Paco said," Where is my knife?"
In one boot, he had secreted his money. In the other boot he concealed a knife, which he had produced and handed to Belton.
Belton knew what to do. He rushed out and caught up with the doctor before Cornish could get word to Blaze that he, Belton, had thrown in with the outlaws. But he fucked up! He should never have left the knife buried in the dead man’s back!
He hurried to reassure Paco. "Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll get that knife right now." He started back out the door.
Paco rattled the shackles that bound him to the pipe.
"Get me out of these!"
Belton’s frantic mind was pulled in two directions. He wanted to follow Paco’s command. He was part of the gang now. He had crossed the line. But had he made the right choice? He still had his gun. Paco was still chained up. He didn’t know what to do.
He said, "I’ll be right back."
In the alley, the spot where he had left Doc’s body was revealed by light spilling out from the open office door.
The body was gone!
Belton said, "Oh shit!"
He bolted to the end of the alley. He peered into the street.
Doc Cornish was stumbling awkwardly in the direction of J.D. and Kate Blaze!
Panic swept through Belton. He was really fucking up! He had to make things right with Paco before Rosa showed. Now there was no turning back. He dashed into the office.
Paco observed his empty hands.
"Well?"
"I...that is, he..."
"You didn’t kill him."
"I’m sorry. I thought he was dead." Belton scrambled forward, fumbling for the key. "Here. Let me set you free."
Paco emitted an angry roar. A caged tiger. Before Belton could reach him, Paco gave one mighty yank and the pipe tore loose from the ceiling and floor. Paco thrust the length of pipe aside like a toothpick.
Belton sensed danger. He whirled. Tried to escape this raging bull. Paco caught him just short of the doorway. Belton started to cry out but before he could, the shackles that bound Paco’s wrists looped around Belton’s neck. Belton raised both hands in a frantic attempt to pry loose the chain wrapped around his neck. Paco stepped in close so he could whisper into Belton’s ear. Paco snickered.
"You are a stupid fucking gringo. I will piss on your mother’s grave."
He jerked the chain with a savage twist and was rewarded by the snap of Belton’s neck. The stench of human feces soiled the air. Paco lowered the dead body with distaste. The cabron had shit in his pants at the moment of death. Paco had killed men at close quarters before. This was a common occurrence, but never pleasant.
He found the key and freed himself of the shackles. He relieved Belton’s corpse of the pistol. He blew out the lamp, pitching the office into darkness. He had no intention of blindly rushing into the night. That was one of Rosa’s pet commands. Think before you act, Paco, she had told him many times. And so he eased open the door.
He heard voices approaching from the direction of the street.
J.D. and Kate Blaze!
The old doctor had reached them. They would be expecting trouble. But night had fallen. The alley was shrouded in darkness.
Where was Rosa?
She would not expect him to stay cooped up in an office that stank of a shitty dead man.
Paco brought up the gun and let himself silently, stealthily, into the night.
Chapter 23
"Down!"
Kate responded to J.D.’s command.
They threw themselves flat against the smelly dirt of the alley one heartbeat before a handgun snapped off a pair of shots. The bullets whistled overhead, puncturing nothing but the air where they’d stood.
J.D. sensed movement at the far end of the alley. The shooter was making tracks. J.D. bolted to his feet. He gave chase, staying low.
Kate approached the office cautiously. A rectangle of golden light from the open doorway spilled into the alley. Her nostrils pinched at the stench of human feces.
J.D. pressed himself to the far end wall of the building. With both Colts up, he glanced around the side of the building.
Moonlight cast a ghostly pale across the backside of Whiskey Bend. No one in sight. Nothing moved.
When he rejoined Kate, she was stepping from the office. She indicated the interior.
"It wasn’t Belton who was shooting at us. And I think we can kiss our reward money goodbye."
J.D. glanced inside. Belton’s crumpled body lay sprawled across the floor, the shackles still wrapped around his neck. J.D. drew back from the nasty smell.
