Whit Cook, Ben Hanley, and Lou Price had ridden into town about half an hour earlier. Later, Roy Keene and Andy Jordan would show up, followed by Russ Garwood and T. J. Evans.
Ten hard-faced, gun-hung strangers riding in together would attract a lot of attention and arouse suspicion. Tatum didn’t want that. Redemption was a growing community, so strangers weren’t that unusual as long as they weren’t in large groups. By midday, all ten outlaws would drift toward the bank, ready to strike as soon as Tatum gave the word.
For now, Tatum, Belton, and Flynn went into the general store, looking like grub-line riders who had stopped to pick up some supplies. That was exactly what Tatum wanted people to think.
With spurs jingling, the three men walked along an aisle between shelves full of assorted goods and approached the counter at the back of the store. An old man with a long white beard stood behind the counter waiting on a couple of women. Tatum barely gave them a glance.
His attention was focused on the other person behind the counter.
The woman was in her early twenties, he figured, with a shining cap of fair hair that curved around her face. She had blue eyes and a little dimple in her chin, and she was so wholesomely pretty that Tatum felt the impact of it like a punch in the gut.
She smiled and asked, “What can I do for you?”
There were a lot of answers to that question, Tatum thought, none of them particularly proper but all highly exciting and appealing. He made sure his face didn’t reveal what he was thinking as he replied, “My pards and I need some flour and coffee. Pound of each, I reckon.”
“All right, I can get that for you.”
Her hands were resting on the counter. Tatum glanced at the left one and saw the wedding ring on her finger.
So she was married. That was just as well. He already had a woman back at the hideout they’d been using, and Hannah was the jealous sort.
Besides, he sure as hell hadn’t come to Redemption to go courting. He was here for the money in the bank, and that was all.
The old-timer finished with the two ladies, and as they left the store, he strolled over and gave a friendly nod to Tatum, Belton, and Flynn.
“Morning,” he said. “You fellas just passing through? I don’t recall seeing you around here before.”
“That’s right,” Tatum said easily. “We’re on our way to Colorado. Thought we might try to get in on some of those gold strikes out there.”
The mouth wreathed in a long white beard curved in a smile as the storekeeper nodded again.
“Just between us, if I was thirty years younger I might give it a try myself,” he said.
“If you’re gonna settle down, though, this looks like a nice place to do it.”
“That it is,” the old-timer agreed. “Redemption has had its troubles, but it’s pretty peaceful now.”
That was liable to change pretty soon, Tatum thought. He and his men wouldn’t shoot up the town unless it was necessary, but if anyone got in their way, it would be just too damned bad for whoever it was.
“Maybe if the prospecting doesn’t work out, we’ll come back here,” he said.
“You do that. Good citizens are always welcome.”
Flynn laughed. Tatum shot him a sharp glance. Sure, it was pretty funny for anybody to refer to them as good citizens, but they didn’t want to act like that.
The storekeeper didn’t seem to notice. He kept talking, shooting the breeze as old men had a tendency of doing, while the blonde weighed and bagged the flour and the coffee. When she was done, she set the bags on the counter in front of Tatum and toted up the price. He paid her, handed the flour to Belton and the coffee to Flynn, and said, “Let’s go.”
He couldn’t stop thinking about how pretty that woman was as they walked out of the store.
He wasn’t the only one. When they reached the high porch, Flynn let out a low whistle and said, “Lord have mercy. I’d give a lot to spend some time with that gal.”
Flynn was the product of an Irish father and a Mexican mother. He was young and handsome and considered himself irresistible to women. For the most part he was right.
Belton said, “Yeah, she was pretty sweet.”
“Forget it, both of you,” Tatum snapped. “That’s not why we’re here, and you know it.”
He wasn’t going to let on that the blonde had affected him the same way. He was the leader of this gang, and he didn’t want his men knowing that he was thinking about anything except cleaning out that bank.
He slipped his watch from his pocket, flipped it open, and checked the time.
“We’ll give it another half hour,” he said. “Then it’ll be time to make our move.”
Roy Fleming, mayor of Redemption and president of the bank, had a habit of working at his desk through lunch. That was even more common these days, because several months earlier his head teller, Mason Jones, had been killed during an attempted robbery. The would-be thieves hadn’t gotten away, but they hadn’t been stopped until it was too late to save poor Mason’s life.
After that, Fleming had promoted one of the other tellers, but the man just wasn’t as good at the job as Mason had been. So Fleming wound up being nervous about leaving the bank in anyone’s hands other than his own.
Today, however, he was thinking about going over to the café for lunch. This was the day they served pot roast, and Helga Nilsson’s pot roast was the best Fleming had ever eaten. It would be a shame not to indulge in it.
He left his office and strolled out into the bank’s lobby. All three tellers had customers, with two more waiting at a couple of the windows. One of the customers was Walter Shelton, Fleming realized.
Shelton was fairly new in Redemption, having moved here about a year previously. The man kept only a small amount on deposit, but Fleming knew from talking to banker friends of his in Wichita and Topeka that Shelton had much larger accounts there, where his businesses were. It seemed to Fleming that it would make sense for Shelton to transfer some of that money here.
