Bullets Over Bedlam

by Peter Brandvold

  “Bedlam?” said Muttonchops. “Bedlam’s a ghost town.”

  “I happen to like ghost towns,” said Saradee as she lit the cigarette, puffing smoke. “They’re so quiet. Even the ghosts.”

  The men chuckled, casting their amused, conspiratorial glances back and forth among themselves. The redhead turned his wolfish gaze back to Saradee. “Why don’t you forget about that dusty old ghost town. That’s no place for a girl like you. Why, you can ride to Tombstone with us!”

  “Tombstone?”

  “Yeah.” The redhead glanced at the tall gent’s bulging saddlebags. “We just happened to run across a little fortune . . . by purely legitimate means, of course. We figured on havin’ us a good ole hoof-stompin’ time in Tombstone with our newfound treasure, drinkin’ and gamblin’ and such.” His brows furrowed suddenly, as if from deep consternation. “Only one thing’s been missin’.”

  “Oh?” Saradee said, matching the man’s frown with her own, her voice pitched with mock gravity. “And what thing would that be?”

  “Why, a pretty little gal like yourself!” intoned the first rider, smoothing his droopy mustaches with the first two fingers of his gloved left hand. His horse was sniffing the palomino, the palomino lifting its head indignantly.

  “Sorry,” Saradee said, taking a slow pull on her quirley. “My momma told me to watch out for boys like you.”

  “Boys like us?” said the first rider, feigning indignance. “Now, what kind of boys would we be?”

  “Chowderheaded peckerwoods,” Saradee said matter-of-factly. “Who wouldn’t know what to do with a girl like me if I gave you lessons for the next ten years.”

  She heeled the palomino forward, nudging the first two riders out of her path, their horses sidestepping nervously and chuffing. Smoke puffed out behind her as she trotted the palomino down the hill.

  Behind her, the men chuckled uncertainly, brows ridged.

  “Won’t you reconsider?” shouted the tall man above the clattering of the horses’ shod hooves. “The trail ain’t safe for a pretty girl travelin’ alone!”

  “Thanks for the admonition,” Saradee called, spurring the palomino into a trot. She cast a glance behind at the four men watching her from the shaded hillside, and smiled, showing her perfect white teeth between her wide, red lips. “I’ll keep a finger on my trigger and an eye on my back trail!”

  She stopped two hours later atop a rocky knob, and peered into the ravine she’d just left. A half mile east along the ravine’s floor, a mare’s tail of brown dust curled amidst the saguaros and mesquite shrubs.

  Just the right amount of dust for four riders who’d set their hats for a pretty girl and a fine-boned, broad-chested palomino.

  “Come on, boys,” Saradee said. “Don’t be late for supper. I could use some beans and biscuits and I’m about out of coffee, too. Wouldn’t mind gettin’ my hands on that money in your poke, neither!”

  She chuckled and kicked the palomino down the scarp, parting shrubs and heading into a shallow wash twisting between seven-foot-high banks streaked with shale and pocked with swallows’ nests.

  She traced a gradual bend and paused to watch a thick, Mojave-green rattlesnake twisting up out of its hole in the side of the ridge. Fascinated, she unsheathed her rifle and prodded the snake with the barrel.

  It struck, closing its mouth around the steel. With a bewildered cast to its flat, copper-colored eyes, the snake recoiled against the sandstone wall and beat a fast retreat to its hole.

  Saradee watched it, her face lit up like an awestruck child’s. When the snake had coiled back into its hole, she sheathed her rifle and rode on.

  After another hour, she stopped the palomino under a low mesa, the west-falling sun filling the hollow with cool purple shade. A thin, shallow freshet ran along the base of the mesa, sheathed in grama grass and sage.

  Saradee cast a look over her right shoulder. Her pursuers were nearly a mile away, walking their horses along the shoulder of a cedar-stippled mountain. She probably wouldn’t have noticed them if she hadn’t been keeping an eye on them for the past several hours. Each rider was no bigger than the nail on her little finger from this distance, but there they were, just the same. They’d probably lay off until the sun went down, then move in after dark.

  Unless she could lure them in sooner.