"Then Paco is on the loose."
The clatter of racing hoofbeats across the wooden bridge into town peppered the night.
Kate said, "And here comes Rosa and her boys. The party’s complete."
They returned to the mouth of the alley. Kate found cover behind a rain barrel. J.D. sought the deepest shadows.
The incoming riders separated. The pulse of hoofbeats could be clearly heard in the quiet night. One circled around to the far end of the street. Then two of the night riders tore down the street from opposite directions. Pistols barked, throwing lead at the hotel. Shouts and cries of alarm heard from inside the hotel, accompanying by the sound of shattering glass.
Kate and J.D. pegged off rounds at the horsemen galloping past but the darkness and the riders' high speed made a sure hit impossible. Then the riders were beyond effective range, each to an opposite end of town. Their horses whinnied.
Kate said, "They’re reloading. Fixing to make another run."
J.D. quietly grunted assent. "They don’t know Paco escaped. They’re softening up the hotel for an assault."
Kate emitted an unladylike grunt of her own. "Won’t they be surprised? Wonder what happened to Rosa."
"She’ll show up soon enough," said J.D. "And the reward for us now is staying alive. Here they come."
The riders again rode full-speed from opposite directions.
J.D. and Kate opened fire before the horses drew abreast of the alley. It was impossible to tell which of them scored the hit, but a shout of pain could clearly be heard, followed by a ceasing of the riders’ pistol fire.
The night grew quiet again except for a light wind that carried on it the scent of mesquite. A loose shingle rattled. A dog started barking somewhere in town.
J.D. said, "Cover me,"
Kate said, "You’re covered."
He left the alley to kneel beside a fallen outlaw.
It was the one called Jaybird. The entry wound on the left side of Jaybird’s head was bad enough. There was nothing left of the right side of his head except a hideous mess that glistened blackly in the light of the moon.
Movement from down the street caught J.D.'s attention.
The second rider, the one called Spivey, dismounting and storming into the hotel.
Kate said, "He’s making us come to him?"
J.D. nodded. "Smart."
"Only if it works."
As he ran into the hotel lobby, Spivey was brimming with self-confidence. He was going to be The Man Who Killed J.D. Blaze! Hell, yeah! Not only Blaze but that gun-toting, smart-mouthed bitch of a wife that he traveled with too.
But he wasn’t about to take on those two out in the open. That wouldn’t end any other way than him being sent straight to hell. Spivey liked killing people. But getting killed? That was something else again.
He would bushwhack them just like he had those blue bellies out on the prairie. But he could ambush these two from inside. Get them into the hotel and turn it into a slaughterhouse. Then he would ride out of Whiskey Bend with his own damn reputation. Paco and Rosa could take care of themselves. He’d be his own man. Yeah!
In the lobby, folks drew back as one. Terror animated their expressions at the very sight of him. Spivey liked that. Especially one little old gray-haired lady who looked to be from the East, an elderly woman whose eyes brimmed with despair at such brutality. Spivey cou
ldn’t resist. He blew her brains all over the wall behind her as he strode past.
"Anyone tries to stop me will get what that old biddy got!"
He rounded a bend in the hallway beyond the lobby and vanished from their sight.
Gunsmoke hung heavy, a lazy blue haze drifting at chest level, when J.D. and Kate rushed in thirty seconds later. The woman’s husband cradled her body. He wept with grief, pleading as if to bring his wife back from the dead.
"Harriett...Harriett, don’t leave me...Harriett—"
People were trying to comfort him. Someone covered the body with a coat, but the blood quickly soaked through.
A mild-manned, balding man approached J.D. and Kate.
"I’m the manager. This is horrible! Simply horrible!"
"Ain’t it," Kate agreed. "Which way did he go?"
The manager pointed. His whole arm shook as if he were in the grip of a fever.
"He went that-a-way!"
J.D. said, "Now there’s a saying that could catch on." He eyed the "T" formed where the lobby corridor met the hallway, the direction indicated by the manager. "Right or left?"
