Ambush Valley

by Johnstone, William W.

  “They got away? And with the money?”

  “That’s right. They couldn’t abandon you quick enough, hombre.”

  The man started to curse in a low, furious voice. Frank let him go on for a few seconds, then cut in with a harsh laugh. “You didn’t expect them to stay behind and get caught just because you got shot, did you? They had the money. That was all they cared about.”

  “The dirty sons. We said we’d stick together. Damn their hides!”

  “Tell me who they were,” Frank suggested. As ex pected, he hadn’t found anything in the saddlebags that had belonged to the dead men to tell him their identities. “Maybe that would help me track them down.”

  “I dunno ….”

  “I imagine they’ll be living high, wide, and handsome in San Francisco within a week or two, as much loot as they carried off.”

  The outlaw cussed again, then said, “All right. They’re Johnny Blanco, Matt Higgins, and Ed Wrinkle. Those are the names I know’ em by, anyway.”

  “And what about you?”

  The man’s mouth twisted. “I’m Cullen Bradley.”

  “Where’re you from, Bradley?”

  “Poplar Bluff, Missouri. That’s where I grew up, anyway. I been on the drift for the past few years. That’s where I met Johnny and Matt and Ed. On the trails where the night owls hoot, if you know what I mean.”

  Frank nodded. “I know, boy. I’ve ridden a few of those trails myself.”

  Bradley swallowed hard and asked, “You … you ain’t really gonna hang me, are you, Marshal?”

  “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t.”

  “It wouldn’t be right! Like I told you, I’ve never killed nobody. I’ve stole before in my life, sure, but I draw the line at killin’. You might not’ve noticed, but every shot I fired this mornin’ went high on purpose.”

  Frank didn’t believe him for a second. He had seen Bradley firing, and the outlaw wasn’t aiming deliberately high. If Bradley was right about never killing anybody, it was because he was a poor shot.

  But in the absence of proof, Frank didn’t intend to try to send the outlaw to the gallows. Bradley didn’t have to know that just yet, though.

  Frank shook his head. “I don’t think a judge and jury will believe that, Bradley. And even if they do, I’m not sure they’ll care. The mayor was pistol-whipped-“

  “I didn’t do that, neither!” Bradley interrupted, his voice rising in panic. “That was Johnny Blanco done it! I never hurt nobody!”

  “Folks might be more inclined to believe you if you were willing to help us out a mite.”

  “What do you want me to do?” The young outlaw looked and sounded desperate. “I’ll do anything!”

  “Tell me how the four of you knew that payroll money was going to be in the Lucky Lizard office this morning.”

  Bradley licked his lips and hesitated, but only for a second. Then he nodded in eagerness and said, “It was a fella who works at the bank in Virginia City who told us. He used to ride with Johnny before he went straight. His name’s Russell.”

  “That his first name or last name?” Frank asked.

  Bradley shook his head. “Hell if! know. I never heard Johnny call him anything except Russell.”

  Frank thought about it, then nodded. “All right,” he said. “I’ll send word to the authorities in Virginia City and let them figure it out. I reckon they can find this fella Russell and see that he gets what’s coming to him for helping you.”

  “What about me? Are you … ” Bradley swallowed hard. “Are you still gonna hang me?”

  “You’ll stand trial for robbery, assault, and attempted murder,” Frank said. “What the court does with you isn’t up to me.”

  “You … you’re not gonna just string me up?”

  Frank smiled coldly at the young outlaw. “You’re lucky Tip Woodford wasn’t hurt any worse than he was, and that his daughter wasn’t hurt at all. If they had been … well, I wouldn’t have wanted to be you, Bradley.”

  The outlaw gulped and closed his eyes in relief. With a snort of disgust, Frank turned and left the room.

  “Take care of him, Doc. I’ll deputize a couple of men to stand guard over him until he can be moved over to the jail. How long do you reckon that’ll be?”

  Garland thought about it and said, “Give me a day or two, Marshal, just to make sure he’s out of the woods. Then you can take him over and put him behind bars where he deserves to be.” The doctor paused. “Will he be sentenced to hang?”

