The Thunder Riders

by Frank Leslie

  Tomlain’s eyes turned dark in the sunlight as his chest rose and fell, blood gushing out from the hole in his side, sopping his shirt and vest. “You son of a—”

  His right hand reached for the Smith & Wesson holstered low on his right thigh in a black rig he’d had tooled and stitched in Durango on their last trip to Mexico. Considine’s own hand closed around the gun’s grips before Tomlain’s could reach it, however, and he slid the .45 from the holster.

  He held the oiled weapon up close to his face, looking it over. “Sorry, Eddie. Anyone you want me to notify?”

  “Come on, Jack. I can ride. Put me back on my horse.”

  Considine sighed, stood, and regarded the other five men facing him. Anjanette stood off to his left. The other woman, Toots, stood near Anjanette, rummaging around in her saddlebags as she glanced over her right shoulder at Considine.

  “I did the last one, so I ain’t gonna do Tomlain. I don’t wanna get the reputation of bein’ an executioner.” He glanced at a short, sharp-featured man in a bowler hat decorated with bear claws, with a string of wolf teeth around his long, thin neck. “Luther, I know you and Eddie were tight, so I won’t ask you.”

  Considine raked his gaze across the other four men, his eyes expectant, waiting.

  “Hold on.” It was Toots, standing beside her horse and facing the group, with a hand-rolled cigarette drooping from her lips. She held a lucifer in her left hand. A smile shaped itself slowly on her round, fleshy face, the pug nose peeling from sunburn.

  She scraped the lucifer to life on the cartridge belt wrapped around her thick waist, on the outside of her wool poncho and deerskin leggings, and cupped her hands to the cigarette, puffing smoke. Drawing deep on the quirley and tossing down the spent match, she walked over and took the Smith & Wesson out of Considine’s hand. Staring at the desperado leader, she held the gun out toward Anjanette.

  “If she wants to be in this group, let her show how much sand she’s got under those purty tits.”

  Chapter 8

  Following the tracks of the dozen galloping riders and the stagecoach fishtailing through the chaparral, deputy U.S. marshal Vince Patchen galloped his steeldust over a low butte crest and down the other side. He followed the tracks and the trail of torn sage and cactus toward a mesquite thicket standing in a shallow bowl and checked the steeldust down twenty yards from the abandoned stage.

  The six-hitch team was gone, their harness scattered about the scrub, the wagon tongue drooping.

  Dismounting, Patchen shucked his rifle, levered a round, and approached the stage warily, swinging his head from left to right. He didn’t want to get himself bushwhacked as his old ranger friend, Wilson Pyle, and Pyle’s young partner had done.

  Patchen squeezed the Henry in his gloved hands and licked his lips. Poor sons of bitches had been shot down like dogs.

  When he’d scrutinized the area thoroughly, concluding the gang had moved on, Patchen walked back to the stage and knelt down beside a woman lying near the coach’s open door, in a blood-splattered green traveling outfit. The woman’s sandy blond hair had fallen from its bun to hang in disarray about her pretty face.

  Patchen didn’t bother lowering his head to listen for a breath. The open eyes were death-glazed.

  Horse hooves thudded and tack squawked behind him. He straightened, looked over his shoulder at the twelve-man posse galloping toward him, with Speares in the lead, then poked his head through the stage door. Inside the coach, three more bodies lay, bloody and broken, in a single pool of slowly congealing blood on the floor between the seats. Flies droned. The blood smell hung heavy in the close quarters.

  “I figured they’d dump the stage sooner or later.” Speares drew up beside Patchen’s steeldust. Blood spotted the thick gauze wrap over his nose. Adjusting the bandage with one hand, he said, “They’ll be picking up the pace now, headin’ for the border, no doubt.”

  “That means we’re gonna have to pick up the pace,” Patchen said, his jaw hard as he raked his gaze over the posse pulling up to either side and behind Speares. The catch party was made up mostly of shop owners and their sons, with one Mexican vaquero and three Anglo market hunters whom Speares had lassoed in one of Saber Creek’s saloons.

