Loco as a peach orchard sow and deadlier than the Devil on a Saturday night.
Each one had killed more times than he could count on both hands. Each man had a bounty on his head, but very few bounty hunters, let alone bona fide badge toters, valued their lives so little as to fog the gang’s trail. U.S. marshals had been known, when spying more than one or two members of the gang in one place, to turn around and walk the other way.
“Hey, Cannady,” said Ned Crockett, riding off the outlaw leader’s right stirrup. He jerked a nod at the wooden sign marking an intersecting trail just ahead and closing. “What say we head on over to Blacky’s Place in Spinoff Creek and get us a drink?”
The outlaw leader frowned and checked his horse down to a trot. “Blacky’s Place?”
“It’s a little dive this fat bastard from Arkansas put up along Spinoff Creek. Last time I was through, it was the only wooden building in town.”
“Don’t got time for side trips,” Cannady growled.
“It’s only two miles,” said the small, half-Mex child killer named Waco, riding just behind Cannady. “I was through there just last month. Good whiskey. And the trail circles around that mountain, leads back to the main trail ahead. Wouldn’t be like we’d be backtrackin’ or nothin’.”
Cannady reined his horse to a halt, swept dust from the hummingbird tattoo beneath his blind left eye. “Do I need to remind you boys we got us a bank to rob?”
“Not for four days,” said Ed Brown, the only black man in the bunch. Six feet four and nearly three hundred pounds, he’d long ago discovered that only a hefty mule could carry his gargantuan carcass for any distance over a mile. He was clad in smelly deerskins and wore a leather, narrow-billed immigrant cap. A heavy Sharps rifle hung by a leather lanyard down his broad back.
“We can make it to Sundance in three days easy,” said Ned Crockett, puffing the quirley so perpetually wedged in one corner of his mouth that it had carved its own black furrow in his lips. “What’s the hurry?”
“Yeah, what’s the hurry?” said Young Knife, the only full-blood Indian, a Ute, in the bunch. “Me, I’m thirsty!”
Cannady looked around at the rocky ridges lining the trail, then glanced at the wooden arrow pointing south along a shaggy two-track wagon trace. “If you boozers need a drink so goddamn bad, then I reckon we’d best get you one. But only one. I don’t like side trips!”
Later, as the group trotted their horses through a small canyon carved by Spinoff Creek, Ned Crockett turned to Cannady riding to his left. “What’s eatin’ you, Boss? Is it Sylvester?”
Cannady turned his head to spit tobacco juice over his left stirrup. Running the back of his gloved hand across his mouth, he shrugged. “Sylvester don’t do well on his own. Never has. Hell, I had to bottle-feed the whelp till he was eighteen years old. I swear, he’d never have eaten a damn thing, and he’d have left the house without his gun or bowie knife.” Cannady plucked a tobacco braid from his shirt pocket and eyed it thoughtfully. “You know how he is. Hell, he’s even crazier than I am. Takes after our ma’s side.”
“You left three good men with him, Clayton. He’ll be all right. Hell, they’ll probably start out tomorrow and catch up to us in time for the holdup on Tuesday.”
“We left three men who I thought could feed and clothe my little brother and tend his wound,” Cannady said. “None of ’em can shoot worth shit, if it comes to that. Rodeo—he’s good in a knife fight—but I only brought him into the group ’cause he’s Waco’s cousin, and I owed Waco a favor.”
Crockett scowled at the gang leader, smoke puffing out the side of his mouth not holding the cigarette. “Clayton, you’re just a damn worrywart, you know that?”
Because he and Cannady had both left Missouri together just after the War, Crockett was the only man in the bunch who could rib the outlaw leader without getting carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey, or having the barrel of a six-gun shoved up his ass and fired.
“Shit,” Cannady said, cracking a sheepish smile. “You’re right, Ned. I think too much, and that leads to worry. I’m with the savage—let’s get a drink!”
He gave a rebel whoop and gigged his zebra dun into a gallop, the rest of the gang following suit. They didn’t gallop far before the little tent town of Spinoff Creek appeared around a bend in the trail—a dozen or so dirty white tents, a mud-and-brick livery stable with two peeled-log corrals and a windmill, and a two-story saloon with a broad front porch.
