The Coyote Tracker

by Larry D. Sweazy

  Josiah had no clue which grenades Juan Carlos carried and planned on using. It didn’t matter. Damage was not the intention. A distraction, causing panic and surprise, was the hoped for outcome.

  But using the explosives was a big risk. The Ketchum grenade was a Union invention, and there had been times during battle that Confederate soldiers had used blankets—a straw-drawn duty—to catch the incoming grenades. The soldiers threw the unexploded grenades back from where they came. Kind of like stabbing a man with his own knife. Josiah had seen it done more than once. It was a possibility that Juan Carlos and Miguel could find themselves in the same situation.

  “Besides, you worry too much, Señor Josiah,” Juan Carlos continued, with a wry smile. “Miguel and I will handle seven men, while you only handle two or three.”

  “The bombs will wake all of Austin,” Josiah said.

  “That, too, is part of the plan, señor. We hope to draw some goodwill to our aid, if we are in need. I’ve never known a curiosity seeker who was not armed.”

  “That’s all good and fine as long as they shoot at the right person.”

  “That is another chance we must take, señor. Perhaps we will be gone by then, our quarry safe, and the smoke and bullets behind us.”

  * * *

  Josiah parted company with Juan Carlos and Miguel with a silent nod once they were two blocks from the saloon.

  He stayed close to the buildings and boardwalk, using the shadows as much as he could for cover. His pace was steady, but he held Clipper back, aiming to ease in behind the Easy Nickel as stealthily as possible.

  If there were times when Josiah thought riding a black horse, like the one Miguel rode, was a good idea, now was one of those times. But he would not part with Clipper. They had been through too much together.

  A known and agreed upon alleyway appeared about a block away from the saloon, and Josiah guided Clipper into it.

  The alleyway sat between a milliner’s shop and a lady’s dress shop, both places Pearl had most likely frequented—in her previous life. He pushed the thought of her from his mind but found it hard since Juan Carlos had brought up what he was risking.

  Still, he needed to focus, stay grounded on the task at hand: his life and everyone else who was involved in the rescue. Scrap depended on the success of it, without even knowing what was going on. There were troubles with Pearl that Juan Carlos was unaware of, matters of the heart that had taken a hard turn, a turn Josiah wasn’t sure could be straightened out—even if he had the time to properly bring the spat about his presence in Blanche Dumont’s house, and all it entailed, to a complete end.

  He tied Clipper’s reins to the back corner post of a small porch behind the milliner’s and loaded up with his weapons.

  He had a knife in his boot, and his Peacemaker, along with a full accompaniment of cartridges in his belt, and another thrown over his shoulder. He pulled his rifle, a Winchester ’73, out of the scabbard, patted Clipper on the neck, and eased away along the dark alley, certain of his next destination.

  It didn’t take long for the back of the Easy Nickel to come into sight.

  Another alleyway ran along the rear of the building, and it was cloaked in as much darkness as the one Josiah had left Clipper in.

  The building was dark, at least what Josiah could see of it. There were no windows in the back. Just a door on the bottom floor, crowded with empty beer kegs, and a stairway that led up three flights. From what he could see, there were no lamps burning.

  He had positioned himself at the corner of another building about twenty feet across from the back door. He was close to the spot where Lola had been killed, where Scrap’s fate changed in a moment, only because of his desire to seek out his sister, and nothing more. That one act had changed everything for the boy. His life might never be the same again.

  There was nothing to do now but wait.

  A breeze kicked up, snaking through the alleyways, between the buildings, bringing with it a chill; a chill that ran up and down Josiah’s spine, goading him to be afraid. Going into battle was never easy, never a joy. There was no way that Brogdon Caine was going to give up Myra Lynn without a fight. Josiah knew what death smelled like, tasted like, and the memory of those senses came rushing back to him, reminding him of his past, and of his future. He hoped his skills would see him through. His trigger finger was cold and numb.

  Josiah didn’t have to wait too long.

