by Evans, Tabor
Or . . . maybe not.
A weird stiffness in the back of his neck told the lawman that the desperadoes had heard the gunfire, maybe even seen Greer’s fire, and were heading toward him now. Slowly. Gradually, maybe. But they were back there, only a mile or two behind him. That stiffness in his neck told him so. At first light, they’d increase their pace, which meant he had to increase his, as well.
He just hoped they didn’t run him down until he got the loot. After he got the loot, it would be easier to lose them. Now, they knew where he was heading, and it was just a matter of who got there with Lacy first.
He’d ridden for forty-five minutes before Lacy started to groan and sigh, the groans and sighs growing louder until she said in a thick, garbled voice, “Longarm? Longarm . . . what’re you doing, damnit. Untie me, damn you!”
Longarm kept riding, putting the dun slowly up the gradual slope of the valley far ridge, climbing through the pines, crossing occasional small clearings.
“Longarm, goddamn your ornery hide, untie me, damn you, or so help me . . . !”
Longarm stopped the dun. With a sigh, he swung down from the saddle and walked back to where Lacy’s head hung down the clay’s side. “Damn, it was quiet.”
She jerked at the ropes. “Untie me, you bastard!”
He would have continued riding with her tied—at the speed he was traveling, it wouldn’t kill her—but her screams would give his position away to Gunn and Cruz. He considered gagging her, but while she certainly deserved it, he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
Pulling out his folding barlow knife, he cut her free and pulled her none too gently off the mare’s back. She was bound up so tightly in the blankets that she stumbled backward and fell in the grass. “Ouch!”
“Keep it down or I’ll bind you and gag you, and you wouldn’t like that.”
“Help me, damnit!” she ordered, trying to wriggle free of the blankets.
He reached down, found an end of the blanket, and gave it a hard tug until she’d rolled pale and naked into the grass, her clothes and shoes tumbling away from her. She groaned and grunted, then cast him a hateful look, jutting her chin. “I hate you, you big, mean son of a bitch!”
“I’m gettin’ bigger an’ meaner, Miss Lacy. I reckon having done to me what you been doin’, capped off by the whack over the head I took from your ole pal May, just made me moreso.”
She started to retort, but he stopped her with: “No, no. You just keep that purty mouth shut, or I will bound and gag you. I won’t let you go until we get back to where you hid the loot.”
Shivering, she wrapped the blankets around her as she sat on her naked rump in the grass. “If you think I’m going to show you where that money is, you’re badly mistaken.”
“If you don’t show me where the money is, Lacy—”
“Yes?” she interrupted insolently. “What are you going to do about it? Spank my bare bottom? You’d just love that, wouldn’t you?”
“Nothin’ would please me more.” Longarm shucked his Colt and spun the cylinder, making it whine. Then he aimed the pistol at the girl’s forehead and clicked back the hammer. “Nothin’ more except puttin’ a bullet between those purty, evil eyes of yours, that is.”
She stared at the gun aimed at her from a foot away. “You wouldn’t dare!”
“After that last stunt you pulled,” he said with a caustic chuckle, “you bet I would. Now, get dressed. We’re wastin’ time. Gunn and Cruz are likely behind us. You don’t want them boys catchin’ up to us any more than I do. Probably less than I do, after what you pulled on them.” He chuckled again and depressed the Colt’s hammer. “Face it, Lacy. You done run out of friends. The party’s over. You an’ me are gonna fetch those saddlebags and head to Jawbone once and for all.”
“Gunn and Cruz are gonna have somethin’ to say about that.”
“Yep.”
She just stared at him, shivering inside the blankets. Her eyes were cold and cunning, just like before. He knew she was still thinking about how she could get away from him. She was trying to put some new tricks up her sleeve. Only problem was, even he himself didn’t know if he was lying about drilling a bullet through her head if she didn’t produce the loot. That uncertainty was in her eyes, too. Tempering the shrewness. That was one trick he himself had.
It was about time he had one . . .
