.45-Caliber Desperado

by Peter Brandvold

  “No. Like I said, only Mateo knows. He will probably tell us soon.”

  Several of Mateo’s men cast furtive, dark glances at the pair approaching the fire hand in hand. Obviously, several of the bunch wanted their leader’s comely sister for their own. Feelings of resentment toward Cuno were building. He could feel the animosity; apprehension plucked at his spine like a guitar string.

  He’d have to take care to never give these men his back, unless he wanted a knife in it.

  7

  DEPUTY U.S. MARSHAL Spurr Morgan drew his buckskin to a halt in a chokecherry thicket near which a muddy creek trickled and shucked his 1866-model, brass-framed Winchester repeater from his saddle boot. Gently, he racked a round into the old but familiar weapon’s chamber, then lowered the oiled hammer to half cock.

  He stared through the tangle of shrubs and cedars and past a falling-down privy toward the back of the three-story roadhouse that looked so sun-blistered and rickety that the next strong breeze would likely obliterate it and muttered, “There’s three of ’em, and I’ve been after them rancid polecats’ hides for nigh on two months now. Let’s not muck this up, shall we, Sheriff?”

  To his left, Sheriff Dusty Mason out of Willow City, Wyoming Territory, slid his own, much newer rifle from his saddle boot and gave the older Spurr, who was pushing sixty though he himself was not sure of his own age, a condescending look. “You should have had him in Wheaton.”

  Spurr felt anger surge up from deep in his loins. Making it all the hotter was the humiliation that came with it. Indeed, he should have taken down Wes Leggett, Christopher Fancy, and Marvin “the Maiden Killer” Candles back in Mason’s county in Wyoming Territory.

  Three things had gotten in Spurr’s way—a bad ticker, a comely, big-bosomed whore half his age, and one of his notorious benders. Leggett, Fancy, and Candles had indeed been holed up just outside of town, at a little outlaw ranch owned by an Irishman and stage relay station manager, Burton P. Murphy, while Fancy had been sparking the Irishman’s blond daughter, Lucy.

  Spurr hadn’t known that at the time, however. He’d thought they’d ridden on to Deadwood. But he’d been fairly deep in his cups by then, and he hadn’t bothered to check the authenticity of his information.

  So here he was now, riding with the tinhorn county sheriff whose father he was damn near old enough to be and whom he’d been ordered to ride with by Chief Marshal Henry Brackett in Denver as a sort of punishment for his misstep in Wheaton, and having to take load after load of subtle and not-so-subtle shit from the arrogant bastard who obviously thought Spurr had ridden roughshod after owl-hoots way longer than he should have.

  Spurr didn’t like the man’s mustache or the liquid cobalt-blueness of his eyes. He also didn’t like the fact that Mason was a Texan. Spurr didn’t like Texans for too many reasons to go into, but the main one being that they thought they owned the whole fuckin’ frontier—cow, wagon, six-gun, and doxie . . .

  “You ever make a mistake, Dusty?” Spurr asked the county sheriff now. “Ah, never mind. You think on it hard. Chew your mustache over it and get back to me later. For now, let’s go get them three fork-tailed critters and haul ’em back to Cheyenne for hangin’.”

  “I’m for that.”

  Mason swung easily out of his saddle, hiking his right leg up high with a flourish, even making his spur rowel trill as it cut the air. Spurr glowered at the tall, rangy lawman, almost twenty years Spurr’s junior, setting himself lightly on the ground beside his tall strawberry. He often thought the man tried to look healthier, faster, and lighter on his feet for the sole purpose of getting Spurr’s goat, which he’d gotten over two weeks ago now, even before they’d picked up the trail of the three killers in southern Dakota.

  Spurr looped the reins of his big roan, Cochise, over a chokecherry branch. The back windows of the roadhouse had flour-sack curtains drawn over them. When gold and silver was still being hauled out of the nearby hills, the place had done double and triple time as a mercantile and brothel. Spurr had done some skirt chasing here himself not all that long ago.

  He remembered that the whores here had taken pride in the place and had even planted flowers around it. Now, however, the placed seemed nearly as rickety as the outhouse that flanked it, and there was nothing left of the flowers but wiry bits of brush nearly sunken into the ground.

