He pulled the hand of his useless arm onto his lap and jerked off his neckerchief.

  Blackburn and Simms sat with their backs to the front wall, near the windows on either side of the door that jerked as bullets slammed against it, ripping splinters from the panels. Both men were filling their empty pistols from their cartridge belts.

  “Where the hell’s Fuego?” Blackburn barked above the hammering fusillade.

  As if in response, a large shadow moved slowly down the stairs to Bob’s left. It was Fuego, descending the steps slowly and buttoning the fly of his buckskin trousers. He had a bloody knife in his teeth.

  Upstairs, a girl was screaming.

  When Fuego reached the bottom of the stairs, he removed the blade from his mouth and crouched to peer out the nearest window. “You gringos sure know how to make some noise. Hard for a man to enjoy himself.” He glanced at Bob. “You find the money?”

  26

  CUNO MASSEY CHECKED the brown-and-white pinto down in a six-foot gulley on the northern outskirts of Alfred. He leapt out of the saddle, slid the Winchester from the boot, and, moving up to the edge of the gully, racked a live round in the rifle’s breech.

  He’d been following Oldenberg’s small group since just before dawn. Oldenberg had cut the trail of Colorado Bob and Johnnie Wade, and they’d led Cuno, trailing from about two hundred yards behind, here to the bailiwick popping like Mexican fireworks on Cinco de Mayo.

  He peered over the gully’s jagged, brush-tufted crest. Gunfire barked and cracked, with occasional whining ricochets. Cuno could see smoke puffing up above the frame, sun-weathered buildings, but he could see only one shooter, likely one of Oldenberg’s men, crouched behind a rain barrel in a gap between two bulky, barrack-like business structures, shooting toward the south side of the street.

  Cuno hoped they hadn’t killed any of his prisoners. He’d started the job of hauling their sorry asses to Crow Feather, and he intended to finish it. Just as he intended to retrieve his horse and his guns.

  He scrambled up out of the ravine, leaving the horse cropping grama grass behind him, and ran crouching through the scattered sage and rabbit brush. The town’s crude, sparse buildings grew before him, as did a few scattered corrals, stables, and haggard-looking privies.

  Smoke rose from a few chimney pipes.

  Occasional shouts lifted beneath the staccato thunder of the lead swap on the town’s main drag.

  Cuno kept one of the large buildings—the fifth building down from the left end of the town—between himself and the street, out of sight from the gang members. Oldenberg’s men were bearing down on Colorado Bob’s group hunkered down in the little, pink house that Cuno had seen when he’d scrutinized the town from the main trail several minutes ago.

  Cuno stole around a lean-to shed and corral in which three nervous horses snorted and knocked their stalls, then sprinted the last forty yards to the back of the building he’d been heading for. He pressed his back against the wall, tried to get a fix on the Oldenberg shooters, then jogged out from behind that building to the next.

  He crept up to the gap on the far side of the building, pressed his left shoulder against the wall, and edged a look around the corner, glancing up the trash-strewn gap toward the main drag. He pulled his head back quickly, but he’d taken a good enough look to see the man firing a rifle over the rain barrel at the head of the alley.

  The cracks of the man’s rifle echoed off the buildings to either side of him. Cuno could hear his cartridge casings clinking into the dust behind him.

  Somewhere along the street, someone suddenly started cursing sharply—either wounded or enraged or both.

  Cuno edged another look around the corner of his covering building. The man at the head of the gap squeezed off another shot across the street and jerked his cocking lever down. He was a big, hatless gent with a cap of dark curly hair sitting close against his broad skull and long, broad sideburns. He wore a doeskin vest and brown chaps over black Levis.

  His tan slouch hat lay crown down against the side wall of the building to his right, as though it had been blown there by the wind or a bullet. Cuno stole toward him, holding his Winchester up high across his chest and staying close to the wall on his left.

  He wanted the man dead, but he couldn’t shoot him in the back. Cuno had to give him a chance, even if it was only half a chance.

  As the man ducked down behind the rain barrel to begin thumbing fresh shells from his cartridge belt, he gave Cuno his profile. Cuno took two more steps, adjusting his grip on the Winchester.

  Suddenly, the man, having apparently spied Cuno in the periphery of his vision, snapped a look down the gap. He dropped his gaze back down to the Winchester resting with its loading gate up across his knee.

  Frowning, he turned toward Cuno once more. His eyes widened and his broad nostrils flared.

  “Hey, who . . . ?”

  He didn’t finish the question. He didn’t know who Cuno was, but his instinct told him he wasn’t on his side.

  The man flung the Winchester aside and, keeping his startled gaze on Cuno, reached for one of the two Smith & Wessons jutting up from his tied-down holsters. Cuno snapped his own Winchester straight out before him and fired.

  He winced as the man yelled loudly and, straightening, fell back over the top of the rain barrel. He hung over the top of the barrel, kicking as the hole in his chest drained the life out of him, his chaps flapping like giant batwings, and his big head swinging from side to side.

  Cuno racked a fresh round and, crouching and staring cautiously into the street over the dead man on the barrel, moved forward, running his left shoulder along the building’s unpainted, plank-sided wall. He didn’t like that the gunfire had died off considerably, with only a couple of pistols popping from the direction of the pink-and-white house angled left across the street.

  Oldenberg’s boys had likely become savvy to the wolf in their fold—Cuno. The tentative shooting from the house told him the Colorado Bob group was puzzled, as well.

  Cuno stopped at the building’s front corner. He dropped to a knee, the rain barrel shielding him from the other side of the street, and glanced around the front of the building.

  A man was crouched behind the rear wheel of a farm wagon parked at the edge of the street, just beyond the boardwalk. He had two Colt pistols aimed toward Cuno, hold
ing them high so that they framed his gray, cunning eyes beneath the brim of a coal-black derby hat. He was grinning wolfishly, poking his pink tongue out between his ragged teeth, the silver cross thonged around his unshaven throat glowing in the sunlight angling under the porch roof.

  Cuno’s eyes snapped wide as both pistols exploded simultaneously, belching smoke and flames.

  He drew his head back behind the wall as one slug chewed into the wood before him, peppering his cheek with stinging splinters, and another barked into the wall of the building on the other side of the gap.

  Cuno dropped the Winchester, clawed the borrowed .45 from the borrowed holster, and snaked his arm around the corner.

  Two quick shots—k-pow! k-pow!—and the derby-hatted gunman threw both his half-cocked pistols up over his head with a startled yelp and flew back against the wagon wheel. There was one hole in his cheek, and another beneath the silver cross at his throat. He was still staring, stunned, at Cuno, as a rifle popped on the other side of the street.

  The slug hammered into the rain barrel.

  Cuno dropped down behind the rain barrel, holstered his Colt, and picked up his Winchester. He racked a fresh cartridge as the gunman across the street, hunkered down behind a pile of crates in front of a drugstore, snapped off two more rounds into the water barrel, the heavy-caliber rounds echoing loudly, like thunder.

  At the moment, he was the only one shooting, the other guns—even those inside the pink house—having fallen silent while the shooters tried to figure out who was who and what was what.

  The man sent several more fifty-caliber rounds into the water barrel or skimming off the walls to either side of Cuno. The burly blond freighter sat tight, cheek pressed against the barrel’s cool, smooth oak, squeezing the Winchester in his hands. A cricket of apprehension was scuttling along his spine.

  The man across the street was trying to keep him pinned down while others flanked him just as he’d flanked them. Cuno had to keep moving.