The deputy bolted upright, reaching for the old Remington on his hip while dropping his booted feet to the floor with a crash and several squawks from the swivel chair. Eddie froze, hand on the holstered revolver butt, looking around as though the room were on fire.
“What is it, Marshal? Is it them? Is it them?”
“No, it’s not them, you idjit. You went to sleep!”
High-pitched, mocking laughter rose from the cell beside Whitman’s.
“Is it them? Is it them?” the voice mocked before breaking into more laughter.
“Shut up, Scanlon,” the marshal barked. “If I want any shit out of you, I’ll squeeze your head!”
In the shadows of the next cell, Rick Scanlon lay on his cot, one elbow propped beneath his head, casually dragging on a quirley and blowing smoke at the ceiling.
He cackled mockingly. “If I didn’t know better, Marshal, I’d say your deputy was a mite off his feed this evenin’. But then again, who wouldn’t be feelin’ jittery ... the night they was gonna die?”
Ignoring the young roughneck, Whitman dropped his feet to the floor with a weary grunt and rose. Cursing under his breath, he spit into the sandbox, stretched his suspenders up over his shoulders and sagging belly, and limped into the main room.
“Get up,” he told the young deputy.
“Sorry, Marshal,” Eddie said. “I was just gonna close my eyes for twenty seconds.”
“Twenty seconds, uh?” Whitman grumbled. “Why in the hell you so damn sleepy? You’re s’posed to sleep during the day. I hired you to work the damn night shift.”
“Haven’t been able to sleep too good during the day,” Eddie said. “Reckon it takes a while to get oriented differ’nt.”
Whitman reached for his gunbelt, which was coiled over the hat tree behind the front door, and wrapped it around his waist. He canted his head at the cell he’d just vacated. “Go lay down. If you’re sleepy, for chrissakes, go to sleep.”
“I thought you wanted me to keep watch.”
Whitman barked, “But you ain’t keepin’ watch. You’re sleepin’. I’m awake now anyhow. Go lay down. I’ll wake you if I need you.”
“Hee-hee,” Scanlon chuckled within the wavering shadows of his cell. “Hey, what’s that?” he said dramatically. “Did I hear my pa comin’ to my rescue?” He laughed again.
“And you shut up in there, or I’ll take a horsewhip to you,” Whitman yelled, poking an angry finger at the cell door.
As the deputy slouched into the empty cell, removing his jacket and gunbelt, the young hardcase said, “Ah, come on, Marshal. What’re you holding me for anyway? So I got a little frisky over at the Mother Lode. It’s been a tough week.”
“A little frisky, eh?” Whitman said, removing his six-shooter from his holster and checking the loads. “You call ordering your men to tie the whores into chairs so you can shoot apples off their heads a little frisky’?”
Scanlon said, “It was all in good fun, Marshal.”
“I don’t think the whores saw it that way.”
“That’s the trouble with the whores in this dump,” Scanlon said. “They ain’t only ugly, they got no sense of humor.”
“Well, you better hope Mr. Crumb has a sense of humor. He runs a pretty tight ship—you know that.”
“I ain’t gonna be in here long enough for ole Crumb to play his judge-and-jury games, old man,” Scanlon scoffed. All the humor had leeched from his voice. “I’m gonna be outta here in an hour, maybe two. And you and your deputy there are gonna be swinging’ from that Cottonwood down by the creek.”
His voice remained hard, but Scanlon raised it a notch for the frightened deputy’s benefit. “Just a-swingin’ and a-kickin’ and a-tryin’ to suck air through your windpipes. Only no air’s gonna come, ’cause—”
“I told you to sew it, Scanlon!” Whitman shouted, turning toward the dark cell in which the hardcase lay smoking.
Scanlon chuckled softly.
“Don’t listen to him, Eddie,” Whitman said. “We’re the law in this town. His old man respects that. Deep down he does.”
There was a slight pause before Eddie said, “I ain’t worried, Marshal.”
Scanlon hooted softly.
Whitman glanced into the cellblock furtively, then stole out from behind his desk, quietly sprang the front window shade to the left of the door, and peered into the night-shrouded street. Looking first right, then left, and seeing that all was quiet, he gave a quiet sigh.
No sign of old Sam Scanlon’s boys.
