“We heard how you screamed, huh?” McBride said. There was no pity in him.
“You…go…to…hell….”
“Save a place for me by the fire,” McBride said. Without another glance he stepped around the little man and walked back into the cave.
Now he had to find Allison Elliot.
Chapter 34
After retrieving his revolver, John McBride left the barn and angled toward the back door of the house, sleet cartwheeling around him. There was no sound of gunfire from the hill. Both Apaches and white men were lying low, biding their time until the storm passed before again trying to kill each other.
The door was open and McBride stepped into a hollow silence. Only the moaning of the wind made a sound as it prowled restlessly around the eaves of the building and gusted sleet that frosted the glass of the open windows.
He was in the kitchen and quickly crossed the floor and went through another door that led to a hallway. Wary of Moses and his scattergun, McBride held his Smith & Wesson up and ready, finger on the trigger.
The hallway led to the main reception area of the house and the grand staircase. In a numbing cold, McBride warily mounted the stairs, each creak of the old timber threatening to expose him to whoever might be listening.
He reached the landing and on cat feet made his way to the hallway leading to the turret room.
“Can I be of assistance, Mr. McBride?”
McBride turned and saw Moses standing a few feet behind him. The man was unarmed and wore a black armband around the left sleeve of his jacket.
“Where is Miss Elliot?” McBride asked, aware that his heart was hammering in his chest.
Moses spoke in a half whisper. “There has been a death in this house.”
“Allison?”
“No, Mr. McBride, not Miz Allison. Someone else, someone very near and dear to her.”
For a moment McBride thought Moses must know about Drago, but that was impossible.
“Who is it?” he asked.
The old giant did not answer. He stepped around McBride, paying no attention to his gun, then bowed and waved a hand toward the end of the hallway. “Please follow me. The deceased is this way.”
Like a man walking through a surreal dream, McBride followed Moses along the hallway. He was at the bottom of the steps to the turret room when he heard sobbing, punctuated by the wrenching wails of a woman pushed to the edge by grief.
“Miz Elliot is taking this very hard,” Moses said, his dark eyes shadowed by his own sorrow. “I fear for her now that the master is gone.”
McBride was puzzled. Who was the master? A man he knew or someone who had managed to remain hidden in the house?
Moses interrupted his thoughts. “You go on up, Mr. McBride. I will wait here. If Miz Elliot needs me, she will call out.”
McBride nodded. He holstered his gun and climbed the stairs. The door to the turret room was open and he stepped inside.
Once again the foul stench in the room was a living thing that sought to choke him. Stunned by what he saw, McBride fought back the urge to be sick.
Allison sat on the edge of a steel cot, holding the bloodstained head of a man to her breast. A heavy rifle bullet had blown away part of his skull, but the face, streaked with fingers of scarlet, was intact. It was the face of a man in his early sixties, and it had been a good, strong face at one time. The cheekbones were high and prominent, a great hawk’s beak of a nose above a large dragoon mustache. As far as McBride could tell, the man’s hair was white, thin, revealing much pale scalp.
The dead man’s legs were bare, obscene things, black and grotesquely swollen, and they had rotted out from under him while he was still alive. Maggots arched and crawled over the man’s legs, and fed higher, under his nightshirt.
McBride, fighting back nausea, looked away to the window.
An overturned wheelchair lay in the middle of the floor and alongside it a .50-caliber Sharps rifle and some empty shell casings. A large ship’s telescope, made of brass and mounted on a steel tripod, stood close to the open window. McBride told himself that whoever the dead man was, he could have looked through that spyglass and seen forever.
Allison sensed the presence of someone in the room. She turned her tearstained face and saw McBride. Gently she laid the man’s head on the cot, then jumped to her feet. “John!” She threw herself into McBride’s arms and he smelled the stench of death on her.
“Allison,” he said, “who is he?”