  “I can’t ride any faster than this,” said the bank owner, Franklin, wincing as, with one hand on the cantle, he shifted in his saddle. “You men better go on ahead. I’ll only slow you down. I’ll go back and alert the army out at Fort Chiricahua, have them send a patrol—”

  He stopped as Speares raised his Remington to his head and thumbed back the hammer. “Isn’t that your money we’re chasin’, Franklin?”

  As the banker turned toward the sheriff, his lower jaw dropped, his face flushing with outrage. “Really, Speares!”

  Speares squinted one eye. “Ain’t you the one responsible for all that Wells Fargo gold? You tell me if I’m wrong.”

  The others, except Patchen, snickered as Speares held his gun barrel against the banker’s left temple. Franklin’s mouth opened and closed several times before he finally loosed a few words. “Well . . . yes, of course I’m responsible. But—”

  “But nothin’,” Speares said through gritted teeth. “I’m shorthanded the way it is, since all my deputies were gunned down tryin’ to protect your gold. Now, I realize you ain’t no gun hand, but, by God, I need every warm body I got, if for nothin’ more than keepin’ an eye out for an ambush. In other words, you ain’t goin’ nowhere but south with me and this posse, and you ain’t comin’ back till either you’re dead or we’ve killed every last one of that bunch of border snipes that invaded my town.”

  Franklin shifted his eyes nervously, swallowed. “You don’t think someone should notify the army?”

  “Take too long. Besides, those blue-bellies got their hands full with them bronco Apaches.” Speares pushed the revolver’s barrel more firmly against the banker’s head, causing Franklin to stretch his lips back from his gold-capped teeth. “Have we come to an understanding now, Mr. Franklin?”

  The banker slid his gaze to Patchen, standing before the posse, grinning and holding his Henry over his shoulder. Finding no help there, Franklin returned his gaze to Speares. “I guess I have, Sheriff—”

  A voice from behind cut him off. “What I wanna know is what’s in it for us?”

  Patchen glanced at the man riding directly behind Speares—one of the market hunters in a broad-brimmed hat, chaps, and a long tan duster. He was probably twenty-five and, like his two compatriots, carried himself like a man who knew how to use his well-tended sidearms.

  “I mean,” the man said, sliding his flinty gaze to the sheriff, “I think there should be a reward.”

  “Yeah,” said the man sitting on an Appaloosa to his right. “Me and Jim and Nudge was just ridin’ through when that gold was hit. We got no ties to this town. We hunt for a livin’, and by God if we’re gonna hunt that gang of cutthroats and your loot, we want a reward!”

  Speares gigged his horse forward, turned it around to face the three market hunters. “They took a girl. That ain’t enough for ya?”

  The one on the far right glanced at the other two, then turned back to Speares. “Hell, her old man ain’t even ridin’ after her. Last I saw, he was curled up drunk behind his bar.”

  Speares glared at the man, but checked his anger. Aside from the marshal, these three were the best of the posse. He couldn’t afford to lose them.

  He looked at Franklin, then canted his head to indicate the townsmen flanking the market hunters. “Mr. Franklin here guarantees you each two hundred and fifty dollars—if the gold and the girl are recovered.” Speares looked at the banker, flushing beneath the brim of his black bowler. “Ain’t that right, Franklin?”

  Speares didn’t wait for a response. “Move out!”

  “Sheriff,” Patchen called.

  As the others spurred their horses south, Speares turned back to Patchen, standing before the stage. The deputy marshal looked at the woman in the green dres
s. “What about your dead?”

  Speares just stared at him as if he had no idea what the man was talking about.

  “You’re not going to bury them?”

  “The best way to honor the dead,” Speares said, holding his skitter-stepping mount’s reins taut in his right fist, “is to shoot the shit outta those that killed ’em!”

  The sheriff turned his horse and put the steel to its flanks.