The manager had difficulty staying focused. His eyes kept jumping from the activity around the dead woman and her weeping husband to the hallway as if he expected Spivey to come out shooting.
"I...I believe he went to the left. Or perhaps it was the right." He lifted both hands to his flushed cheeks. "Oh dear, oh dear!"
"The doors to the rooms are locked?"
"Naturally. I remember hearing the man’s spurs going down that hallway and then...nothing." The manager snapped the fingers of his right hand, his countenance brightening. "By Jove! It doesn’t matter which way he went down the hallway, don’t you see?"
Kate eyed the man up close.
"Talk straight, bub. We’re wasting time. He thinks there’s rooms and such for him hide in and wait so’s he can pick us off while we’re looking for him."
"But that’s a crazy plan!"
Kate nodded at the mess of the old lady’s blood and brains dripping down the lobby wallpaper.
"Does that look like sane?"
J.D. said, "What about you not hearing his spurs?"
"There was no sound of his spurs," said the manager, "because he stepped outside! He’s not letting himself into a room through a door in the hallway."
J.D. picked up on the thought. "He slipped around outside to let himself in through a window."
The manager nodded eagerly. "A lot of guests lock the doors but forget the windows. There have been thefts so we warn them but it’s still common."
"Are there rooms with connecting doors? He’ll pick a room that’s got a fallback escape route. He’ll wait for the sound of our spurs. He’ll wait until we pass his door. Then he’ll step out behind us. Unless we stop him."
"We have three such rooms," said the manager. "They’re a bit more expensive, of course, but the traveling salesmen and such don’t seem to mind as long as —"
J.D. unhitched his spurs. He attached them so they hung soundlessly from his gun belt.
Kate did the same.
J.D. said, "We’ll check those rooms first."
Chapter 24
Spivey was starting to think that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.
He sat in a chair in the dark hotel room. He held a six-gun in each hand. The grips of the pistols felt loose and sweaty in his palms. He wiped a sleeve across his forehead to keep the cold sweat that coated his forehead from dripping into his eyes.
It was stuffy in the room after the heat of the day. The window remained open across the room, through which he had gained entry.
A trickle of sweat worked its way down the middle of his back.
It wasn’t fear.
Keep telling yourself that, he kept telling himself.
It’s two-to-one, sure, but you hold the element of surprise. It was damn clever to ease out of the hotel and then slip around outside. He made sure to pick a room with a connecting door, which now stood open, to further stack the deck. But in the short time of his occupancy, the confines of the room had become like an invisible vise, tightening and grinding his guts.
It ain’t fear.
It’s anticipation of the rep to come.
But where were they, dammit?
He had expected to hear their spurs jangling in the hallway. That’s how he intended to pin them in from behind. But so far, nothing. And too damn much time had passed.
Spivey considered easing his way out the window. Get on his horse and clear the hell out. Light a shuck for parts unknown. Hell, they got Jaybird. He saw 'Bird go down in the moonlight when the lances of gunfire from the alley toppled him from the saddle during their second run past the hotel.
His plan to lure J.D. and Kate Blaze inside, where he could bushwhack 'em, occurred spontaneously when he saw Jaybird go down. Spivey dismounted at a gallop, the momentum of dismounting in such a manner hurling him onto the hotel steps.
His riderless horse, and his storming into the hotel, would surely draw Blaze’s attention. Shooting the old biddy in the lobby would ensure their quick response.
He missed Jaybird. It was Jaybird who organized the mass bust-out from the Yuma pen. It was Jaybird’s notion to head east along the border, thereby eluding a posse and ultimately hooking up with Paco and Rosa. Spivey could sure use an idea or two right about now. Jaybird was good in the brains department. Spivey, not so much.
His muscles started cramping. The damn room didn’t have enough air, even with the open window. It was nervous tension. That’s what it was. He hated to admit it. He started to stretch his legs to ease the tension within him. There was the slightest jangle of one of his spurs against the floorboard.