The saloon looked like something out of Cheyenne or Denver. No question it had been built by a man with full confidence in Spinoff Creek’s booming prospects. The dull green paint peeling off the sun-blistered boards, however, and the lack of other significant buildings surrounding it, attested to the builder’s chagrin.
The gang tied their horses where other horses were tied at the two hitch racks and, slapping their hats against their thighs and raising a miniature dust storm along the shaggy main drag, mounted the porch and split the batwings to enter the saloon.
The Chinaman, Kong Zhao, had just walked out of the saloon’s back kitchen, carrying a heavy iron pot with two thick wedges of leather, when the batwing doors creaked and spurs chinged loudly across the puncheons. He paused halfway to the fireplace, and swung his gaze toward the front of the smoky, low-ceilinged room.
Men filed in. Hard-faced riders, well-armed, with the looks of seasoned killers about their sharp eyes and craggy faces. After seven years on the American frontier, raising a young daughter, Kong could smell the evil of such men from a long way off.
The newcomers, boots pounding and spurs singing, dropped into chairs or lined out along the bar. Kong snapped his gaze to his daughter. Head bowed, jet-black hair hiding her face, Li Mei arranged beer mugs on the wooden tray at the bar.
“Beers for my boys!” intoned one of the hard cases, pounding both fists on the bar planks. “And shots all around. For the good gentlemen over there as well,” he added with a nod to the four bearded prospectors, who’d recently come in from their diggings.
The miners nodded; one raised his near-empty beer mug in salute.
While the hard cases talked in their harsh, ebullient tones, lighting cigarettes or cigars, coins clanging on the bar top and a deck of cards being riffled, Kong Zhao hung his stew kettle over the fire. He cast dark, furtive looks at the newcomers while he stirred the stew with a long-handled spoon.
As Li Mei carried a beer tray toward the prospectors’ table, the glance of one of the hard cases found her. The man with curly blond hair poking out from beneath a battered brown derby, and sitting at a table near the bar, regarded her wryly, his cold, appraising eyes running up and down the girl’s lithe frame. As Li Mei set the beer mugs on the prospectors’ table, the blond hard case’s eyes sharpened while his near-toothless smile grew, and he poked the brim of his dusty hat off his forehead.
“You gonna deal them cards, or you just gonna stare at the kitchen help?” barked the giant black man sitting to his right.
“Don’t get your bloomers in a twist, Brown,” the hard case said and, turning his gaze to the other cardplayers, began flipping the pasteboards around the table.
“Hey, Chinaman, you gonna stir that stew all day, or you gonna dish it up?” one of the prospectors said.
Kong jerked his head around. The prospector who’d spoken stared at him expectantly, a fat stogie clamped in his teeth.
Bowing and muttering his apologies, “So sorry, so sorry,” Kong quickly scooped stew into four wooden bowls, and delivered the bowls and silverware to the waiting prospectors. He shuffled and bowed, arranged the forks and spoons beside the bowls, then shuffled back to the table by the fireplace to retrieve a loaf of crusty brown bread.
When he’d set the bread on the table, he turned toward the bar, where Gilman was frantically filling mugs from the beer tap and slopping whiskey into shot glasses. Kong stopped suddenly. The lead hard case, standing at the bar, stared angrily toward him, as if trying to see through him.
�
��Get the hell outta the way, Chinaman.” The man with the hummingbird tattoo beneath his milky left eye waved Kong aside. “You’re blockin’ my view!”
Kong frowned, confused. Shuffling aside, he turned to follow the hard case’s stare to one of the prospectors whom Kong had just served. The prospector stared past Kong toward the bar, a steaming spoonful of stew held halfway to his mouth. His eyes grew large, and his bearded faced turned red.
“Lowry Gemmell,” said the man with the tattoo, issuing the prospector a rock-hard grin. “Well, well, well.”
As the hard case shoved away from the bar and strode toward the prospectors’ table, his right hand released the thong over his revolver’s hammer.