“My father. He was hit by a stray bullet, John.” She moved her head rapidly from side to side, like a woman distracted by despair. “John, my father, my life, my love, is dead.”
The woman clung desperately to McBride and he felt his skin crawl. He pushed her roughly away from him. Suddenly he was no longer what he seemed. The thin veneer of the western man dropped from him, dragging with it all he had become in the past months, gunfighter, lawman, businessman…dupe.
All at once he was again Detective Sergeant John McBride of the New York Police Bureau of Detectives. And he was dealing with a cold-blooded murderess.
Allison was aware of the transformation and it troubled her. She wiped tears from her eyes with the back of her hand, smearing black mascara across her cheekbones. “John,” she whispered, “what is wrong?”
“Jim Drago is dead. He died in the tunnel where you keep your racehorse.”
“Did you kill him?” Allison asked the question without a trace of emotion.
“No, he was killed by a rattlesnake. Poetic justice don’t you think, Allison—one snake killing another.”
“I can see it in your face, John. Your eyes are like stone. The dwarf told you everything, didn’t he?”
“He told me about the people you’ve murdered, Allison, yes. And the children you’ve killed.” McBride nodded toward the dead man. “And he did his share. He used his Sharps to kill John Whitehead and then Conrad Heber down there on the slope, didn’t he?”
“And why not?” Allison said defiantly, her face twisted with rage. “They failed him, all of them, and they had to die. My father planned to build a city, a great city, but the people who came here were too small to share his vision.” The woman took a step toward McBride, her eyes, shining, on his. “Imagine it, John, a city where all the ills of society, poverty, misery, crime, would be banished, a utopia where people could live in peace, prosperity and harmony. My father was a great man, and that was his great dream.”
McBride smiled without humor. “And instead of all that, the rule made the people of utopia his prisoners and he encouraged you and Drago to spread terror and death among them. In the end your father didn’t create a paradise. He created a hell on earth.”
“No! No! That came later, after the shiftless trash failed him. Father saw his dream become a nightmare as businesses went under, settlers stopped coming and the railroad lost interest. At the end, in his despair, he shot himself.”
Allison stepped to the cot. “Look at him, John. See for yourself what they did to him. The bullet did not kill him, and Moses and I nursed him back to at least a semblance of health. But he was paralyzed from the waist down and later his body began to rot. Can you wonder that he looked down at his decaying legs and wanted all of them dead?”
“He made the rule and you and Drago enforced it.”
“Yes, we did. Father wanted no one to leave Suicide. He planned to keep them all right here where he could kill them one by one. Some tried to leave—”
“And you used the tunnel to go after them. Your father had the powerful telescope and told you where the fleeing people were headed.”
“In the early years Father began work on the tunnel through the hill to encourage the railroad. And yes, John, later I used the tunnel for another, much more noble purpose.”
“And you hid him there the day I searched the house?”
“He was there. Moses took him to the cave.”
McBride looked at the woman. Despite the stink in the room, despite the stench o
f death about her, even with her hair undone and her face swollen from tears, she was still a beautiful, desirable woman.
“Allison,” he said, steeling himself, “I wish I’d killed you the day you murdered John Wright and his wife. God knows, I tried hard enough. It’s amazing, but even now, after all I know about you, how evil you are, I would still like to spare you the pain that’s coming to you.” McBride drew himself up to his full height, his face carved from granite. “Allison Elliot,” he said, “it is my painful duty as marshal of this town to arrest you for the murders of—”
“No, John! Not so cold!”
The woman crossed the floor and threw herself at McBride. “John, you said you’d help me and now I need that help. We can leave here, begin a new life together, you and I.”
“Did you say that same thing to Drago?”
“The dwarf amused me, that was all. John, from the first time I saw you, it was always you. I love you, John. I have a little money left. It won’t take us far, but we can start all over again back east.” Allison smiled. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, to go back east with me?”
McBride did not understand. “There are five men buried on the hill and another dead in the cave who thought you had a fortune in gold hidden in the house.”