“You get dressed and think about it,” he said, holstering the six-shooter, then reaching inside the mackinaw and plucking one of Greer’s cheroots from the breast pocket of his frock coat. He stuck the cigar in his mouth, then fired a lucifer on his cartridge belt, cupping the flame as he lit the cigar, puffing the aromatic smoke out in the chill air.
She chuffed her disdain for him, then reached around her, gathering her clothes and shoes, then let the blanket slide off her shoulders as she climbed to her feet. Standing before him, letting him get a good look at her jiggling nakedness, she dressed, shivering, glaring at him, muttering oaths under her breath.
Longarm leaned back against her horse and smoked and watched her. At first he tried not to watch, because he feared the warm caress of desire her body evoked in him. But then he realized as he watched her that he felt nothing. No prickling in his belly or cock or elsewhere. He had no urge to grab her and pull her to him, feel those breasts mashed against his chest, or to throw her to the ground, spread her legs with his own, and mount her.
“Here,” he said, stiffly tossing her a wool poncho he’d found with the tack he’d rigged her horse with. “Gonna need that.”
She grabbed the poncho out of the air and stared at him. She seemed to sense his lack of desire, and it confounded her.
“In rather a hurry to have me cover up, aren’t you?” she said.
“Cover or don’t cover. Up to you. Just pull that on if you’re going to.” He stared off along his back trail, puffing the cigar. “We’re gonna be movin’ again in three jerks of a whore’s bell.”
With a caustic grunt, wrinkling her nose, she dropped the poncho over her head.
“Sure you wouldn’t like one more look at my tits before we got moving?”
“I seen ’em.”
Longarm looked at her again and shook his head, amazed that she’d had such a hold on him. Why, she was nothing more than a black-hearted devil standing here before him. All that was missing were the green horns and yellow fangs. She appalled him.
Longarm took another puff from his cigar, then grabbed her and tossed her up onto the claybank’s back as though she weighed little more than a small bag of Arbuckles. She gave an indignant squeal at his brusqueness, then leaned forward to grab the saddle horn. “Damn you!”
“Nah, you’re the one who’s damned.” Chuckling ironically, he filed the coal off his smoke with his thumbnail, then, stuffing the half-smoked cheroot in his coat pocket, he took the claybank’s reins as well as his own horse’s ribbons and stepped into the leather. “You’d best settle in. We ain’t gonna be stoppin’ much between now and reachin’ that loot!”
He pressed heels to the dun’s flanks, and the horses moved forward. She grabbed the horn again with a gasp, nearly falling off the clay’s back.
* * *
The next day, in the midafternoon, he lay atop a volcanic dike in the foothills of the San Juan Mountains, staring through a spyglass he’d found in Heck Gunn’s saddlebags. He slid the glass from left to right, scrutinizing a wooded, grassy area along a creek that meandered near the base of the dike. This was where he’d nabbed Lacy away from Gunn and Cruz back in what seemed another lifetime, so much had happened since then.
Twisting the brass-chased telescope slightly this way and that, he adjusted the single sphere of magnified vision, bringing up the scattered pines and piñons running along the creek’s other side and up a slight, boulder-strewn rise from the water. No sign of Gunn and Cruz ov
er there. Longarm had thought they might have somehow gotten ahead of him and Lacy and been waiting for them here.
The cottonwoods were shedding their leaves, giving him a good view of where the gang had been camped and the area around where she’d hid the loot with the intention of somehow shedding the gang later that day and returning to it later. Nothing here now but orange and yellow leaves dancing as they fell from the gray-brown branches and flashing in the golden, high-country sunlight. There were scattered piñons, a few wolf willows, sage, and rocks. Not much else to offer cover to possible ambushers.
That Gunn and Cruz did not appear to have set a trap for Longarm did little set him at ease, however. He turned to peruse a broader area around him, beyond the slope on toward the San Juan valley to the northeast, where the Sangre de Cristo jutted against a cobalt sky.
He’d seen no sign of the outlaws since he’d nabbed Lacy from the Greers. His veteran lawman’s sense, as well as just plain old common sense, told him they were back there, however. They had to be. That he hadn’t seen them only made him all the more nettled, anxious.