  Keeping his voice low enough so that Bradley wouldn’t overhear, Frank said, “Not likely. He’ll be sent to prison, though, that’s for sure.”

  Garland sighed. “It’s been peaceful here for a while,” he said. “I hope today’s events don’t signal a return to the sort of violence that used to plague this town.”

  “You and me both, Doc,” Frank said. “You and me both.”

  But unknown to Frank Morgan, events were taking place far to the south that would have an effect on his desire for peace and quiet. The seeds of brutal violence and deadly peril were already being sown.

  Just not in Buckskin, Nevada.

  Chapter 2

  Despite the heat, the eight men who rode into Tucson wore long dusters over their range clothes. Their hats were pulled down low to shield their faces from the sun-and to make it harder for anyone to get a good look at their features. They reined to a halt in front of the First Territorial Bank, which was a large, redbrick building, and as they dismounted, the long coats swung back a little to reveal guns in low-slung holsters. If anyone had been paying any attention, these eight strangers surely would have aroused some suspicion.

  But it was the middle of the afternoon and mighty hot, as it always was in Tucson, and the few folks who were out and about instead of snoozing in the shade some where just wanted to ftnish whatever errands had brought them out and get back to somewhere cooler.

  So nobody on the street really noticed the eight strangers. But Randall Berry did as they strode into the bank. He saw the dusters, the tugged-down hats, the way the men pulled bandannas up over the lower half of their faces as they entered the building so that only their eyes were visible. Randall Berry was a teller in the First Territorial Bank, and as he saw the men he said, “Oh, hell.”

  Those were his last words, because a second later the man who was in the forefront of the sinister group swept his hand under his duster, came up with a gun, and fired, The bullet struck Randall Berry just above the right eye, smashed his skull, bored through his brain, and exploded out the back of the unfortunate teller’s head in a grisly spray of blood, bone shards, and gray matter. The impact flung Berry backward in his teller’s cage. He flew off the stool where he had been sitting and crashed to the floor on his back.

  The gunshot, and Randall Berry’s death, got the atten tion of everybody else in the bank.

  And that was just the way Cicero McCoy wanted it. The gun in McCoy’s hand was rock-steady as he bel lowed, “Nobody move! This is a holdup!” He had learned over the course of a career in lawlessness that had lasted for several years that sudden, unexpected death made people freeze at first, so that instinct didn’t make them try to fight back. Then fear that they would be the next victim prompted them to cooperate.

  True, the sound of a gunshot usually alerted the local law that something bad was happening, but McCoy and his men knew how to clean out a bank in no time flat. They were usually on their horses, galloping out of town, while the star-packers were still trying to figure out where the shot had come from.

  Today would be no different. Cicero McCoy was sure of that.

  Half-a-dozen people were in the bank, not counting the dead teller—three customers, two more tellers, and the bank manager. They all stared at the outlaws in shock and horror. The duster-clad robbers spread out through the big room. One man covered the manager while another leveled his gun at the pair of terrified tellers. A third man herded the customers together and warned them not to try a
nything or they would die. That left four men with canvas sacks to clean out the tellers’ cages and the vault, which the manager was forced to open at gunpoint. While that swift looting was going on, the leader of the gang, the rawboned, lantern-jawed Cicero McCoy, strut ted back and forth keeping an eye on the whole thing, as well as glancing at the street from time to time to make sure it was still clear. With the metronomic certainty of a clock, the seconds ticked away inside McCoy’s head. He knew that if they were in and out of the bank in no more than two miutes, they stood a good chance of getting away clean.

  Unfortunately for McCoy and his gang, today the sheriff happened to be only a couple of doors away down the street, rather than in his office, which was separated from the bank by several blocks. At the sound of the shot, the law officer jerked his revolver from its holster and ran out of the dress shop where his wife had dragged him so that he could look at the gown she had picked out for a dinner being given by the county supervisors. The sheriff didn’t know what was going on, but he figured he would rather face outlaw lead than go through more of the torture he’d been enduring.

