There was a throbbing in his ears and then the pain in his head lifted. Suddenly. All the agony that had lived inside him, growing and growing in intensity until there had been moments when he had wanted to drive a knife point into it and release it, that intense pain had gone.
Weston felt as if a weight of torment had been lifted from him.
If only the damned rain would stop! Drenching him the way it was, running now into the corners of his mouth, over his. mouth, damn well choking him almost!
Unable to do anything else, Weston opened his lips and gulped the water inside.
It tasted like blood.
Weston’s head floated.
The thunder shook the frame of the building but it seemed a long way off. He was happy now that the terrible pains that had thronged his head had gone away …
Hart shifted between moments of sudden and unexpected brightness and longer spells of blurred dark during which it seemed more like night than day. They would know now that he had got past the first man and would have to decide which way to play it. To find spots for ambush as he had, or come at him face to face.
He stopped as he turned the corner of one ramshackle building and his eyes sought to pierce the gloom. A shape seemed to be moving towards him from up what had once been the foreshortened main street. Hart waited, held his breath; lightning slashed the sky right to left above him, he crouched low and the street was bare.
Dark.
He shifted to one side and continued.
‘Hey!’
The shout came from his left, spun him round, hand clawing for the Colt.
‘Hey!’
Higher up this time - two of them playing games, bewildering him, or the storm throwing a single voice?
Hart backed against the wall and as he did so it went crashing to the ground, the entire wall, flattened by a tremendous gust of wind that had Hart himself bowed against it. Turning into it at the sound of the boards striking the ground and then beginning to bounce haphazardly across the street.
‘Hey!’
He turned again, almost a full circle, to see one man advancing towards him, pistol already drawn.
‘You lookin’ for me, feller? Lookin’ for me?’
Hart took two paces into the street, waiting for a bushwhacker’s bullet that never came. He saw the man’s long, once white coat flying out behind him like a cloak, saw -just - the broad grin on his black-skinned face.
‘You an’ me,’ the Negro called into the wind, ‘we got us a little business to take care of, huh?’
Both men trod slowly towards one another, boots squashing down into mud, splashing up deep puddles around their legs. No more than twenty feet separated them; even in that swirling rain Hart could see the smile fixed on the Negro’s face like it was painted, see the gun, the hand, the finger.
Thunder and lightning hit simultaneously.
Hart’s right hand blurred and two shots sang out, muffled by the falling echo of the thunder.
Walker’s eyes closed tight and he punched out sideways with his empty right hand; his left leg tried to turn but the boot stuck in the mud; the fingers of his left hand slowly let the pistol slip from their grasp. Hart thumbed back the hammer of his Colt and leveled it at the Negro’s chest.
Walker made one more futile effort to turn away, as though he didn’t want to face the man who had sent a bullet through his lungs. Not that he was seeing anything, eyes still shut, the grin on his face setting fast into the rictus of death. Blood began to slide between his lips, down through the broad nostrils, from both of his ears.
Still he didn’t, wouldn’t fall. It was as though some stubborn freak of the wind was holding him upright long after he should have gone.
Hart wiped his left sleeve across his face to clear the water from his eyes and forehead.
When he looked again Walker was falling backwards, falling fast; a cloud of water rose and spread around him. Blood welled up through the gaping hole in his chest and mixed with the steady flow of rain, staining the long white coat rose-pink.
The smile on the Negro’s face was an ugly death mask.
Hart headed on up the street.
Rain danced around his feet.
Somewhere up ahead, in the water-blackened buildings he had yet to enter there were the remaining men. Hart was between two shacks when another fork of lightning exposed him without cover. He had begun to dive sideways before the pistol thrust through a gap between the sodden boards. He landed on his right shoulder and propelled himself in a rolling movement that took him almost to the opposite wall. Two shots sought him and missed, the second throwing up a spasm of water into his eyes.
Hart pushed himself half up with his left hand, ignoring the pain that burned in his shoulder, drawing and firing the Colt with a fluid motion. A board was hammered back by his bullet and he heard a man’s voice shout, but in anger rather than pain.