  “Well, I reckon you’re in charge since you’re federal,” Mason snorted. “How you wanna play this, Spurr?” He spat a wad of chew onto a flat-topped rock and, holding his rifle up high across his chest, crouched as he stared across the sage-stippled flat and past the two-hole privy that was missing most of its vertical boards, at the roadhouse. “We could call ’em all outta there. But maybe we oughta wait till dark when they’re all three sheets to the wind.”

  “I see no reason to get fancy,” Spurr said and began walking toward the roadhouse, holding his old Winchester down low by his side. “I’ll go in the front while you go in the back. They either throw down iron and come along sweet as cherry pie, or we dust a few hides.”

  “Spurr!” Mason called, keeping his voice low and jerking an anxious look at the sagging, sun-blistered building toward which the older lawman was strolling like he was merely heading uptown for a leisurely lunch and perhaps a game of euchre.

  Spurr threw an arm up, beckoning, and tramped down the well-born path curving from the building’s back door to the privy. From the ammoniac smell and the dead brown leaves of the sage shrubs just outside the back door, most of the place’s customers didn’t bother with the extra hundred-foot hike to the dilapidated privy.

  Spurr veered left of the path and walked along the east side of the place and past split cordwood stacked against the wall, to the sagging front gallery. Stopping and glancing back the way he’d come, he watched Dusty Mason run at a low crouch across the backyard, his face around his dragoon-style mustache mottled red with anxiety. The sheriff disappeared behind the building as he made a dash to the back door.

  Spurr chuckled and shook his head. It was not to his credit, as his late mother used to say, that he loved it when he could get the otherwise cool son of a bitch’s own goat and stretch the younger man’s nerves taut as piano wire.

  “Teach him to ride with this old mossy horn,” the older lawman muttered, swiping a sleeve across his sweat-damp, salt-and-pepper mustache. “This old bull buff rides alone from now on, or he don’t ride at all! Specially with no local sheriff who thinks he’s the next Bat Masterson . . .”

  But then, he’d been entertaining the idea of retirement in Mexico for a long time, and nothing had come of it. Truth was, if he wasn’t lawdogging, he’d likely grow so bored with himself that he’d blow his own head off inside of two weeks.

  He gave Mason time to calm his nerves and enter the roadhouse, then make his way to the roadhouse’s main front drinking hall. Then he mounted the creaky, splintered porch steps from which a coat of green paint had long since dulled to a sun-bleached gray and turned toward the batwing doors shaded by the low brush roof.

  A wind gusted suddenly, and Spurr turned to see a screen of dust lift from the adobe-colored street and fly toward him, flecked with bits of hay and straw and ground horse shit. The breeze peppered his face and blew his hat off his head. Before he could grab it, it had drifted under the batwing doors and tumbled on into the saloon. Spurr crouched to swipe it out of the air.

  As he did, a thunderous boom sounded, making the porch boards jump beneath his boots.

  For half a confused second, Spurr thought the wind had blown in a thunderstorm despite the plainly sunny sky. But then he felt a mad spray of slivers across his back and shoulders. He raised his gaze to see that both tops of the now madly swinging batwings had been blown clear away. They lay in slivers around the worn, high-topped moccasins he’d preferred since his Indian-fighting days when he’d often needed to walk a distance quietly.

  He spun to his left, slamming his shoulder against the front of the building.

  Kabooomm
m!

  The porch floor leapt again beneath Spurr’s moccasins. The rest of what had remained of the batwing doors after the first blast now blew out past the aging lawman, across the gallery, and into the broad trail beyond. Only a few bits of wood remained, jerking back and forth on the spring hinges.

  The echo of the second blast had not died before Spurr gave a raucous yell and threw himself through the dark, smoky opening, instantly smelling cordite as he thumbed his Winchester’s hammer back to full cock.

  He hit the floor on his creaky right shoulder and hip, trying to ignore the hammering pain that lanced through both and making a vague mental note that he was getting too old for such maneuvers. He blinked against the misty shadows inside the saloon, saw an uncertain man shape before him, the light from the doorway behind him glinting on the black iron bores of a double-barreled shotgun.