  Yakima whiled away the afternoon and early evening in the Saber Creek jailhouse by counting the stones in the ceiling, then in the floor, and by trying not to think about how far Wolf and the girl were getting away from him.

  By nine o’clock it was fully dark, and the street traffic had died down. Yakima, lying on his bunk, ankles crossed, stared through the cell bars at the shotgun in the hands of the liveryman, Suggs, who slept tipped back in the sheriff’s swivel chair.

  The shotgun lay across Suggs’s broad thighs. Fifteen feet away. But with the bars between the gun and Yakima, it might as well have been in the next territory.

  Yakima’s heart did a slow, hot roll.

  He had to get out of here tonight. By sunrise tomorrow, the gang, Wolf, and Anjanette would be deep into Mexico—probably too far away to track. Speares and his men would most likely be dead, their bloody carcasses strewn about some isolated arroyo.

  The door latch clicked.

  Yakima shuttled his gaze to the front wall as the door opened. A pretty redheaded woman in a low-cut red and black dress and a lacy black shawl poked her head through the opening, her plucked eyebrows arched. She’d gone heavy on the eyeliner and war paint, and the mole off the right corner of her mouth stood out from the rouge.

  Suggs had jerked with a start when the door hinges had squawked. His shotgun slid off his thigh and hit the stone floor with a clatter. As he bent forward with a nervous grunt to retrieve it, the redhead laughed.

  “It’s me—Polly.”

  Suggs looked up at her, and the lines in his face planed out.

  “Kinda slow tonight,” the redhead said, closing the door and stepping into the room. “I knew you were alone over here, with orders not to leave, so I thought you might be lonely.” Her eyes grew soft, and she sucked a breath to lift her opulent breasts. “Want a poke? Half price for the man guardin’ that killer in there.”

  Suggs picked up the shotgun and sat back in the chair. “I don’t think so, Polly. If Speares got back and caught me . . .”

  Polly stepped forward, hooking her thumbs into her bodice and pulling it down to her waist, the large, pale breasts jolting free. “That your last word on the subject, Charlie?” She stopped before Suggs’s chair, smiling. Suggs stared at her breasts like a little boy staring at a jar of colored rock candy on a mercantile counter.

  He set the shotgun down against the desk and reached forward, palms out. “My, those’re some jugs!”

  Polly stepped back with a laugh. “Let’s see the lucre, Charlie!”

  Suggs scowled, glanced at the door, then the window, then turned back to the girl. “I reckon Speares won’t be back tonight.”

  He glanced at Yakima, who peered out from beneath the hat tipped low over his eyes, lifting his chest slowly and regularly, feigning sleep. Suggs stood and poked a hand in his pocket, flipped a couple of coins on the desk. “Hell, since he’s gone after them damn Thunder Riders, Speares prob’ly won’t ever be back. No point in deprivin’ myself of a half-priced poke!”

  “Now you’re talkin’!” Unpinning her hair from the back of her head, Polly skipped toward the open door of the jail’s only other cell, to the right of the one Yakima was in. She glanced at Yakima, wheeled toward Suggs. “What if he wakes up?”

  Suggs chuffed. “So? The breed ain’t long fer this world.”

  Yakima continued raising and lowering his chest slowly as Suggs followed the girl into the cell, awkwardly dancing a little jig and humming a few bars of “Old Arizona.” Yakima could see part of what they were doing out of the corner of his right eye, without turning his head.

  When Suggs had pulled his pants down to his knees, nuzzling the girl and giving her ass a couple of sporting slaps, they crawled onto the cot on the other side of the barred wall. Suggs raised the whore’s dress above her waist, positioned himself between her spread legs, and began thrusting.

  Yakima let them get going hot and heavy, grunting and sighing and giving the cot’s leather springs a good workout, before he poked his hat back off his forehead. He dropped his boots to the floor, eased across the cell, and stuck his left arm through the bars. He wrapped the arm around Suggs’s neck and slammed the man’s head against the cell wall so hard that both cages shook.