“They were wrong, weren’t they?”
“Then why did you kill them?”
“Father killed them, right from this room. He was defending his home, John. You can’t fault him for that.” Allison’s smile grew wider. “I’ll go pack. Then we’ll put Father in his wheelchair to defend his house and leave.”
McBride shook his head, a sense of unreality fogging his thinking. “Allison, we’re surrounded by Apaches. We may not even live out this day.”
The woman laughed and waved a hand. “La-la-la, John. The Apaches won’t trouble us. We’ll walk through them hand-in-hand like Arthur with his Guinevere and they’ll stand back and look at us with…with…awe. Besides, Father will be watching over us with his Sharps.”
A sane man confronted with madness will often begin to doubt his own sanity. He’ll grope through the dark caverns of his mind seeking the light, any light, to banish the frightening, deranged shadows that lurk and threaten.
It was McBride’s police training that helped him take a step back from the brink.
“Allison, if I survive this day, I will arrest you for the murders of the Peacock family, the carpenter John Wright and his wife, and many others. In the meantime you are confined to this house until I can turn you over to the Texas Rangers or a United States marshal.”
“You think I’ll run, is that it? Run from a thing like you? You’re just the same as all the rest, McBride—weak, shiftless and gutless.” The woman’s eyes were alive with hate. “You won’t put my head in the noose, McBride.”
“Allison, you need help,” McBride said. “I promise, you won’t hang.”
“You’re damn right I won’t hang.”
Allison brushed past McBride and stepped to the door. “Moses! Get up here!”
Slow, heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs. McBride drew his gun and waited.
When Moses appeared he was still unarmed. His huge hands dangled by his sides, the fingers clenching and unclenching.
“Moses, it’s over,” Allison said. “It’s all over. You know what to do. I’ll tell you when.”
The man bowed slightly. “I’ll make the necessary arrangements, Miz Elliot.”
“Allison, don’t try to leave this house,” McBride warned. “I’ll have a man watching the tunnel.”
“Father and I won’t leave. We like it here.” She sat on the cot and lifted the dead man’s head to her breast again. “Don’t we, Father?”
“Mr. McBride, it’s best you leave now,” Moses said.
On the cot, Allison was softly crooning a love song. The front of her dress was black with blood.
McBride stepped to the door. “Take care of her, Moses,” he said.
The giant nodded. “I’ll make the necessary arrangements,” he said again.
McBride, wondering at Moses’ meaning, left the house the way he had entered.
The sleet had stopped and suddenly the hill racketed with gunfire.
Chapter 35
The Apaches were running.
As McBride slid down the hill to where McKay, Channing and the others were standing, at least two dozen mounted men were riding among the fleeing warriors, shooting them down. McBride recognized Angel Guerrero among them. The bandit seemed to have experienced a sudden change of heart about Indians, because he was yelling at his men to let none escape.
A tall man wearing a canvas slicker, mounted on a rangy buckskin, charged three Apaches who had made a stand at the base of the hill. He had let the reins trail and had a Colt in each hand. The revolvers bucked, hammering lead, and the Apaches went down. The man rode around the sprawled bodies, shooting into each one again and again, his lips peeled back in a ferocious grin.
The surviving Indians fled to the west where they’d left their horses, but riders went after them, killing without mercy.
McBride scrambled down the hill, bullets thudding around him, and ran for the El Coyote Azul, mud spurting from his hurtling boots. He dodged horses and roaring, shooting men and reached the entrance. When he pulled the curtain back and ran inside, all was quiet.
His heart thumping, McBride stepped toward the kitchen, fearing what he might find. Apaches treated captive women like they treated horses: Use them until they drop, then find others.
Gun in hand, McBride pulled back the curtain and walked inside.
The two fat ladies looked up at him and giggled. The table was spread with food and the stove fires blazed.
Relief flooded through McBride. He joyfully hugged each woman in turn, saying words they did not understand. He was aware of Bear stepping beside him.