There wasn’t any point in wasting time - he wanted it finished: now. He sprang to his feet, covered himself with a quick shot on the run, and crossed the street in less than a dozen strides. The door to the shack hung loose on a single hinge and flapped in the wind. Hart ran right at it, kicking it wide and jumping into the dark space, gun circling, seeking.
He saw a movement in the far corner, a shadow that was more than a shadow; his shot sent it ducking low and he hurried three, four paces in, struggling for his eyes to adjust to the light.
The shape had merged with the walls: for a second he imagined himself to be alone.
A second only - then the sound was clear but not from where he expected, from behind. Hart whirled fast, the blanket swishing away in a curve that left the sawn-off Remington uncovered. He recognized the shape of Colley in the doorway, the lesser darkness of the outside framing his lean and angular body, the shotgun that he himself was toting, the weapon he had used in the carriage on the train.
Hart’s reactions were faster, his finger on the trigger first by those fractions of time that make the difference between living and dying. As he let loose with the Remington he let his body drop backwards, seeing Colley’s sawn-off jerk up and to the side. The roar of the second shotgun merged with the first as Colley’s thin body was hurled back through the open doorway, arms and legs spread wide to crash down on his back in the rain.
Before he had landed a scream of agony told Hart that Colley’s charge of shot had not been wasted. Waite took the force of a good deal of it in his left side and arm; he rocked round on his heels and fell face first into the shack wall, still yelling. Several of the boards gave way and he pitched awkwardly forward, half-stumbling, half-jumping out into the street. Hart hurried through the gap after him. Waite tried to run but six paces was all he could manage before his legs shifted underneath him and he fell to his knees.
Hart grabbed at his long lank hair and yanked Waite’s head back so that his face was full into the stinging rain. One half of his duster coat was scored with blood. His eyes were so deep that the pupils seemed to have sunk right back into the middle of his skull.
‘Get up!’
Hart dragged Waite up by his collar and pushed him round.
Waite stared at him, angry and helpless, his face contorted by the pain from the shotgun wounds.
‘It’s just you an’ me,’ Hart shouted at him through the sound of the storm. ‘You an’ me, then it’s finished.’
Waite shook his head as if he didn’t understand. ‘I don’t... I ain’t got no gun.’
It was there in a muddy puddle to Hart’s side. He bent and picked it up, watching the tall man for any false move as he did so. Waite didn’t look as if he had anything left in him. Hart checked that there were still shells in the Smith & Wesson and held it out towards Waite.
Waite shook his head, drops of rain flying from his brow and nose.
‘Take it.’
Again, a shake of the head, a grimace.
‘Take it!’
Waite stared back at him through the driving rain, not moving.
Hart threw the gun down at his feet, the butt wedging itself into a rill of mud.
‘You pick up that gun an’ use it or I’ll drop you where you stand.’
Waite shook his head slowly. ‘You won’t,’ he called out. ‘You won’t do that. Not you.’ He winced as his broken arm spurred him with pain. ‘You’re goin’ to have to take me in.’
Hart’s finger hesitated on the trigger.
Teresa moved towards where he stood in the aisle, reaching for him.
‘You won’t do it.’
He touched the mass of bloodied curls that her head had suddenly become and felt the skull give like the shell of a small bird’s egg.
At the last moment something in Hart’s narrowed eyes told Waite that he had called it wrong. He was reaching for the pistol between his feet when the first shot sent him flying backwards, aimed for his head, the lank hair flattened by the rain. The second shot followed the first exactly, opening Waite’s head to the wind and rain so that they could carry its fragments away at will.
Hart stared down at the gray and red merging into the yellow oozing mud.
The memory of Teresa clutched at his arm.
He holstered his Colt and turned away. There was no let up in the rain, even though the thunder seemed to have fallen back beyond the hills. A mile out of the deserted town he met the two detectives, riding slow, hunched inside their slickers. Hart rode between them, not turning his head, not speaking. They moved their mounts aside to let him through. It was over.
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If you’ve enjoyed this book , read the rest of the series:
Hart the Regualtor
Cherokee Outlet
Blood Trail
Tago
The Silver Lie
Blood on the Border
Hart the Regulator 6 Page 13