  The redhead and Suggs screamed at the same time. The redhead stared up in horror as Yakima slammed Suggs’s head once more against the bars and held him there, closing his arm taut around the liveryman’s neck. Suggs groaned and choked, his face swelling and turning red as the redhead rose up on her elbows, yelling, “Stop! No!”

  Yakima turned his gaze on her. “Get the keys from the desk or I’ll kill him!”

  She tried wedging her fingers between Yakima’s arm and Suggs’s neck. “Let him go! You’re killing him!”

  Yakima tightened his grip. “I will kill him if you don’t fetch those keys pronto! I’ll tear his head clean off his shoulders!”

  Suggs gasped, eyes bulging, and threw his left arm out, gesturing toward the desk.

  Sobbing, the redhead scrambled out from beneath the liveryman, rose from the cot, and ran into the main office. She grabbed the key ring off the desk and started back toward the cell in which Suggs was slumped on the cot, head grinding into the bars.

  Yakima turned to stare at her over his right shoulder. “Unlock my cell door!”

  She slipped on the stone floor, nearly falling, as she turned suddenly and lunged toward Yakima’s cell. She hadn’t pulled her dress up, and her big breasts bounced and her red hair hung across her shoulders as she fumbled the key into the lock. It took her several tries to finally get the key turned, and then the bolt gave with a satisfying clank.

  As the door swung slightly outward on its rusty hinges, Yakima released Suggs, turned around, and pushed it wide.

  He’d taken one broad step toward the desk, over which his cartridge belt and holstered .44 were coiled on a hat peg, when the outside door sprang open. A thin, long-haired man in a wool tunic and a broad-brimmed felt sombrero stumbled in, then stopped suddenly, eyes bright, as two others came up beside him—including the Mexican, Spanish Lluna, whom Yakima had fought on his last visit to town, in the Saguaro Inn. All wielded rifles, revolvers hanging off their hips or under their arms.

  “Well, well—looks like we got here just in time, gents!” The thin man cocked his rifle and aimed from the hip at Yakima’s belly. “The breed was about to take a stroll!”

  Chapter 9

  Yakima froze, glanced at the shotgun leaning against the sheriff’s desk.

  “Forget it, breed,” said the third man, flanking the thin gent, raising his own Winchester and narrowing his flinty eyes. “You’ll never make it.”

  “Hey, don’t go and spoil our necktie party, heathen,” said Spanish—a bulky Mexican wearing a green greatcoat, red bandanna, and low-crowned sombrero. A streak of white, like lightning, marked his shaggy black beard.

  They were ten feet away, but Yakima could smell the liquor on their breath.

  The thin gent’s glassy hazel eyes slid to the whore standing near Yakima, who quickly pulled her bodice over her breasts. Suggs was on his hands and knees on the cell floor, shaking his head as if to clear it as blood dripped from the gash in his right temple.

  “Hey, Suggs,” said the thin man, laughing while keeping his rifle trained on Yakima. “Speares might not have felt the need to specify, but I believe he wanted you to guard the breed, not turn the jail into a whorehouse.”

  Lluna and the third hombre laughed.

  “That’s real funny, Boyd,” Suggs said, rising stiffly while dabbing his cut te
mple. “Put the son of a bitch back in his cell, will you? There’ll be a couple nights’ free stablin’ for all three you boys if’n you don’t tell Speares.”

  “No need,” Boyd said, grinning at Yakima. “We’re gonna throw a necktie party in the breed’s honor—out front of the saloon. A couple of the boys are building a bonfire, and Old Antoine is tapping a fresh keg.”

  Suggs grabbed his underwear and held them over his crotch. “Speares ain’t gonna like it.”

  “Sheet,” said the big Mexican. “Speares ain’t comin’ back. They make him look bad. Take his girl. He’ll fight, but them Thunder Riders will fill him so full of holes he won’t be able to hold one leetle sip of wheeskey.” With that last, the Mexican held up his right hand, spreading his index finger and thumb about an inch apart and squinting at it.