“I thought they might be dead, or worse,” he said to the old scout.
Bear said something to the women in Spanish and they giggled, and both poured out a torrent of words that lasted several minutes. When they were finally quiet, McBride gave Bear a puzzled look.
“Breaking it down, John, the Apaches didn’t bother them none. They fed the young bucks, gave them mescal and spoke to them in Spanish. The Apaches told the ladies that once the blancos were dead, they’d come back for them and take them to their ranchería.”
One of the women spoke again, looked at the other, and both smiled.
“She says men are men.” Bear smiled. “White, Mexican or Apache, they all want the same thing.”
McBride grinned. “Tell them I’m glad they survived.”
“I think they already know that, John. They say you hug like a grizzly.”
The shooting had stopped. McBride and Bear left the kitchen and stepped outside.
McKay, Kaleen and Levy were standing in the middle of the street, surrounded by mounted men. There was no sign of Channing.
The tall man in the canvas slicker turned his head when McBride and Bear appeared. He kneed his horse to the cantina door and drew rein. “My name is Ransom Rentzin,” he said. “I’m looking for my brother Roddy, who might have passed this way.” He waved a hand toward the three men. “Your friends here seem to have developed a sudden case of the forgetfuls. Maybe one of you saw him?”
McBride shook his head. “Could be he passed on through.”
Rentzin was thinking, his cold blue eyes moving from McBride to Bear and back again. Finally he said, “You, in the plug hat, what do they call you?”
There was no backing away from it. “John McBride.”
Rentzin didn’t seem surprised. “Roddy came to see you, figured you were a named man and he could add your scalp to his collection.” He moved his slicker away from his guns. “You sure you didn’t see him?”
McBride opened his mouth to speak but a shout from down the street stopped him. He turned and saw a mounted man leading a paint horse: Roddy Rentzin’s horse.
“Recognize this, Ran
som?” the man asked. “Damn my eyes if’n this ain’t Roddy’s pony.”
“That’s Roddy’s hoss all right,” another man said. “I’d recognize that paint anywhere. He’s right purty.”
McKay was ashen. He rounded on Levy and yelled, “I told you to get rid of that horse.”
Levy looked more miserable than scared. “I couldn’t do it, Jed. Like the man said, that’s a right purty pony.”
Rentzin’s smile was a mean, angry grimace under his sweeping mustache. He said to McBride, “Mister, looks like you’ve got some fast talking to do. Did you gun my brother?”
Before McBride could answer, Bear took a step forward. “No, he didn’t. I did. Yeah, he was here, Rentzin, and like you and the rest of your clan he was no good.”
The tall man was quiet, seemingly thinking this over. He shifted in the saddle and his eyes moved down the street to the creek where the cottonwoods tossed their branches in the wind. He turned his head to his men. “Hang him,” he said.
Bear tried to draw, but Rentzin rode his horse right at him. Bear fell against the cantina wall, his gun coming up, but Rentzin crowded him close. Men jumped on the old man and a big towhead wrestled his gun away and slammed the barrel across his face.
As Bear dropped, McBride was already wading into Rentzin’s men.
In a blind fury, his fist thudded into the chin of the man who had pistol-whipped Bear. As the towhead staggered back, McBride went after him. He threw a right to the man’s belly; then as he doubled up, he brought up his knee into the man’s face. The towhead let out a bubbling scream as his nose shattered, spraying blood and splintered bone. His head snapped back and McBride hit him again. He didn’t see the man drop. Something hard crashed into the back of his skull and the sky fell on him.
The round, concerned face of one of the fat ladies swam into McBride’s view as he woke. She was pressing something cold to the back of his neck, waving a bottle with a vile smell under his nose.
He pushed the smelling salts away, and slowly his eyes focused. Angel Guerrero was sitting opposite him at the kitchen table, grinning from ear to ear.
Shadow of the Gun Page 20