Where the hell were they?
He lowered the glasses, looked down the slope behind him, saw the claybank mare and his coyote dun idly cropping the blond needlegrass that grew up from the thin, gravelly soil in front of a low mound of rock. Lacy sat on a rock between him and the horses and slightly to his left, at the base of a small, jagged-topped scarp.
She leaned forward with her elbows on her spread knees, staring at the ground with a wary, crestfallen cast to hear near-blank gaze. She hadn’t said more than two or three words to him in over twenty-four hours. She’d been sullenly silent as a scolded schoolgirl, realizing the game was finally over. She looked so raggedy-heeled that Longarm almost felt sorry for her.
Almost.
A hell of a lot of folks had died on account of her, and he’d almost been one of them more than once.
“Get over here,” he ordered.
She lifted her head to look at him dully. Then she rose from the rock with a sigh and walked toward him, her honey-blond hair shining in the sun, soiled skirt buffeting about her long legs. Wisps of hair blew against her pale, drawn cheeks. With another, fateful sigh, she dropped to her knees before him, and he held out the spyglass.
“Look over there,” he said, canting his head toward the creek. “Point out where you hid the loot, and don’t fuck around. Remember my warning.”
“Or you’ll drill a bullet through my purty head?”
“You got it.”
She stared back at him, upper lip curled in a sneer. The sneer faded, and apprehension grew in her eyes. She took the spyglass, and aimed it toward the creek, giving it a couple of twists as she stared through it, then handed it back to Longarm. “See that tree with its roots pulling out of the bank?” She canted her head toward the creek.
Longarm nodded. He’d seen the tree through the glass.
“The saddlebags are in the hollow with the roots,” she said, rolling onto her side, propped on an elbow, staring off in grim defeat.
Longarm narrowed an eye at her, tapped his open palm with the glass. “They better be.”
She scowled at him.
Longarm rose to his knees, grabbed a pair of handcuffs he’d worn hooked over his cartridge belt. “Hold your hands out.”
“Why?”
“I’m gonna fetch the saddlebags. Don’t want you runnin’ off. You’re headin’ with me and the money back to Jawbone.”
She gave him another scowl and looked up at him from beneath her slender, blond brows as he clicked the cuffs closed around her wrists. “It’s not too late, Custis,” she said with a hopeful half smile. “You don’t mind if I still call you Custis, do you? Mexico’s a lot warmer than here. Especially, with me . . .”
Longarm chuckled. “You’re a stubborn little thing, I’ll give you that.” He stood, grabbed his rifle, and looked around. Seeing none of the cutthroats moving in on him, he said, “Sit tight. I’ll be back.”
“I reckon I’ll be here,” she said with another fateful sigh, looking toward the Sangre de Cristo warily. “As long as ole Heck Gunn don’t get me.”
Chapter 18
Longarm walked down the steep slope, loosing slide rocks behind him, and crossed the shallow creek. Looking around him warily, expecting guns to start roaring at him from any quarter at any time, he climbed the rise to the pine that had torn its root out of the bank and angled down toward the water. The tree had no bark or needles on it, dead a long time.
He glanced back up the dike behind him. Lacy knelt atop the ridge, staring toward him, cuffed hands before her. Stared toward him with a hopeless air. Longarm turned to look into the ragged cavern where the dead pine’s nestled inside the slope. He couldn’t see anything, but when he reached into the hollow, pressing his left shoulder against the bank, his gloved hand touched leather. He closed it over the saddlebags and gave a grunt as he dragged them out from behind the weblike roots.
He hauled them out onto the bank before him. The cracked brown leather shone in the sunlight. Both pouches bulged. Longarm unbuckled the flap of one, opened it, saw the green of the paper bundles stuffed inside.
Relief washed through him. He was almost giddy with it. He’d thought for sure the girl would have kept playing games and he’d have to pistol-whip her before he finally found the money bags.
