by Bill Crider
“Your uncle’s a liar. Your mother is just fine, and she’s waiting for you inside the church.”
Angel slithered over to Hoot and put his mouth next to Hoot’s ear.
“Where’s your mule?” he asked.
“Over yonder,” Hoot whispered. “Some old man’s gonna be lookin’ for it any minute now.”
“I’ll get there first.”
“You gonna take me with you?”
“Sure,” Angel said.
Hoot grinned.
“You shouldn’t have run off with my niece, though,” Angel said.
“You know how it is,” Hoot told him.
“Yeah. I know. And I think I’ve changed my mind.”
“Thought you might,” Hoot said, the grin still plastered on his face. “Don’t guess it matters much now.”
“Don’t guess it does,” Angel said. “Not to you.”
Hoot was still grinning when Angel brought his knife around and slit Hoot’s throat from one side to the other, slicing through both carotid arteries and sending blood jetting across the cemetery.
Angel paid no attention to the blood. He was up and running toward Laurie and the woman. Hoot must’ve made some kind of noise because they half turned toward Angel, who hit the woman in the chest with his shoulder. She sat down hard.
Angel scooped Laurie up under his arm and kept right on running without looking back. He was about halfway to the trees when the woman yelled for him to stop.
Angel didn’t pay her any mind. He knew the woman wouldn’t shoot, not as long as he was holding Laurie, who was screaming, kicking, and trying to bite him. He just squeezed her even tighter.
He found the mule with no trouble at all, but he knew he was going to have problems with Laurie. He wasn’t sure he could mount the mule without at least a little cooperation from his niece.
“If you’ll hold still,” he told her, “I won’t have to hurt you. If you don’t, I’ll hit you.”
Laurie kept right on struggling. It was as if she hadn’t heard him.
“All right,” he said. “But remember, this is all your fault.”
He was about to club her in the head with the handle of his knife when he heard someone behind him.
“Don’t you dare hit her,” Ellie said. “If you do, I’ll kill you.”
Angel turned and saw Ellie standing there, breathing hard and holding the shotgun ready to fire.
Angel smiled at her. “You shoot at me with that thing and you’ll kill the both of us. I don’t think you want to do that.”
Ellie’s shoulders slumped, and Angel knew he had her buffaloed. He looked past her and saw someone else coming toward them.
“You tell your friend to keep his distance,” Angel said. “Much as I’d hate to hurt this little girl, I’ll cut her if you give me a reason.”
Laurie kicked and screamed, and Ellie turned her head to see who was coming. It was Shag Tillman. Ellie knew Shag wouldn’t be any help to her.
Angel put the point of the knife to the side of Laurie’s neck.
“You better calm yourself,” he told the girl. “If you don’t, this knife might just slide right through your skin.”
Laurie stopped kicking.
“That’s better,” Angel told her. Then he said to Ellie, “Now, I’m gonna get on this mule and ride away from here. You can tell Brady and my sister that I’ll have to finish the job on them later. In the meantime, they can think about how happy Laurie’s goin’ to be with her Uncle Angel.”
He bent his head down closer to Laurie. “Ain’t that right, honey? You really do like your Uncle Angel, don’t you?”
“No,” Laurie said, and she threw her head back and smashed it into Angel’s nose.
Angel let out a yelp and dropped Laurie. She hit the ground and rolled, and Angel made a dive at her with the knife. When he did Ellie pulled the first trigger of the shotgun.
The buckshot hit Angel at about his waist and nearly ripped him in two. A couple of pellets also hit the mule, which brayed and shied away. Angel toppled toward it, missed, and fell to the ground.
“Good God A’mighty,” Shag said.
THIRTY-NINE
A week later, Shag was sitting in the swing in Ellie’s front yard. Brady Tolbert was in a chair nearby, his shoulder swathed in bandages. Both men were drinking lemonade from glasses that were cool to the touch, though to tell the truth Shag would’ve preferred something a little stronger than lemonade. It was late afternoon, and a soft breeze was blowing.
“That Angel Ware was ridin’ a desperate trail,” Shag said. “He must’ve been a little bit crazy to go up against Ellie Taine.”
“I don’t think he knew what he was getting into,” Brady said.
Shag had to smile at that. “Plenty of men would be fooled, I guess. And by the time they figure out what they’ve got into, it’s too late.”
Shag was just glad that Ellie had been there to take care of things. Nothing against the Texas Rangers, but it was easy to see who’d taken control of the situation at the abandoned church. If Shag had to pick somebody to be on his side in a fight, he’d go with Ellie Taine every time.
“Thing is,” he said to Brady, “Ellie don’t have any idea just how tough she is. She’s a hell of a woman.”
“That she is,” Brady said.
Ellie came out of the house and walked toward them. Sue and Laurie were with her. Ellie was carrying a pitcher of lemonade on a tray.
“Can anyone use another drink?” she asked when she reached them.