The marshal directed his gaze left again. The Mother Lode up the street was closed, the wind shepherding leaves along the street, up the boardwalk, swirling them at the base of the saloon’s big, plate-glass window. That’s where the trouble had started a few hours ago. Where it always started with Old Man Scanlon’s firebrand son.
The trouble was, neither Scanlon nor his son had any respect for the law—at least, not for the law in Bitter Creek. And because they didn’t, none of their men did either.
Well, that was about to change, goddamnit. Right here and now ...
Hearing soft footfalls, Whitman felt his heart leap. Giving a start, he turned his startled gaze up the street to his right. A rider materialized out of the darkness, riding a tall black Thoroughbred. As the horse approached, Whitman’s heart lightened. It was only the girl who’d ridden to town with Prophet and the dead Thorson-Mahoney Gang—that girl bounty hunter who looked like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.
She rode straight-backed, chin jutting tensely. Her hat was tugged low over her forehead. The wind nipped at the brim and at the girl’s baggy, brown poncho. Her honey-blond hair bounced on her shoulders, fanning out behind her in a wind gust.
The high-stepping Thoroughbred’s hooves clomped in the street, barely audible below the wind keening in the jailhouse’s chimney pipe.
Where in the hell was she going this time of the night, Whitman wondered, turning his head to follow the girl past the jailhouse and down the street. Leaves funneled between the blacksmith shop and the ladies’ millinery, churning into the street behind the horse.
And then the horse and the girl turned the corner around
the Methodist church and disappeared
Whitman stood wondering after the girl, unconsciously grateful for the distraction. Where would she be riding on a cold, windy night? Hell, it was a good sixty miles to—
“Any sign of my old man yet, Marshal?”
Whitman jumped, startled, his heart leaping violently. Bunching his face with anger, he turned to the darkened cell. “Boy, you’re gonna get a horsewhippin’ if you don’t keep that trapdoor shut!”
Scanlon’s self-satisfied chuckles sounded softly from the shadows. Whitman ground his teeth together and resisted the urge to poke his Colt through that closed cell door and commence firing. A few years ago, when he was young and a tad wild himself, he might have done just that. If he did it now, however, he knew the outlaws in this woolly country would declare open season on him.
Whitman stoked the old potbelly stove and put coffee on to boil. When the water was bubbling, his night-shift deputy was snoring softly. Scanlon was too, thank Christ.
Whitman retrieved the coffee can from the cupboard above his desk and dumped a fistful into the water. He was about to add one more when a sound rose from the street beyond the front door.
Whitman froze, his fistful of coffee poised above the bubbling pot. The thuds of shod hooves sounded again. Saddle leather squawked—several sets.
Whitman opened his hand to let the coffee fall into the percolator, then hurried to the window. Peering out, he felt his back draw taut and his chest grow heavy.
Six or so riders trotted in from the right, materializing like ghosts from the darkness. The half-dozen silhouettes pulled to a halt in the middle of the street, directly before the jailhouse.
In the middle and slightly forward of the group sat Big Sam Scanlon—a tall, bulky figure wearing a wide-brimmed black hat. His gray mustaches curled out
from both sides of his mouth, bone-white against his shadowed face. He wore a fox-fur coat buttoned up to his throat. His mountain-bred mustang skitter-stepped beneath him, but settled when Big Sam drew the reins taut.
The butt of a Spencer rifle jutted up from beneath Sam’s left thigh, within easy reach.
Regarding the jailhouse sternly, Big Sam barked, “Whitman!”
The marshal’s heart turned a somersault. He wheeled to the gun rack, calling, “Eddie!”
The deputy came instantly awake, his feet thudding to the floor. His voice owned a nervous trill. “Is it them, Marshal?”
“It’s them,” Whitman said, grabbing his double-barreled Greener from the rack and breaking it open. “Get your ass up here.”
From the locked cell, young Scanlon’s mocking cry lifted on a laugh. “Is that my pa, Marshal? Told ye he was comin’!”
Ignoring the hardcase, Whitman turned to Eddie, who was pulling his gunbelt on. “You stay here. Grab a Winchester and whatever you do, don’t let those bastards in the building. You been practicing your shooting in that ravine, haven’t you?”
“You bet, Marshal,” Eddie said, trying to steel his voice as he grabbed a carbine from the wall rack.