Relax, Spivey told himself.
He tried to think of something pleasant. He thought about slitting the cavalryman’s throat that morning. Watching the bright red gush of blood and the glaze in the kid’s eyes as he died. He thought about the boner it gave him. Yeah, those were good thoughts.
But where the hell was Blaze and his bitch wife?
On the other side of the door, a few away in a hallway lit by kerosene lamps that cast a wavering illumination, J.D. lifted an index finger to his lips, signaling for extreme silence. He’d heard the brief jangle of spurs from within the room they were passing.
Kate nodded. She’d heard it too.
They had been easing along the hallway. Each with their back pressed to the wall to make as narrow a target as possible. Advancing in tandem, slowly. Their bootfalls close to the wall, lessening the chance of a tell-tale squeak of floorboards that would signal their presence.
J.D. motioned for Kate to position herself a few feet further along the hallway, to the side of the next door down from the one behind which they’d heard the spur jangle where the genius, Spivey, waited to ambush them.
Spivey thought he had them cornered. It was the other way around.
But that didn’t ease J.D.’s nerves, now taut because he always worried about his woman when he and Katie went into a fray together. What would he ever do in a life if he lost her? He didn’t even like to contemplate that. And right now she looked damn beautiful, standing there with a Colt in each hand, eyeing him for his signal. What a woman.
He motioned to the doorknob before him, a gesture with his boot to indicate kicking it in. Kate nodded. J.D. mimed the number one with a nod of his head. Then two. She silently counted with him. J.D. gave Kate the nod for three. Simultaneously, they each lifted their right boot to deliver a sharp, short kick to the doorknob before them, kicking powerfully enough to practically take each door off its hinges.
They strode into the adjacent rooms.
Spivey was caught completely by surprise. He leapt to his feet like a jack-in-the-box when J.D. kicked his door in while the crash of Kate’s entry into the next room carried loudly through the open connecting doorway.
J.D. started triggering his Colts.
The bullets punched Spivey into a dying man�
��s backstep. He struggled mightily to raise his gun, a dying reflex squeezed off a round into the floor. Spivey peered down at the holes in his chest. He looked up at J.D.
J.D. said, "This is for those two cavalrymen, you piece of shit."
He fired both Colts.
The impact of the bullets--one through the head, one into the heart--sent Spivey crashing through the window behind him.
Kate appeared in the connecting doorway. She saw Spivey’s legs, visible from the knees down because the low window sill had caught and tripped him when he went down, resulting in his corpse being partially in and partially out of the room.
Kate said, "Damn. You get to have all of the fun."
From the street out front, a snarling she-cat snarl of a voice shouted into the night.
"I’m calling you out, bitch! Step out and fight like a woman, Kate Blaze. Come out and die!"
Rosa Diablo...
J.D. said to Kate, "Looks like you get to have your fun too."
Chapter 25
J.D. and Kate again positioned themselves outside, at the mouth of the alley that ran beside the hotel.
Rosa Diablo stood in the middle of the street, clearly visible in the pools of light cast by the hotel and the saloon. Classic gunfighter posture with her boots firmly planted. Right wrist out and bent, held loose, ready for a quick draw. Waiting...
Kate said under her breath, "I’m looking forward to this," and she started to leave the shadows.
J.D. said, "Wait. What if it’s a trap? Paco could be waiting to pick you off, using Rosa as the bait to draw you out."
"Like hell. Rosa’s the boss of those two. This dustup tonight hasn’t been going on for but a few minutes. Paco’s still trying to get his hands on hardware and not finding anything but people’s homes with the doors locked and bolted."
From the street, Rosa shouted, "What is it, puta? Do you run and hide when you are called out? Do not hide, Kate Blaze. The moment of truth is at hand."
Kate looked at J.D. "There’s no turning back for this."
Blaze! Western Series: Six Adult Western Novels Page 9