  Saradee dismounted, unsaddled her horse, and tied it to a cedar tree near the little stream. She rubbed the animal down with dry grass, taking her time but keeping an eye on the sun, which had another hour yet before it disappeared behind the western ridges.

  When she’d gathered wood for a small fire and spread her bedroll, she cast another glance at the ridge behind her, colored now a deep, brassy orange. She could no longer see the riders, but they could probably see her.

  She chewed her lower lip, turned away from the ridge, removed her gun belt, and coiled it atop a nearby boulder. She glanced again behind her, then pulled her shirttails out of her pants and slowly began unbuttoning her shirt, her cool eyes staring at the stream, sensual excitement rippling through her.

  When she’d taken off the shirt, she stood frozen for a moment as the dry breeze found the six-inch welts crisscrossing her back. She removed her boots and denims and the long, men’s underwear clinging to her muscular thighs and flaring hips, and padded barefoot into the stream, touching her fingers to the welts on her bottom. They’d scabbed nicely and might not even leave scars.

  Flagg, after she found him, should be so lucky.

  She walked upstream until she found a wide flat pool. She sat down in the pool, in the soft, cool sand, rested on her arms, and threw her head back, arching her back and pushing her breasts up proudly. She grinned when she thought of the men staring down from a nearby scarp, an evil, girlish titter escaping her lips.

  Slowly, she lowered her back into the water. A delicious chill coursed through her as the hard, crusted cuts sucked in the moisture from the stream.

  She lifted her hands, cupping water onto her thighs, hips, and belly. She dippered several handfuls onto her breasts, then massaged the water around on them, chuckling again when she thought of the men watching from above.

  They probably had at least one spyglass between them. Saradee’s mouth opened wide as she laughed. They were getting one hell of an eyeful.

  “Come and get it, boys . . .”

  She got up slowly, catlike, and stretched. Then she stood, walked slowly back along the stream, lifting each foot with a dancer’s flourish, and dried off with her saddle blanket, dressed, and fed more wood to the fire. When the flames were burning well, crackling as they fed on the dry mesquite she’d gathered from the other side of the stream, she set coffee to boil. That was about all she had in the way of food, for she’d left Cartridge Springs in such an ill temper that she’d forgotten to put on trail supplies.

  She pulled her cast-iron skillet out of her saddlebag, though, and greased it from a small tub of bacon fat. Her keen ears—keen as any Indian’s—had already picked up the slow clomp of oncoming riders.

  A half hour later, she spread her saddle blanket beside the fire. She set the coffee to one side of the highest flames and sat down on the blanket. She leaned back against a rock, tipped her hat brim low, crossed her arms on her breasts, and closed her eyes.

  Half-dozing, she smiled to herself, listening to the sounds of boots softly crunching gravel before her and to her right. The sounds got louder, stopped. A gun hammer clicked back.

  “Hello, little miss.”

  Saradee jerked her head up with a start, snapping her eyes wide with feigned surprise. “Oh!”

  Two of the ragtag trail riders stood ten feet on the other side of the fire. The other two stood to her left. Three aimed pistols at her. The red-headed kid in the stovepipe hat aimed an old trapdoor rifle. His broad grin showed two rows of tobacco-brown teeth tipped like fenceposts after a Plains twister had gone through farm country.

  “Now, now, nothin’ to be afraid of,” he said. “Long as you
cooperate.”

  All four stood staring at her, their grins not reaching their eyes. Their dust-streaked faces were flushed with lust.

  The tall, one-eyed gent glanced at the shell belt wrapped around the two pistols to Saradee’s right. “Nice and easy, toss those hoglegs over here, by my feet.” He stared down his pistol barrel at her warningly. “Nice and slow.”

  Making her hands shake a little, Saradee slipped each pistol from its holster in turn, tossing it into the sand on the other side of the fire.

  “Ah, Jesus,” she said, her fear-sharp eyes darting from one gun-wielding hard case to the other. “You aren’t all gonna take me at once, are you?”

  The redhead chuckled through his teeth, spit bubbles popping along his gums.

  Saradee shuddered, made her voice thin. “I’ll cooperate if you will. Just one at a time. And you gotta promise not to kill me, and to leave a little meat when you’re through.”