Standing at his cell door, lacing his fingers together around the bars, young Scanlon cackled like a witch. “Ah, come on, Marshal. Why don’t you just let me go? You ain’t got no help but that kid, and Crumb’s cowering under his bed.”
“Sew it, Scanlon!”
“You don’t wanna die tonight. You don’t wanna get little Eddie’s neck stretched tonight …”
“Don’t listen to him, Eddie,” Whitman said. “We’re the law here. People gotta respect that or we’re no better’n the brush wolves.”
“I hear you, Marshal,” Eddie said. “He don’t scare me a bit. He keeps up his talkin’, I’m liable to shove this carbine down his throat.”
“Now you’re talkin’,” Scanlon said with a laugh.
“Whitman!” Big Sam Scanlon called again, louder this time.
A horse chuffed. The rancher’s men were talking quietly amongst themselves.
When Whitman had shoved wads down both barrels of his Greener, he braced Eddie with a look and opened the door. Holding the Greener out before him, the marshal stepped onto the boardwalk, then drew the door closed behind him.
“What is it, Scanlon?” the marshal asked, as if he had no idea why the belligerent rancher had come calling so late in the night.
“I hear you been messin’ with my boy again, Whitman,” Big Sam said in his deep, even voice. He sat his mustang casually, one gloved hand atop the other on the saddle horn.
“I haven’t been messin’ with your son. He’s been messin’ with the girls over at the Mother Lode. I told him what was gonna happen next time he got out of line and discharged his firearm within the town limits. He’s locked up, and he’s gonna stay there till the circuit judge comes and hears his story.”
Big Sam stared down at the marshal. The cowboys on either side of him stared as well, their prominently displayed pistols in easy reach.
Big Sam had been an outlaw before he’d come to Bitter Creek and bought a ranch with stolen loot. Most of his men were gun wolves with whom Sam had ridden the long coulees. He used the wolves to keep the miners and grangers from tearing up his graze and squatting on his water holes.
Whitman couldn’t see the gun wolves’ faces under their hat brims, but he could tell by the set of their shoulders that they weren’t smiling.
Big Sam’s voice rumbled up from deep in his chest. “You know I don’t recognize Henry Crumb’s so-called law. Let my boy go, Whitman.”
“I can’t do that, Sam.”
“Mr. Scanlon,” corrected the tall, loose-limbed cowboy sitting to Big Sam’s right.
Holding the Greener across his chest, Whitman glared back at him in silence.
“You let him go,” Big Sam warned, “or I’ll stretch your neck. No one fucks with me, Marshal. No one. Not you, not Henry Crumb, and not Dean Lovell. It’s time you and all these rock-pickers and plow boys got it straight.”
Whitman’s chest felt heavy and constricted. He took a deep breath, calming his nerves, and measured his words carefully, trying to keep the trill from his voice. “I know you were one of the first settlers in this basin, Mist … Sam ... but that don’t make you and your boy above the law. When young Rick comes to town, he obeys Mr. Crumb’s laws or I turn the key on him, just like I’d turn it on anyone else. No exceptions. I’ve given him enough chances to straighten up and fly right. Now it’s time he sees Mr. Crumb. He’ll probably only get a fine and maybe some probation—”
“One of Crumb’s famous fines, eh?” Snarling, Scanlon rose in his saddle and leaned forward over his horse’s long neck and said tightly, “Let him out, Whitman.”
By the weak lamplight in the window behind him, Whitman saw the old man’s lips bunched beneath his mustache.
“Now!” Sam roared.
“It’s not gonna happen, Scanlon. Now, you boys go on home. No doubt Rick’ll be along in a few days.”
Neither the old man nor the others said anything. The man to Scanlon’s right, whom Whitman now recognized as Leo Barnes, Sam’s ramrod, turned to the old man expectantly. Scanlon fairly reeked of animosity. Whitman clutched the shotgun before him, his heart thumping so hard he felt dizzy. His throat was dry. Perspiration streaked his bearded cheeks.
He was encouraged by the old man’s lack of action. Scanlon didn’t really want trouble with Henry Crumb and Dean Lovell.
Feeling that he needed only to press a tad harder to turn Scanlon’s bunch for home, Whitman stepped off the boardwalk into the street and thumbed the Greener’s right hammer back.