  He skidded out of the shop onto the boardwalk. A man who was standing nearby pointed and yelled, “Down there, Sheriff! I think that shot came from the bank!”

  The lawman had already wondered about that. Tucson had never been as wild and woolly as some of the other settlements in Arizona like Tombstone, and it had settled down even more in recent years as the final decade of the nineteenth century rolled by.

  But there were still outlaws in the West, and train rob beries and bank holdups still took place. Here and there stagecoach lines still operated, and the stages got held up, too.

  So the sheriff figured outlaws had hit the bank, and as he approached the big brick building on the run, he saw that he was right. Men wearing dusters, pulled-down hats, and bandanna masks ran out of the bank and headed for horses tied at the hitch rack in front of the building.

  The sheriff, a stocky man with a hawk nose and a bushy mustache, bellowed, “Hold it right there, you bastards!”

  Smoke and flame spurted from the muzzles of the out laws’ guns as they opened fire on him. The sheriff felt the jolt as a bullet burned along his left forearm. He yelped in pain and stumbled. More slugs whistled around him. He triggered a shot and threw himself off the board walk, landing behind a water trough. He didn’t have any idea if his bullet had hit one of the bandits, and at the moment he didn’t care. He made himself as small a target as he could as he huddled behind the trough. Right now he wished he was back looking at ball gowns with his wife, no matter how boring that had been.

  Cicero McCoy bit back a curse as he swung up onto his horse. That lone badge-toter didn’t worry him, but the fact that somebody had taken a shot at them did. Sometimes, if anybody put up a fight, that emboldened the rest of the townsfolk to show some backbone, too. Well-armed citizens were more of a danger to lawbreak ers than the authorities were. If anybody ever figured out how to take all the guns away from the people, so that they could no longer defend themselves, then hell would break loose. McCoy and his kind would run rampant, with no one left to stop them.

  Right now, McCoy was more concerned with getting himself and his men out of Tucson, along with the money they had taken from the bank. He peppered the trough where the sheriff had taken cover with lead to keep the lawman pinned down. “Let’s go, let’s go!” he shouted to his men as they leaped onto their horses.

  When they were all mounted, McCoy jerked on the reins and wheeled his horse around. The plan was for them to head southwest out of Tucson. There wasn’t much but rugged country in that direction between the settlement and the border. Mountains and desert, ravines and towering spires of rock. Ugly country where a man on the run could disappear. That was exactly what Cicero McCoy intended to do.

  His spurs raked savagely against his horse’s flanks as he put the animal into a run. The other members of the gang trailed behind him. Shots began to blast here and there as townies tried to stop them. When a man ran out in front of them brandishing a shotgun, McCoy shot him down without hesitation, sending a bullet into his chest and catching him in the throat with a second slug. Crim son fountained in the air as the dying man turned in a circle and then collapsed.

  A little boy yelled, “Pa!” and ran toward the man, who had fallen in front of McCoy’s hard-charging horse. McCoy never slowed. If the brat was going to run in the street like that, then he deserved whatever happened to him.

  A woman screamed and ran after the boy. She grabbed him, jerked him back, flung him out of the way of the thundering hooves. But the shoulder of McCoy’s mount struck her and spun her off her feet, and a second later the steel-shod hooves of the horses belonging to the rest of the gang shattered her skull and pounded her body into a bloody heap that barely looked human. The kid stood there shrieking in horror as the riders flashed past him.

  Being orphaned like that would be good for the little bastard in the long run, McCoy thought. It would toughen him up. Kids these days had it too damned easy.

  Killing didn’t bother McCoy, had never fazed him. People usually got what they deserved in life, he figured, and If they got in his way, that was their own lookout and not his problem. Up ahead, an old greaser in a sombrero tottered through the open double doors of a livery stable at the edge of town. He carried a pitchfork. He wasn’t really a threat, but McCoy shot him in the belly anyway. The old Mexican groaned, doubled over, and fell as the bank robbers thundered past the stable. Blood darkened the sand around his body.