“It’s mighty good,” Shag said, “but I think I’ve had my limit.”
He set his glass on the tray she extended to him.
“What about you, Mr. Tolbert?” she asked.
“I wish you’d call me Brady,” he said.
Ellie blushed. Familiarity with men didn’t come easy to her.
“As much as we’ve been through together,” Brady said, “you’d think we could call each other by our first names.”
“She’s Miss Ellie,” Laurie said, in case Brady didn’t know. “But you can call her Ellie if you want to. She won’t mind.”
“Now, Laurie,” her mother cautioned. “Don’t go meddling in other folks’ business.”
Brady set his glass on the tray. “How about it, Ellie? I’ve been staying in your house for a week now.”
“Well, I guess it’s all right,” Ellie said. “Brady.”
“When will you be headin’ back to Del Rio?” Shag asked the Ranger.
“Soon. Maybe tomorrow.”
“Oh, no, Uncle Brady. You have to stay another day. Miss Ellie is going to let me read you a story by Mr. Irving from one of her books. It’s about a headless horseman.”
“I guess I could stay long enough for that,” Brady said. “But my job here’s finished, and I’m healed up enough to ride. I have to get back to the Ranger station.”
“Before you leave, I wish you’d talk to Miss Ellie about bein’ my deputy,” Shag said. “I could use a little help in the job.”
“Don’t go starting that with me again,” Ellie told him. “I have a ranch to run. I don’t have time to be doing anything else.”
“You had time to go off after Angel,” Shag pointed out.
“That was different. That was personal.”
“There’s lots of folks need help besides just the ones you know,” Shag said. “What about them?”
“That’s your job, I guess,” Ellie said.
She’d had no intention of ever getting involved with manhunting or violence again after her first experience. That had been personal, too, but at the same time it had been different. Not that she could explain even to herself what the difference was.
“I’m not real good at the job,” Shag said. “Much as I hate to admit it.”
“You’re better than you think you are. You took on Hoot back at that church. You came out to help me with Angel.”
“You didn’t need much help with him.”
It was true. Ellie knew
well enough that she could take care of herself in nearly any situation. That was one thing she’d learned after her husband’s death.
But she didn’t want to involve herself with other people’s troubles, and she didn’t want to have to kill anyone else, even if the one she killed was as bad as Angel. Angel had proved to her just how futile it was to go out for revenge, and wasn’t that what Shag was really talking about? Justice never seemed to enter into it.
“You know why it is, don’t you?” Shag said.
“Why what is?” Ellie asked.
“Why you didn’t need much help with Angel.”
“No. But I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”
“I sure enough am. It’s because you ain’t afraid of the devil. You’d spit in his eye.”
Ellie considered. Maybe it was true, though she’d never though of herself as being particularly brave. She couldn’t remember a single time during her pursuit of Angel that she’d felt fear. But that didn’t make any difference. She wasn’t going to spend her life hunting people down, and that’s what she told Shag.
“I don’t blame you a bit,” Sue Tolbert said. “That’s no way to live.”
“Somebody has to do it,” Brady said.
“I wasn’t talking about you. It’s your job. Besides, you’re a man.”
“If you think that makes any difference, you don’t know Ellie very well,” Brady said.
Sue looked at Ellie.
“Maybe I don’t,” she said. “But I do know that I have to go look in on Lane and Harry Moon. I thought they were going to have a fight after their last game of checkers.”
“Harry needs to get back to work,” Shag said. “He never was one to sit around for very long.”
“I’ll have both of them back in the saddle soon enough,” Ellie said. “That’s my job. Being the boss of this ranch. Come on, Sue. Let’s go see if those checker players want any of this lemonade.”
“Maybe I could read them a story,” Laurie said, taking her mother’s hand and following Ellie back toward the house.
Shag watched them go.
“You ever see another woman like that one?” he asked.
Brady smiled a slow, speculative smile.
“To tell you the truth,” he said, “I don’t believe I ever did.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A native Texan, mystery writer Bill Crider has lived in the state all of his life and uses it as the setting for many of his crime novels. He’s published more than seventy-five books and an equal number of short stories, authoring five different fantastic suspense series.
In his hugely popular Sheriff Dan Rhodes series, he brings a classic western sensibility to contemporary murder mysteries. He launched the series with the suspense novel Too Late to Die, for which he won the 1987 Anthony Award for Best First Novel, and has added more than twenty titles over two and a half decades. Crider also has written several standalone Westerns and chilling horror novels, along with several other mystery series.
In Outrage at Blanco and the sequel Texas Vigilante, he offers a bold twist by crafting a crisp, contemporary crime story and setting it in the 1880s. An extraordinary Western with a strong female hero, this tale of vengeance and justice has earned rave reviews from critics and fans alike.
Crider is an avid reader and collector of mystery and western fiction and lives the quiet life in Alvin, Texas, with his wife Judy —who is always his first reader and biggest fan.