“Ride on home, Scanlon. Don’t dig Rick’s hole any deeper than he already dug it himself.”
Silence.
Only the sound of the leaves swirling along the boardwalks and pelting the dark storefronts. The horses blew and stomped. At the other end of town, where the old miners’ shacks lined the creek, a dog was barking furiously.
Finally, Scanlon turned to Barnes. Whitman saw the man’s hard face split with a grin. Barnes laughed, and then the others laughed too, as if at an unexpected joke.
When they’d all had a good laugh, Scanlon turned his gaze to the marshal’s left. “Okay, Joe!” he yelled with a trace of humor remaining in his voice.
It could have been a trick to divert the marshal’s attention. With the hair pricking along his spine, he stepped back, frowning, and turned his head just enough to see the dark corner of the jailhouse behind him. It was blotted out by a figure bolting toward him. Before Scanlon could turn around to face the man, something hard slammed into the back of his head, catching him just above his neck.
As he went down with a groan, his finger tripped the Greener’s right trigger. The gun roared as Whitman dropped to his knees, lights flashing in his head and a thousand horses screaming in his ears.
He dropped the shotgun and rolled in the dirt, losing consciousness fast. Vaguely, as if in a dream, he heard Eddie yell. The yell was followed by several shots, each more muffled than the last, until a dark sea washed over the marshal, snuffing the world like a blown candle.
Chapter Five
Louisa lay naked on the rumpled, twisted sheets. Smiling seductively, she lay on her side, her head resting on the heel of her right hand, her long, slender legs curled together, delicate feet resting one atop the other.
Her full, smooth, pink-tipped breasts tipped down toward the bed, tantalizingly screened by her left arm. Her hair was a lovely, flaxen mess.
Prophet quickly undressed, leaned down, moved her arm out of the way, and gently suckled her right nipple until the girl was cooing and sighing and scrubbing his head with her hands and clutching at him with her legs.
After his bath, he’d looked all over town for her. Finally, he’d eaten a tough steak at a deserted little cafe called Gertrude’s Good Food, then stomped off to find a room at the only hotel
in town, The Cottonwood. That’s when the spidery old man at the front desk—it was actually a broken-down kitchen table with a penny notebook for a register—informed Prophet that “his sister” had already purchased a room for them both.
The old man’s eyes twinkled knowingly as Prophet, dressed in his trail clothes and hefting his war bag, shotgun, and rifle, thanked the oldster, headed up the creaky stairs to the second floor, and slouched to the end of the hall.
“Louisa, why do we have to go through this brother-sister nonsense every time we check into a hotel?” he asked after their coupling.
Yawning and stretching her arms above her head, she turned to him with her customary impudence. “We wouldn’t want the gentleman downstairs to think we were doing anything improper, would we?”
Prophet chuckled wryly and hooked a lock of hair from her cheek with his finger. “You’ve killed upwards of thirty men, and you’re worried someone’s gonna think you’re doing something depraved?”
“Killing human dung beetles is one thing, sharing a man’s room is another.” She turned, buried her face in his chest, and wrapped her arms around his waist. “People wouldn’t understand how it is with you and me.” She rubbed her cheek against his chest. “I love you, Lou.”
Prophet ran a hand through her hair. “I love you, Louisa.”
“If we love we each other, why are we never together more than a few days at a time?”
With slow thoughtfulness, he said, “Oh, I reckon it’s ’cause we each have some oats to sow before we settle down.”
She didn’t say anything for a time, just held him, enjoying the warmth of his big, muscular body, the slow thud of his heart in his broad chest.
“It’s because we both have men to hunt,” she said.
“Pshaw,” Prophet said. “I don’t have men to hunt—just a livin’ to make, and it just so happens I make it hunting men. You, on the other hand ... you …” He shook his head again and sighed. “You got the world to save.”
Prophet felt her cheek form a smile against his chest. “I’m savin’ it too ... slow but sure.”
He held her away from him. She looked up at him, a faint smile quirking the corners of her mouth. “Louisa, you can kill twenty more men. Make that thirty. Hell, you can kill a hundred.” He shook his head. “It’s not gonna bring your family back.”
The Devil's Lair (A Lou Prophet Western #6) Page 4