When Shelton finished his transaction at the teller’s window and turned to start toward the door, Fleming moved to intercept him.
“Hello, Walt,” Fleming said with a big smile on his round, florid face. “How are you today?”
Shelton was a thin, sallow man with iron gray hair. Spectacles rested on his nose. He never smiled much, so the faint twitch of his mouth counted almost as a grin.
“Mr. Fleming,” he said.
“Now, I’ve told you to call me Roy. We’re doing business together, aren’t we?”
“I have some of my money in your bank,” Shelton said dryly.
“Well, that’s almost the same as us being partners. How are you doing today?”
“Fine, I suppose.”
“How are that beautiful wife and lovely daughter of yours?”
“Fine.”
Fleming kept smiling even though he was wondering what in blazes he had to do in order to drag more than a few syllables out of Shelton.
“You know, my wife and I really should have you and your wife over for Sunday dinner some week. We’d love to get to know you better…”
Fleming’s voice trailed off as he realized that Shelton wasn’t paying attention to him anymore. Instead, the man’s eyes had narrowed behind those rimless spectacles as Shelton peered out through the bank’s front window.
Several men were tying up their horses at the hitch rack in front of the bank, Fleming noted. He didn’t recognize them, but seeing strangers in Redemption was nothing unusual these days. Lots of people were passing through. Some of them stayed and opened bank accounts. Those were the ones Fleming liked.
These men didn’t look like the sort to open accounts, though. In fact, apprehension stirred inside Fleming as he saw how two of the men stayed with the horses and the other eight stepped up onto the boardwalk and headed for the bank’s front door.
Shelton must have leaped to the same conclusion as Fleming. He exclaimed, “My God, they’re going to
rob the bank!”
Then Shelton did something that Fleming wouldn’t have expected in a thousand years.
He reached under his coat and pulled out a hogleg that was damned near as big as he was.
At that moment, the door burst open and the eight men came in fast, bristling with guns of their own. Shelton pointed his revolver at them, said with surprising power in his normally reedy voice, “Eat lead, you sons of bitches!” and pulled the trigger.
Chapter 8
Just about the last thing Caleb Tatum expected to see when he charged into the bank was some spindly, middle-aged townie pointing a gun at him.
Tatum hadn’t lived as long as he had by being slow to react, though. He jerked his Colt toward the man threatening him and fired.
The guns roared so close together it sounded like one shot. Neither bullet found its target because the red-faced fatso standing next to the skinny gink with the gun tackled him just as both men pulled trigger. The slug from the townie’s gun went into the ceiling while Tatum’s bullet whistled harmlessly through the air and thudded into the bank’s rear wall.
The townie lost his gun when he hit the floor. The impact jostled it out of his hand.
All this was unexpected, but Tatum knew they could deal with it. No job ever went off perfectly. Keene and Garwood wheeled around to cover the windows and door, while Cook, Belton, and Price rushed the tellers’ windows. Flynn and Hanley threw down on the customers, while Tatum went for the fatso, who had to be the bank president, and his gun-toting friend.
Tatum kicked the gun out of reach before the townie could make a grab for it. He pointed his Colt at the men on the floor and ordered, “Don’t move!”
By now Cook, Belton, and Price had the tellers emptying their cash drawers into canvas sacks they had brought along for that purpose. Flynn and Hanley made sure none of the customers tried anything funny and grabbed a few wallets and watches while they were at it. No point in wasting time when you could be making a little extra profit.
From the front window, Roy Keene called, “A few people are lookin’ around like they might’ve heard those shots, but nobody’s headed this way yet.”
“Good,” Tatum grunted. He reached down and bunched his free hand in the banker’s vest. He pointed his gun at the man’s nose and went on, “Get up.”
The banker obeyed, clambering awkwardly to his feet as Tatum half-dragged him up.
“You shouldn’t have stopped me, Fleming,” the skinny hombre still on the floor said. “I would have taught these owlhoots a lesson.”
“The only lesson you could teach is how to die quicker,” Tatum said. Knowing that the stubborn old coot would cause more problems if he got the chance, Tatum hauled off and kicked him in the head, knocking him out.
“Oh, dear Lord…” the banker breathed in horror.
“You’ll get worse if you don’t cooperate.” Tatum shoved him toward the safe. “Open it.”
The banker opened his mouth and for a second Tatum thought he was going to argue, but then the man said, “All right. Just don’t hurt anyone else.”
He stumbled over to the massive safe, which was painted green—the color of money, Tatum thought—and worked the combination, spinning the dial with trembling but relatively confident fingers. Then he gripped the handle, twisted it, and swung the door open.
Bundles of cash were stacked on the shelves inside. Tatum pulled his own canvas sack from under his shirt and tossed it to the banker.
“Rake ’em in there,” he ordered. Over his shoulder he asked, “How’s it looking out there?”
“People are still lookin’ over here,” Keene reported, “but nobody’s—Hell! There goes somebody runnin’ up the street. Must be going for the law.”
“More than likely,” Tatum said. The banker was still putting money in the sack. “Hurry up.”