He glanced back at the dike. Lacy knelt as before but she was no longer staring toward him. She was looking behind her, hair blowing in the breeze. Slowly, stiffly, she rose to her feet and turned to stare toward the San Juan valley, then turned her head quickly back to Longarm, snapping her eyes wide.
“It’s them!” she yelled. “Oh, God—it’s Gunn!”
Just then gunfire crackled. Lacy screamed and jerked her head to one side and fell on her side at the top of the dike.
“Ah, shit!”
Longarm threw the bags over his shoulder, picked up his rifle, and ran back across the creek. He climbed the steep slope of the dike hearing the distant whooping and hollering of revelrous riders, the pounding thuds of their horses. When he gained the lip of the dike, he bounded up and over it, and dropped to a crouch beside Lacy writhing on the ground and holding her cuffed hands against her bloody temple.
The riders were pounding toward him up the gentle incline, seventy yards away and closing fast. They were triggering their rifles, and the slugs were hammering the slope around Longarm and the girl, some shrieking off rocks.
“Keep your head down!”
Longarm ran forward and dropped to a knee, firing the Winchester quickly, until the gang of seven riders drew sharply back on their horses’ reins and began leaping out of their saddles. Longarm triggered another round, causing one rider to jerk back and yelp. He ran forward to where the dun and the claybank were whinnying and dancing and straining against their reins tied to the branch of a fallen log, in front of the rock mound that sheltered them from Gunn and Cruz’s fire.
The cutthroats were shouting wildly, angrily, Gunn yelling, “End of the trail, star packer . . . for both you and that little whore!”
Lacy screamed as several bullet plowed into the ground around her, spraying her with torn grass and gravel.
Longarm tossed the saddlebags over the dun’s back, then swung into the leather saddle. He shoved his rifle down into the boot, then triggering his pistol to hold the angry horde at bay, he galloped over to where Lacy lay on the ground and swung down, keeping the horse between him and the shooters.
Slugs whined around him. The horse screamed and danced as one bullet tore into a saddle stirrup and another clipped one of the dun’s rear hooves.
“Get up there!” Longarm shouted, jerking the girl to her feet, then tossing her up onto the dun’s back. He swung up in front of her.
“Hy-ahhhhh!” he shouted, ramming his heels in
to the dun’s flanks and sending the beast flying down over the top of the dike.
The horse hit the slope with another shrill whinny and nearly lost its footing against the momentum of its sudden plummet. Lacy screamed. Bullets sawed the air over Longarm’s head. Then he and the girl and the horse were below the ridge crest, the dun barreling hard, grinding its front hooves into the shale and trying with all its might to stay upright as its rear legs scissored, propelling it down toward the creek.
Longarm held the girl between his arms, keeping a light hand on the reins, giving the dun its head. Lacy screamed wildly and flopped forward against the horse’s neck, clinging to is mane. As they splashed across the creek and swerved to gallop west along its sandy shore, Longarm glanced behind him.
He couldn’t see any of Gunn and Cruz’s men, but they continued to trigger lead and shout furiously. He looked forward, swung the dun up the bank, following a game trail that appeared to slant up the slope and into some piñon pines and firs.
“That’s my hoss, you son of a bitch!” came a shout from behind Longarm as the dun started up the slope toward the relative sanctuary of the forest.
Longarm looked back to see Gunn and Cruz plunging their horses over the crest of the dike, their riders following in a shaggy line behind them.
“And that’s our dinero, amigo!” Cruz shouted in his Spanish accent as his sombrero flew off his head to buffet down his back to which it clung by the brigand’s chin thong.
“I knew they were near! I just knew it!” Lacy wailed as the dun continued to dig its front hooves into the slope, pushing up with its rear ones. “They’re gonna kill us both!”
“Not if I can help it!”
“How can you help it? There’s five of ’em, you damn fool!” she said through a sob.
Longarm glanced behind once more. The killers were galloping toward him, Gunn and Cruz out front and triggering their pistols. The girl had a point. He’d faced longer odds before, but Gunn and Cruz and their men were well-seasoned cutthroats.