  The robbers had left behind two dead men inside the bank. The manager had gotten brave at the last minute and made a grab for a gun in his desk. A couple of McCoy’s men had filled him with lead. Five people had died in Tucson as a result of the robbery, including the woman. That would mean a posse.

  But there was nothing they could do about it now. McCoy and his men had a good lead. They would be a mile or more out of Tucson before the outraged citizens could get organized enough to come after them.

  One of McCoy’s men was a half-Mex, half-Apache named Cortez. He had grown up in the rough country where they were headed now and knew every rock, every ravine, and more importantly, every water hole. When McCoy had decided to hit the First Territorial Bank in Tucson, he had conceived an audacious getaway plan.

  The gang was headed for Ambush Valley.

  Originally the place had had another name, but nobody had used it for a long time. Ten years earlier, while Geronimo and his Apaches had still been raising hell and striking terror into the heart of every white set tler in the territory, a company of United States cavalry had ridden into the rugged, arid valley in pursuit of a small band of raiders. The troopers and the officers who led them had no idea that that was exactly what Geron imo wanted them to do. The scout who’d accompanied the patrol had been picked off earlier, and since the sol diers were freshly arrived in Arizona, they had no idea what sort of nightmare they were getting into.

  They found out soon enough. The valley was a tor turous, twisting maze of rocks and cactus and no water. Unsure how to get back out, the troopers had wandered around for most of a day in the baking heat until they were weak from thirst and dazzled by the blinding sun.

  Then the much smaller force of Apaches, who knew every inch of the valley and had been following the cav alrymen all day, fell on them and wiped them out almost to the last man.

  They had saved a couple of troopers who weren’t badly wounded so they’d have somebody to torture to death. A little light entertainment around the campfire that night.

  Amazingly, one of the victims of the Apaches’ cruelty lived long enough to be found the next day by another patrol accompanied by Al Sieber, General Crook’s chief of scouts, who knew Arizona better than any white man alive and better even than some Apaches. The trooper was horribly mutilated, but before he died he was able to gasp out the story of what had happened.

  Ever since then, the hellish wasteland where the attack had taken place had
been known as Ambush Valley.

  The soldiers probably would have all died of thirst before they ever found their way out of the trap, but there was water in Ambush Valley. You just had to know where to find it. Cortez knew, or at least claimed he did, and McCoy tended to believe it because Cortez’s life would be on the line, too, just like the rest of the gang’s. Ambush Valley was a day and a half’s ride from Tucson. All they had to do was stay ahead of the posse until they got there; then Cortez would lead them through the valley. The pursuers wouldn’t risk their lives by follow mg. That was what McCoy was counting on, anyway.

  Once the outlaws came out at the other end of the valley, they wouldn’t be far from the border. They would cross into Mexico, safe from American law, and live a life of ease … at least until the loot ran low and they had to start planning another job.

  With Cortez to guide them, McCoy was confident they could stay ahead of the posse and make it through Ambush Valley. And if the pursuers were foolish enough to follow them into the valley, McCoy and his men would ambush them and wipe them out just as surely as the Apaches had with the cavalry.

  It was a foolproof plan, as long as the outlaws didn’t allow the posse to catch up to them before they reached Ambush Valley.

  There wasn’t a whole lot Conrad Browning liked about the West. It was still rough and uncivilized, and he much preferred Boston. But he had to admit that some things out here weren’t too bad, like the idea of a siesta. Stretching out for a while in the middle of the day, on a comfortable bed inside a hotel room, with thick adobe walls to keep most of the heat out … that wasn’t bad at all.

  Especially when you had your beautiful naked wife right beside you.

  Rebel was lying on her stomach, dozing. Conrad propped himself on an elbow and ran his fingertips along her spine, following it down to the curve of her hips. His touch made her stir. She turned her face toward him and smiled, although her eyes remained closed. “So soon, Conrad?” she murmured in a sleepy voice.