  The one-eyed man spat into the fire. He kept his glistening eye on Saradee as he strode toward her. “Sure, we’ll leave a little meat.”

  “Hey,” said the man with the drooping mustaches, grabbing his arm. “What makes you think you can go first?”

  “Yeah,” growled the redhead as he and the man with the muttonchops and washed-out eyes both turned toward the one-eyed gent.

  It was the break Saradee had been banking on.

  She lifted her right thigh, flipped up the saddle blanket, and plucked her spare Colt off the ground. Raising it, she clicked the hammer back, aimed at the one-eyed gent, and fired. The man’s eye disappeared, vaporized as the bullet smashed through it and out the back of his head, throwing him straight back into the brush with nary a shriek.

  “Hey!” barked the man with the muttonchops, swinging toward Saradee.

  Quickly but calmly, Saradee shuttled the Colt toward him, thumbing back the hammer, and fired. He hadn’t hit the ground, triggering his own pistol into the fire, before Saradee had drilled a slug through the chest of the man with the muttonchop whiskers.

  The three men dropped like cans off fence posts.

  As her third shot still echoed, out of the corner of her eye Saradee saw the redhead jerk back, shouting and raising his rifle. She hadn’t yet recocked the Colt. Knowing he had the drop on her, Saradee threw herself forward and to the left. As she rolled off her left shoulder, the redhead’s rifle barked, the slug slamming the rock where she’d been sitting an eye wink before.

  Saradee came up off the shoulder, Colt cocked and extended, and fired.

  “Ach!” cried the redhead, his right shoulder jerking back. He dropped the rifle and grabbed his upper right chest, bending at the waist and slitting his eyes. “Bitch!”

  “That any way to talk to a helpless girl travelin’ alone?” Saradee gained both knees, aimed the Colt, and fired. As she’d tripped the trigger, an ember in the fire had popped, and she’d jerked the slug slightly wide.

  “Unh!” the redhead cried, as his right arm flapped out away from his body, the bullet searing his bicep and spraying blood. “Copper-riveted whore!”

  He whipped away, fell to a knee, pushed up, and began running, tracing a jerky course through the darkening sage toward the horse trail.

  Saradee knit her brows.

  “Goddamnit.”

  She rose to her feet with a sigh. As the redhead’s shrieks faded with distance, she stepped out away from the fire, stopped, spread her feet, aimed the Colt straight out before her, squinted down the barrel, and fired.

  The redhead’s head snapped forward. He ran a few more yards, all four limbs flopping crazily, then hit the ground on his chest and slid another ten feet before coming to rest against a Joshua tree.

  Through the wafting powder smoke, Saradee looked around at the three ragtag hard cases nearest the fire. All appeared quite dead. She holstered her Colt, dragged them far enough away from her camp that she wouldn’t trip over them during the night, then strolled off in search of their horses.

  A half hour later, she sat by the fire, biscuits browning in her greased pan, side pork frying in another. She sipped her coffee seasoned with the hard cases’ whiskey, and counted the money from their saddlebags.

  “Three thousand, four hundred and thirty-six dollars,” she said when she was shoving the greenbacks back in the pouch. “Not bad for a no-account girl from the Panhandle.”

  18.

  CAGED

  IN the small but comfortable casa she shared with Dona

  Carmelita Sandoval, Juliana lifted her head from her straw sleeping pallet and pricked her ears, listening.

  Low snores drifted from behind the woven curtain separating the girl’s room from Carmelita’s. Satisfied the old woman was sound asleep, Juliana flung her blankets aside, rose, lifted her nightdress over her head, and tossed it onto a dresser.

  She’d gone to bed several hours ago, but had only dozed as she waited for the chill night to settle over the canyon and for Carmelita to drift into deep sleep. Now, the night had settled, so cold that goose bumps rose on Juliana’s arms as she padded about the earthen-floored room, blindly gathering her clothes in the stygian darkness, and dressing.

  When she’d donned heavy underclothes, a simple gray dress, a poncho, and sandals, she slipped out of her room and into the casa’s small kitchen area. Moving toward the beehive fireplace still emanating heat and a dull, orange glow, she kicked a chair. The leg scraped the floor with a low bark.