“Wait a minute now, Cannady,” said the prospector, dropping his spoon into his bowl and leaning back in his chair, holding his hands chest high, palms out. “I couldn’t come back fer ya. That posse was all over me like ants on honey.”
“Boys,” yelled the hard case to the rest of the room. “Remember how I told you about an old friend of mine leavin’ me out on the Devil’s dance floor down Arizony way, with a dead horse, no food, and damn little water?”
“I was gonna bring you back a horse,” protested the prospector, sweat runneling his long, blond beard. “Fact, I was headin’ back your way with one, but then the damn posse sniffed me out.”
“So, that’s Lowry Gemmell,” said one of the other hard cases, chuckling and shaking his head. “Man, did you cross the wrong hombre!”
Gemmell stared up at Cannady, who stopped before his table. Gemmell’s chest rose and fell sharply, and his fingers curled down over his upraised palms. “Now, let’s talk this out, Clayton. No reason why two civilized human beings can’t iron out a wrinkle in their friendship.”
“Yeah, they is,” said Cannady. He drew his gun in a single, short blur, and pulled the trigger.
Gemmell rocketed straight back in his chair, hit the floor with a resounding boom.
Cannady grabbed another prospector by his collar, flung him out of his chair, kicked the chair out of his way, and walked over to where Gemmell lay writhing.
“’Cause one of us is dead!”
Cannady’s revolver spoke three more times—three angry shots delivered one second apart. The chandeliers rattled and the floor vibrated.
In the ensuing silence, one of the prospectors standing to Gemmell’s right, holding a frothy beer mug in his ham-sized right fist, muttered, “Shit.”
Kong Zhao had stood frozen beside the square-hewn center post. Now he backed slowly toward his daughter.
5
KONG ZHAO WAS backing toward Li Mei when the gang leader turned his milky left eye on him and jutted his finger. “You, Chinaman, got some trash for you to haul out to the trash heap. Hop-hop. Sing-sing. Pronto!”
The others laughed, breaking the silence following the gunfire.
Cannady turned to the other prospectors sitting at Lowry Gemmell’s table. “You boys don’t mind, do ya? I mean, this son of a bitch certainly wasn’t no friend of yours, was he?”
The hard case’s voice so teemed with accusation that the other three men stared at him in hang-jawed silence.
“Didn’t think so.” Cannady turned to Kong. “What’d I tell you, Chinaman? Hop to it! Them trash heap rats and coyotes is hungry!”
Kong glanced at his daughter. He wanted to tell her to go into the back room or upstairs till these men had left, but he’d only draw attention to her. Maybe, seeing that she was merely Chinese, they’d leave her alone.
Kong nodded and shuffled over to the dead man, whose chest was thickly bibbed with dark red blood and whose eyes seemed to gaze down at something on the floor over his right shoulder. The Chinaman shoved several chairs out of his way and, breathing heavily but moving lightly on his slippered feet, grabbed the dead man under the shoulders and pulled him through the tables toward the building’s back door.
When he’d gotten the man outside, a voice from within said, “Tell your China doll to get her ass over here with them beers, barman. My throat’s damn dusty and”—the man pinched his voice with mock horror—“my nerves are shot from the sight of all that blood!”
“There, there, Paxton,” came another voice. “You’re gonna be just fine.”
Laughter.
Mumbling English curses, Kong Zhao dragged the dead man out past the woodpile toward the creek, and stopped. He straightened, wincing at the pain in his lower back, and sleeved sweat from his forehead.
What to do with the man? He couldn’t really throw him in the trash heap. His body would attract dangerous predators, and after a couple of days in the hot sun, the smell would permeate the town.
He looked around. There was no time to bury the man now. Kong couldn’t leave his daughter alone in the saloon for that long. He’d leave the man here, and bury him later on the other side of the creek.
That resolved, Kong had begun shuffling back toward the saloon when the sound of galloping hooves from the road on the other side of the building hauled him up short. Angry voices rose. The hooves fell silent. Tack squawked and buckles clanked as men swung down from saddles.
Kong had paused, canting his head to listen. Now he moved forward, opened the saloon’s back door, and stepped inside at the same time three big men wearing badges entered the saloon from the front, two armed with double-barreled shotguns.