The man reached in the safe again, but when his hand came out this time it had a small-caliber pistol in it. Tatum had been waiting for something like that. He struck swiftly, chopping down with his gun on the banker’s head. The man dropped the pistol, groaned, and fell to his knees, blood welling from the gash that Tatum’s gunsight had opened up in his scalp.
Tatum holstered his gun, reached into the safe, and scooped up the last few bundles of greenbacks. There were some papers in the safe as well, but he left them and wheeled around as he cinched the top of the sack closed.
“Got it?” he called to the men at the tellers’ windows.
“Got it,” Price confirmed.
“Then let’s go.”
The bank robbers started toward the door, ready to shoot their way out of Redemption if they had to.
Even though it wasn’t quite noon yet, Mordecai had already gone over to the café for lunch. Or supper, as he sometimes called it, because he would sleep most of the afternoon before getting up to take over the night shift in the marshal’s office.
Bill was sitting in the office going over a new batch of wanted posters that had just come in. He tried to keep up with such things, because you never could tell when some wanted owlhoot might drift into Redemption.
To tell the truth, such studying reminded him a little too much of schoolwork. He’d had enough book learning that he could read and write and cipher just fine, but he had never cared for being cooped up in a schoolhouse.
So he was almost glad for the interruption when he heard running footsteps outside the open door and Benjy Cobb suddenly appeared with a wide-eyed look of excitement on his weathered old face.
Benjy worked mostly as a swamper for Fred Smoot over at the saloon, although he helped out sometimes at Monroe Mercantile, too, when he could stay sober long enough in his continuing battle with whiskey. He seemed to be sober now, just all worked up about something.
“What is it, Benjy?” Bill asked as he pushed the reward dodgers aside and stood up.
“I ain’t sure, Bill,” the swamper replied, “but I’d swear I heard some shootin’ a couple of minutes ago inside the bank.”
Bill stiffened in alarm. There had been an attempt to rob the bank several months earlier, during all that Indian trouble, but he’d been able to stop the robbers before they got away.
“Why’d you wait to come tell me?” he asked as he came out from behind the desk in a hurry.
“Well, I wasn’t sure…the bank’s got pretty thick walls, you know…but then some other folks said they thought they heard somethin’, too…”
Bill didn’t wait to hear any more. Without pausing to grab his hat, he rushed past Benjy out of the office. He flung an order over his shoulder.
“Go find Mordecai at the café!”
The bank was a couple of blocks away. Bad leg or no bad leg, Bill could move pretty fast when he had to. He did now, running toward the bank.
Behind him, Benjy scurried across the street toward the café. People started to yell questions, sensing that something was going on.
Bill was still more than a block away when he spotted two men standing by a bunch of horses tied in front of the bank. Those men appeared to see him coming at the same time. They twisted toward him, clawed guns from their holsters, and opened fire.
With his heart hammering wildly in his chest, Bill threw himself down and to the right, landing behind a water trough. The range was too far for accurate shooting with handguns, but the men at the bank might get lucky. The bullets they sent toward Bill kicked up dust from the street in a wide swath.
He rolled closer to the boardwalk and looked through the gap between it and the water trough toward the bank. More men spilled from the building now, all of them brandishing guns. It was a robbery, all right, no doubt about that. Bill drew his revolver, aimed high so the shots might carry better, and triggered two rounds toward the outlaws.
That drew more fire from them. He didn’t have time to see if his shots hit anything before bullets began coming uncomfortably close to him. He scooted back to his right as slugs thudded into the water trough.
Some of the townspeople
were still yelling, but they weren’t asking questions now. Those cries were shouts of alarm and warning. People scurried for cover as the battle continued in the street.
It was a pretty one-sided battle, Bill thought. There were nine or ten of the robbers and only one of him.
A rifle cracked behind Bill and to his right. He twisted his head around to look and spotted Mordecai crouched behind a barrel on the boardwalk on the other side of the street. The deputy had gotten hold of a Henry rifle somewhere and used it to open fire on the outlaws as they tried to get mounted. Men and horses milled around now in a confused mass.
Monroe Mercantile was only a few doors away. Bill cast an anxious glance toward the store. At this time of day, Eden might be in there, or she could be over at the café or even back at her father’s house. Bill just didn’t know.
He hoped that if she was in the store, she would have the good sense to stay behind the counter in the back, where she ought to be safe from any of the bullets flying around wildly in the street.
He needed to get closer, he realized. His Colt would be more effective at shorter range. The shots from Mordecai’s rifle had the outlaws roiled up right now, so this might be his chance.
He pulled three cartridges from the loops on his gun belt and thumbed them into the empty chambers in the revolver’s cylinder. Then, snapping it closed, he lunged to his feet, leaped to the boardwalk, and started running toward the bank.
Before he had gone more than three steps, something knocked his right leg out from under him. He fell off the boardwalk and toppled into the street. At first he thought a bullet had struck him, but he didn’t feel any pain other than that of crashing to the planks and getting the wind knocked mostly out of him.
He didn’t have time to figure out what had happened because at that moment, the door of the mercantile was flung open and Eden ran out, crying, “Bill!” She must have been watching from inside the building and had seen him go down. She leaped off the boardwalk and started running toward him.
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