  He fired once, twice, three times before he’d even stopped sliding on his hip and shoulder, and heard the man with the shotgun scream as he flew straight backward over a table. Spurr’s old eyes were slow to adjust to the gloom shot through with the glare of two long windows on the room’s left side, so all he saw were jostling, man-shaped shadows before two guns flashed simultaneously.

  The slugs hammered the front of a bar to his right, just above his sprawled, buckskin-clad body.

  “Kill the old, nasty son of a bitch!” someone shouted.

  More guns popped, bullets chewing table legs and ceiling posts in front of Spurr, and the front of the bar to his right. Quickly, lying prone, elbows on the floor, he racked another live round into his rifle’s breech, took quick aim at the shadow before which one of the guns flashed, and fired. His target yelped and disappeared.

  He aimed at two more figures as they triggered revolvers while moving around the tables, and watched as he blew one of the yellow-toothed demons out one of the long windows, the man screaming and triggering his pistol into the ceiling and then disappearing through the shattering glass and out into the yard.

  More men screamed and shouted—many more than the three he was after—and triggered more lead, the gunfire in the close confines sounding like many blacksmith’s hammers rapping on empty tin washtubs.

  Spurr was low enough that several tables and chairs offered rudimentary cover, but he was glad to see a stout heating stove just ahead of him, in the middle of the room. It was flanked by a stout wood box with high side panels.

  He triggered two more rounds, then rolled to his left, wincing as several slugs hammered the floor around him, pricking his face with slivers. Two more screeched raucously off the woodstove as he piled up behind it, a man shouting, “He’s behind the stove—get him. I want that lawbringer beefed!”

  “Hey, who is that?” Spurr shouted, hunkering low against the floor and thumbing fresh cartridges from his shell belt into his Winchester’s receiver. “I think I recognize that voice . . . just can’t recollect the name!”

  “It’s Ludlow Walsh!” A bullet clanged loudly against the stove simultaneously with a revolver’s bark. “Take that, you dirty, badge-totin’, privy-suckin’ dog!”

  “Lud Walsh?” Spurr chuckled. “Hell, I wasn’t after you, Lud!”

  A figure moved to his right—a man trying to work around him toward the bar. Spurr whipped his repeater around and fired, but the man ducked behind an awning post, and the bullet hammered a ceiling joist behind him, shattering a hurricane lantern.

  “Hell, I didn’t think you was!” Walsh called from the far side of the room. “But I vowed I’d perforate your big, ugly hide first chance I got, Spurr. No way you’re walkin’ out of this waterin’ hole alive, lawdog. No way at all. Too many against you in here!”

  “That’s how it sounds,” Spurr called. “I just hope the three fork-tailed devils I came special for are here! Wes Leggett, Chris Fancy, and Marvin ‘the Maiden Killer’ Candles—you boys in here, I hope?”

  “Oh, we’re here all right,” came a raucous, laughing voice from ahead and to Spurr’s right.

  It was followed by four pistol blasts, all four bullets hammering the woodstove and setting up the clanging of cracked bells in Spurr’s ears.

  “Behind you, Fancy!” shouted the familiar voice of Spurr’s partner. “Sheriff Dusty Mason! You boys are surrounded, so give yourselves up and live to die another day!”

  “Fuck!” one of the outlaws cried.

  There was the thumping of boots and the bark of a chair across the crude puncheon floor. A rifle thundered at the back of the room. That’d be Mason, Spurr figured. About time he showed. The older lawman was beginning think his young partner was standing in a back room, dribbling down his leg.

  As a man screamed and another shouted curses and a rapid volley of shots rose, making dust sift from the rafters, Spurr rose to a knee and picked out movement through the gun smoke webbing through the brown air.

  He fired his Winchester and sent another man flying out a window. He fired again and saw another figure in a derby hat spin around and clutch his left shoulder with his right hand that was holding a big LeMat pistol. As the man turned back toward Spurr, loosing a string of German-accented English epithets—that would be Rutger Von Muelssen, Spurr absently considered, recognizing the voice—Spurr drilled him again, causing dust to puff from the dead center of the big German’s chest, slamming him back against the wall.

  The shooting stopped abruptly. Somewhere in the thick shadows and webbing smoke, a man was groaning. Then two more shots sounded from the top of a stairs at the back of the room. A gun flashed from behind a table at the bottom of the staircase, and then boots thumped at the top of the stairs.