  Like they’d planned, Juan Carlos was in position and threw a grenade into the saloon’s front window.

  The blanket of silence was so great that the first sound of breaking glass was like standing on a frozen pond and having the ice crack and then explode, right under your feet.

  The shattering of the window echoed up and down the street, sounding the alarm of an immediate attack.

  Josiah took a deep breath and waited for the Ketchum grenade to explode. It didn’t. The grenade had obviously not landed on the plunger. He hoped Juan Carlos was prepared for what came next.

  A light blazed on inside the kitchen of the saloon, lighting all of the back of the building like a fire had been set and allowed to flare. But it was no fire. The grenade had woken up everyone in the saloon, set the men on watch to do their job: protect whatever needed protecting, at any cost. Josiah had underestimated the little Negro at Blanche Dumont’s house. It was not a mistake he cared to repeat this time around. The outcome would be worse than a bruised ego if he underestimated Brogdon Caine.

  Another shatter of glass quickly followed the first, as Juan Carlos threw another grenade. This time a boom! followed as the grenade exploded inside the saloon.

  Josiah didn’t hesitate. He rushed across the dark alleyway, his knife firmly in one hand and his Winchester firmly in the other.

  CHAPTER 35

  Josiah saw the first hint of movement at the bottom of the outside stairway; the shadow of a hulking man just becoming aware of Josiah’s presence.

  There was enough light shining out from the kitchen for Josiah to see the man, who looked like a boulder with arms and legs, reaching for his sidearm. He was dressed all in black, like the riders at the jailbreak and those at the café the day before. Josiah could only assume the man was a member of that crew, though he didn’t look familiar. Not that Josiah had gotten a good look at any of the men either time.

  “Drop it, friend,” Josiah said, the Winchester raised to chest level, his finger on the trigger.

  The man looked like he’d just stirred awake; he seemed slightly disoriented—but he ignored Josiah’s command, raising a Colt with a seven-and-a-half-inch barrel in the direction of Josiah’s head.

  There was no time for second chances, no second requests. Josiah pulled the trigger, shooting the man in the shoulder, sending him stumbling backward, the Colt falling from his grip. Josiah followed up with another shot to the opposite arm. The man spiraled to the ground in a heavy thud, landing on his side.

  There were no other weapons that Josiah could see. He was surprised that the watchman was not better armed, that Caine hadn’t been expecting a rescue, but it didn’t look like he had been.

  The shots had been meant to maim, not to kill. It might have been a mistake, not killing the man outright, but there’d be time to deal with the consequences of that decision later—regardless of Juan Carlos’s warning.

  Josiah tucked his knife in the sheath and scooped up the boulder man’s Colt, then looked down at him, writhing in pain. “You come after me, I’ll kill you outright, you understand?”

  The man said nothing; his eyes were filled with pain, his skin pasty and white, sweat beading on his brow, and his thin undershirt soaked with two undammed rivers of blood. Shock was setting in—Josiah had seen it a thousand times in the war. The man was going nowhere quick. He might even die. Still, there was no trusting a wounded man like you could a dead man.


  Josiah aimed the rifle at the man’s ankle, then thought better of hobbling him, crippling him for the rest of his life—if he lived. Instead, he shot the man just above the ankle, in the calf, as close to the bone as possible without shattering it.

  The shot echoed, joined with a weak scream of sudden pain, overtaking the man so much that his eyes rolled back in his head, the whites of his eyes shining in the night like two miniature moons had crashed to the ground.

  Josiah didn’t stop to check and see if the man was dead or not; he sprinted up the stairs, not looking back, armed with an extra gun now that the man’s Colt had become his.

  Time was ticking away.

  Another Ketchum grenade exploded. A bigger one. There was a noticeable reverberation from inside the building, a shake of the foundation, like a thunderclap exploding inside the cellar instead of overhead. The whole building shook and threatened to collapse, but somehow it stayed standing.