  Juliana sucked a breath and lifted her head, tensing and listening. Carmelita’s snores had ceased. Juliana waited, her hands squeezing the chair back. She’d begun stepping backward, intending to return to her room, when the old woman smacked her lips, sighed, and resumed snoring once more.

  Juliana released a heavy breath and moved toward a shelf to the right of the fireplace. Rising up on her toes, she slid a tea can and several jars aside and felt around until her hand found what she was looking for. She pulled out the old, heavy pistol Carmelita had found in one of the shacks the miners had abandoned when the gold had played out.

  Juliana had never fired the gun. She didn’t even know if it was loaded. Carmelita kept it around to ward off unwanted callers for Juliana, so it must have had bullets in it.

  The gun repelled her, and she didn’t look at it too closely, but she slid it into the poncho’s deep front pocket, over her belly, then stepped lightly through the casa’s main living area to the front door.

  She took one last look behind her, only the dim umber glow showing at the back of the house, then opened the timbered door, stepped outside, and latched the door softly behind her. She shoved her hands into the openings on each side of the poncho’s single pocket. Clasping the gun, she hunched her shoulders against the cold and began moving quickly across the yard and into the night.

  When she arrived at the cobbled main street, she crouched behind a wheelless wagon, staring westward toward the saloon. To the left, the small, stone jailhouse hunched between an abandoned blacksmith shop and a harness maker’s. A dim light shone in the two barred windows facing the main street. A man sat under the brush arbor, in a chair tipped back against the front wall—a hatted silhouette against the white stone, a rifle resting across his lap.

  Juliana lightly tapped her fingers against the wagon’s rotting sideboards as she considered the situation. If she tried to cross the street here, the deputy would no doubt see her.

  Finally, she rose, turned into an alley, crossed the main street a hundred yards east of the jailhouse, and approached the jailhouse from the alley behind it.

  To her left, a stand of tall cottonwoods tossed their large leaves in the breeze. Starlight played on the stream curving behind the trees, with its low, tinny murmur. The sound of the water should cover any sounds she herself might make.

  Stepping slowly across the shale and through the spindly shrubs that had grown up around the jailhouse, she pressed her hands to the cold stones of the rear wall. Four barred windows were small, rectangular shapes in the wall above her, nearly s
ix feet off the ground. She reached up, grabbed the ledge of the first window, rose up on the tips of her toes, and edged a look into the cell.

  The cell itself was dark, but she could see that it was empty, its door hanging halfway open. Beyond the cell and to the left was a desk on which a lamp burned low. Sitting at the desk, his feet crossed on the desk top, sat one of the deputies. He leaned back in a swivel chair, hands crossed behind his head. Soft snores rose.

  She turned her head to look into the next cell, but it was too dark to see anything from this angle. She removed her hands from the ledge and looked warily around, hearing only the leaves and the stream. She moved to the next window, rose up again on her tiptoes, and peered inside.

  At the same time that she saw a silhouetted face staring back at her, a familiar, hushed voice said her name. She jerked back with a start, heart pounding. She looked again at the window. Gideon stared back at her through the bars—a gaunt, haunted figure in the darkness.

  “Gideon,” she whispered, moving back to the wall, placing her hands on the crumbling ledge grainy with dust and old pigeon droppings.

  “Go home, Juliana.”

  She moved her face up close to his.

  His eyes had receded within their dark sockets, and the leathery skin had tightened across his cheekbones. He seemed depleted, somehow. Sapped of energy and life. Seeing him there, like a caged animal, wrenched her heart, and a sudden sob escaped her lips.

  Tears dribbled down her cheeks.

  “Gideon, I—”

  He closed his hand around hers on one of the bars. “It isn’t safe here. If you want to help me, you’ll go home and stay there till these men are gone.”

  “I love you, Gideon. I want us to be together always. What I’ve done haunts me . . . how I led them right to you!”

  “They would’ve gotten me, anyway.”

  “You would’ve gotten them.”

  “You want to be married to a killer?”

  She lifted her head to answer, but he cut her off.

  “You’re good and sweet and honorable, Juliana. Go home and forget me. Wait for the right man. Raise a big family, and shower your love all over them. You’ve got a lot of it to shower, Juliana. Love your family. Hold them close every day, because you never know . . .”