  “That was Candles!” Dusty Mason shouted. “I’m goin’ after him!”

  “Hold on, goddamn—!” Spurr, slowly rising, felt a sudden heavy pain in his chest, and he dropped back down to both knees. His left arm stiffened up. He clutched it hard against his side, set his smoking Winchester onto the floor, and reached into his breast pocket for the little rawhide pouch he kept there. His hands shook.

  Upstairs, boots thumped loudly, making the ceiling above Spurr’s head creak and groan. Dusty Mason shouted, “Hold it, Candles!”

  A girl screamed.

  Candles’s voice thundered in the ceiling. “Drop the gun, lawdog, or this pretty little gal’s gonna look right funny without her head!”

  Shakily, using his teeth, Spurr opened the drawstring on the hide sack. He dribbled a little gold tablet into the palm of his right hand and popped the pill under his tongue. It tasted like iron, but almost instantly he felt a relaxing of the colicky iron crab in his chest that was firing off pain spasms into his left shoulder and into his neck.

  Upstairs, the sheriff and Candles were shouting, and the girl was sobbing.

  “Mason!” Spurr rasped, unable to raise his voice loudly enough for the young deputy to hear. “Wait for me, goddamnit !”

  Spurr stuffed the hide sack back into his shirt pocket, picked up his rifle, and climbed to his feet.

  “I mean it, lawdog!” Candles yelled. “You don’t drop that pistol, I’mma cut this little bitch’s head clear off!”

  “I don’t think so, Candles!” the deputy returned though Spurr could hear the slightest hesitation in the man’s voice. “That knife goes any closer to her neck, you’re gonna be the one missin’ his thinker box!”

  Breathing heavily through gritted teeth, Spurr looked around. Smoke webbed. Bodies lay everywhere, some atop overturned tables or chairs.

  A hot breeze blew through the two broken windows. He heard a slight groan behind him and wheeled, pressing his back against a support post and bringing the Winchester to bear on a fat-faced gent in an apron standing behind the bar. The man raised his pudgy hands in the air. His dark eyes flashed. He had big ears and fleshy, pitted cheeks.

  “No, no!” the man cried, waving his hands. “I own dis place, senor. These men . . . I am no part of, senor!”

  Still hearing the din on the second story and wanting to get up there to help Mason, as Spurr kn
ew Marvin ‘the Maiden Killer’ Candles’s reputation for extreme deviltry, but not wanting to give his back to the main saloon hall until he was sure he wouldn’t take a bullet between the shoulder blades, the old marshal gestured with the Winchester.

  “Come out from behind there and keep those hands in the air. Go on outside and stand in the middle of the yard, but you keep those hands high, you hear me? If I look out and you ain’t there grabbing for clouds, I’m gonna be mad!”

  He’d known more than one lawman sent to his reward in bloody pieces by aprons wielding double-barreled shotguns.

  “Si, si, senor!” the barman cried, waddling out from behind the bar and on out the gap where the batwings used to be. “Si, si, senor!” he yelled, running into the yard, his broad ass jiggling like a croaker sack filled with straw. “Don’t shoot me, por favor!”

  8

  WHEN SPURR SAW that the fat Mexican barman was safely out in the yard and holding his arms high above his head, he turned to the stairs. Things had gotten too quiet upstairs, and his weak old ticker was thudding heavily. He still felt the heaviness in his left shoulder and arm, but that fractious crab in his chest had loosened, and he was able to breathe relatively freely.

  Thank god for the nitroglycerin. A doctor had given him the pills up in Buffaloville, Wyoming Territory, and they’d saved his life more than once, sort of setting off a mini-explosion in his heart that kept the old raisin ticking.

  He took the steps one at a time, hauling himself up by his left hand, holding his Winchester’s butt taut against his double shell belts over his right hip, hammer cocked. He heard Mason’s voice in the second story. It was grim with authority. Candles was grunting replies. Meanwhile, the two men were moving around, as the ceiling continued to creak.

  Spurr gained the mouth of the second-story hall. About halfway down, a girl stood there, facing the open door of a room on the hall’s right side. She was naked—a slender blonde with mussed hair and full breasts—and she was aiming a long-barreled, black-handled pistol through the open door with both hands.