  Yells and screams came from inside the saloon. Gunfire rang out from the front, coming from both directions as Miguel returned fire. The fight was fully engaged now, and Josiah hoped Juan Carlos and Miguel could handle the attack from the hornet’s nest they’d just intentionally kicked open.

  The air smelled of gunpowder, blood, and the ghosts of war. Thinking or regret no longer mattered; only the mission was of any importance.

  Josiah reached the top floor quickly, barely breathing hard. Adrenaline numbed his entire body. He felt nothing. He couldn’t even hear his heart beating, but he could feel it throbbing in his chest.

  Another grenade exploded, and the smell of a growing fire quickly met Josiah’s nose. He pushed open the third-floor door cautiously, the Winchester in one hand, the Colt in the other. He’d sheathed the knife once he decided that any hand-to-hand fighting was out of the question.

  The hallway was dark, no sconces burning, no light visible other than what came in behind him from the graying dawn. All he could smell was the fire and battle raging below him. The chaotic noise drowned everything else out, including any fears that might have followed him up the stairs.

  Josiah took his chances and eased inside the hallway, his finger on the trigger of each gun he carried.

  He focused his eyes, searching for shadows, anything that moved. A rat would have died an instant death if it had dared to show itself. But there was nothing, just an endless hallway bathed in darkness, the number 3 beckoning him.

  He could only hope that Juan Carlos was right, that Myra Lynn was safe inside, held captive for the moment in court when she would betray her brother and send him to the gallows. It was a thought Josiah had a hard time stomaching, but it was easy to figure; Myra Lynn’s life for Scrap’s was a simple whore’s deal, one thing for another, a trade in flesh, only of a different kind.

  The third door was easy to find. Josiah put his ear to it hoping to hear something, a clue of what, or who, might be waiting on the other side. There was nothing. Or at least nothing that he could decipher over the noise and racket below.

  Smoke wafted up through the floor, a gray cloud followed by the first flicker of fire at the front of the building. There was no time to plan, or to wait for the most appropriate moment to rush in. The fire was hungry, already out of control.

  Another grenade exploded, rattling his legs, shaking him all the way to the tips of his sweaty hair. His ears were deafened for a long moment; they tingled. He feared the floor underneath his feet would give way, fall out from underneath him, but it didn’t.

  Josiah took a deep breath, regained his footing, and kicked in the door, prepared to shoot at the first thing that moved.

  Smoke wrapped around his ankles like a silent snake certain of its next meal, but he paid it no mind as his eyes adjusted to a stronger bit of light: A hurricane lamp burned a low flame at the far end of the small room.

  A figure came clear before him, bound in a chair facing the door, arms tied to the side—no way out, no way to escape. It wasn’t Myra Lynn, like Josiah had expected, like Juan Carlos had assured him it would be.

  Instead, he was staring at the panicked face of a familiar man, Abram Randalls. The last time Josiah had seen the mousy little man, he was being carted out of the jail through a hole blown in the wall. Now he was captive on the burning floor of a three-storey saloon.

  Randalls didn’t appear to recognize Josiah. Only fear showed on his face; it was as white with shock as the man’s at the bottom of the stairs.

  There was no one else in the room that Josiah could see, but the door blocked half of his view. A guard was somewhere close, unless Juan Carlos had been wrong about that, too.

  Blanche Dumont’s bookkeeper and Myron Farnsworth’s embezzler had no gag in his mouth, and without the blink of an eye, with sweat pouring from his forehead, he shouted, “They’ve taken her to the train!”

  They were the last words Abram Randalls would ever speak.

  A hail of bullets erupted from the opposite side of the door. The first one caught Abrams in the chin, ending any chance for a confession, or spouting any more revelations about Brogdon Caine’s plans. Blood splattered outward, silencing the man. The impact of the bullet was so severe it nearly toppled over the chair. The second bullet sent shattered teeth flying into the air, along with muscle and sinew, while the third pierced the man’s right eye, sending it completely to the back of his skull. Three more bullets followed, all directed at Randalls’s head. There was nothing left but a fountain of blood exiting the holes; any skill with numbers, keeping secrets, or anything else was long gone, never to be seen or heard from again. He was dead before the echo of his last spoken word fell to the floor.