“What the hell’s all the damn shootin’ about?” barked the tallest man of the three, holding a rifle over his shoulder. “Heard the shots a half mile out of town.” His name was Frank Early. Kong had served the man stew and beer when he’d passed through town before, and seeing the big man and his two deputies, Kong knew a moment’s relief.
If anyone could send the hard cases on their way, it was Constable Early and his deputies, Mulroney and Finnigan.
The lead hard case had been turned toward the back of the saloon, talking to the man beside him. Now he swung around without hesitation and said with brash frankness, “I killed a man.”
“You did, did you?” said Constable Early, a tall man in a high-crowned black hat and long cream duster. He wore a handlebar mustache with waxed, upturned ends. “My name’s Early. I was named constable by this village and the two others up the line. And you are under arrest unless you can convince me you killed in self-defense.”
“I didn’t kill in no self-defense,” said Cannady, rising up on the balls of his boots. “I killed Lowry Gemmell because, after him and me done robbed the bank in Prescott six years ago, he left me stranded in the desert east of Yuma. Shot the shirttail lizard straight up, right through his lyin’, cheatin’ heart. Didn’t even give the bastard a chance to draw his weapon.”
“So, it’s murder then,” said one of the other men flanking the constable, raising a double-barreled shotgun high across his chest.
“No, it weren’t murder,” announced the black man sitting at one of the tables, his deep, resonant voice loud enough to be heard at the other end of the settlement. “It was puttin’ a low-down dirty dog out of his own mis’ry. Too good for him—too fast—if’n you ast me.”
The other hard cases whooped and laughed. Several slapped their tables.
In the following silence, the back door clicked open. Kong turned to see another man, wearing a duster and a badge cut from a fruit or vegetable tin, step into the room and cradle a shotgun in his brawny arms. He had a salt-and-pepper mustache turned down over both corners of his mouth, and wore high-topped, brush-gnawed, mule-eared boots. He regarded the room like an angry schoolmaster, eyes slitted and head swiveling slowly from left to right.
“Look out, boys!” cried Cannady at the front of the room. “We’re surrounded!”
More laughter.
“I’ll see your three,” said the black man casually to one of his gambling partners, tossing coins onto the table, “and I’ll raise you three more.”
Cannady turned to the head lawdog. “As you can see, Mr. Late, you’re interruptin’ a good time. True, blood has been spilled.
But if you don’t want any more spilled—namely your blood spilled—you best take your little tin stars and light a shuck. Your mommas are callin’ you boys. Supper’s on the table.”
Scowling, Cannady turned slowly back to the table.
“Why, you insolent little snipe!” snarled Early.
From the end of the bar, ready to grab Li Mei standing ten feet to his right with a tray of empty glasses in her hands, Kong saw Cannady snap his head back toward the constable. Kong expected Cannady to say something. To yell something. Instead, the Chinaman heard a soft, crunching thud.
Kong blinked and stared over Cannady’s right shoulder. A slender knife protruded from the upper middle of Early’s chest. The lawman stumbled back toward the saloon’s front wall, grunting and hissing and looking down, awestruck, at the blade in his chest.
“Christ!” grunted one of the other lawmen, staring at the injured constable.
As Early dropped to his knees, the other deputy bolted forward, leveling his shotgun at Cannady. “You son of a bitch!”
A half second before the deputy pulled the trigger, the black man bolted up from his seat, his fists filled with two stag-butted revolvers. He aimed one, and raked a slug off the deputy’s left temple.
Screaming and falling sideways, the deputy triggered one of the two-bore’s barrels into the back bar behind Cannady, taking Blacky Gilman through the dead middle of his white-shirted chest. The blast threw the barman back against the shelves, knocking bottles and glasses to and fro and down with a screaming clatter of broken glass.
Kong heard pounding boot falls behind him. He half turned to see the man who’d entered via the back door run up through the middle of the room, screaming, “Stand down, you sons o’ bitches, or—”
Several pistol shots cut him off, the slugs tearing through both shoulders. He stumbled over a chair and fell forward.
Ka-boom!
His scattergun sounded like a cannon.
.45-Caliber Deathtrap Page 4