  Josiah didn’t wait, didn’t breathe. He kept his promise to himself, asked no questions, and fired through the door, emptying the Colt, tossing it to the side, then firing the Winchester as blindly through the door as he had the pistol. A quick thump to the floor followed as the unseen guard met the same fate as Abram Randalls.

  With a quick peek around the door, and a hearty dose of caution, Josiah made sure the guard was, in fact, dead, and that there was not another. He was dead, and the only man in the room. Josiah didn’t recognize the man, but he was dressed all in black. Another rider, dead in Caine’s whorehouse. It looked to him like the commander of the riders and the man behind the jailbreak was Caine, but at this point, he couldn’t be one hundred percent certain. And there was still the question of what Caine was after in the first place.

  Fire fully burst through the floor at the far end of the hallway. Flames reached hungrily upward, then outward, reaching out to any place there was dry wood to consume.

  Smoke filled the hallway, and over the shouts and gunfire that now came from the street, Josiah heard the first blow of the morning train whistle, rising in the distance, calling all riders to it . . . before it was too late to board, or save Myra Lynn Elliot.

  CHAPTER 36

  There was only one way out of the top floor of the Easy Nickel Saloon for Josiah: the same way he had come in. Any hesitation or fear was un–thought of; he knew the morning train left the station at sunrise. The scream of the train’s loud whistle, and the rattle of the house, woke him every morning he slept in his own bed. A place he longed to be now, but could not be. If Myra Lynn really was on the early train out of town, he had no choice but to try and stop her from leaving, even though he had no reason to trust Abram Randalls. He didn’t have any reason to distrust the man, either.

  Josiah hugged the wall down to the door, keeping as low to the floor and in as much fresh air as possible.

  Smoke from the fire below had filled the hallway, making it nearly impossible to see his way out. His eyes burned, and he quickly pulled his handkerchief up over his nose. It didn’t help. His lungs burned like they were on fire, too. By the time he reached the door, Josiah could feel the heat biting at his back and toasting the bottoms of his feet through hi
s boots. He didn’t care what was waiting on the other side of the door. Once he reached it, he busted out, desperate for a breath of clean, breathable air.

  Barely escaping the hallway before another flame reached out for him, Josiah coughed, choked, and yanked the handkerchief from his face.

  Luckily, there hadn’t been anyone waiting for him, either outside the door or hidden in a sniper’s position somewhere on one of the roofs of the surrounding buildings. The well-planned troop of men who had executed a flawless jailbreak seemed to have faltered in their planning for a rescue attempt, if there had been a plan at all.

  Josiah would have taken cover at the back door, but judging from the sound of the gunfire and screams and shouts from the front of the building, every available man was there, fighting off Miguel and Juan Carlos. He hoped the grenades had evened the count.

  There was no time to join in and help. Josiah needed to get to the train. It was hard telling how many men Brogdon Caine had put on Myra Lynn’s escort out of town, but it was clear that the saloon owner considered the girl valuable—or else he had been planning on getting her out of town all along, though that made little sense to Josiah at the moment. He was still trying to digest it all. Without Myra Lynn, there was no witness to Lola’s murder, nothing other than hearsay to frame Scrap as the killer. And all that was left in Scrap’s defense was his story of another man, the obscure cowboy, leaning over Lola, killing her outright, then running off.

  Josiah still had no clue who the killer was, but he had a good idea that the man was no cowboy just passing through town, like Scrap had assumed.

  It seemed to Josiah that the same man had killed all four whores, not just Lola, and that meant the murderer been in town for some time. Probably close. Even out in the open. Like behind the bar of the Easy Nickel Saloon. William, the barkeep, was as good a suspect in the murders as any, now that Josiah thought about it . . . now that everything had led back to the saloon.