.45-Caliber Desperado (22 page)

Only vaguely and briefly, he heard the girl calling his name . . .

 

Spurr put Cochise into the riverbed and reined the big roan to a stumbling halt, curveting him. Mason and Ed Joseph galloped down the slope behind him. “Split up!” Spurr shouted above the wind. “We'll take the bastards from cover!”

He leapt off Cochise's back, twisted an ankle against a rock, and dropped to one knee, cursing. He held the roan's reins, used them to pull himself back to his feet.

Beside him, Mason yelled, “You all right?”

Spurr ignored the question. Getting old and having to display your decrepitude at every turn in the trail was a pisser.

He managed to get his rifle out of his saddle boot, slapped the roan's rump with the Winchester's barrel, then hopped on one moccasined foot behind a slanting shelf of rock at the very edge of the riverbed. Cochise gave a shrill whinny and galloped off down the bed, soon disappearing behind a veil of blowing sand, down a corridor of jutting rock. The other two horses followed him.

Mason scrambled into the rocks a dozen yards to Spurr's right. Joseph dropped behind a boulder nearly straight out from where their trail dropped into the riverbed, another twenty yards beyond Spurr.

Spurr brushed a sleeve across the blood streaking the right side of his face, wincing at the pain of the dozen small cuts inflicted by the flying rock slivers when the bushwhacker's bullet had slammed into the stone wall behind him.

The side of his head, his ear, and neck were peppered with the shards, as well. They burned like buckshot. He could have lost that eye. Damn foolish to get caught like sitting ducks out here, but he, Mason, and Joseph had figured Mateo's bunch to be several miles ahead. They hadn't expected de Cava to send bushwhackers back in the windstorm.

Stupid mistake. The truth was, Spurr grudgingly acknowledged to himself, he and Mason had been tired and had used the storm as an excuse to rest their weary bones. A hard lesson learned. Spurr would never again underestimate the cunning of de Cava's desperadoes. They were capable of anything a tracker could imagine and then some.

He couldn't afford to be tired. He couldn't afford to be old.

He hunkered low, right index finger taut on the Winchester's trigger, and waited. He kept his ears pricked, his eyes sharply focused on the slanting embankment about forty yards straight out away from him and the boulder he was crouched behind. The wind continued to blow the sand in curtain-like waves, obscuring the top of the bank and making visibility beyond nearly impossible.

But that's where the four killers would come from. Had to be. Unless they'd turned back . . .

Gooseflesh began to rise on Spurr's back as one minute became two and then three.

He could feel the tension rising in his two cohorts. He could see Mason down on one knee behind his own boulder, the man's Henry repeater extended out across the top of the rock's flat surface. He couldn't see Joseph because of the blowing sand and the mortar-like slab of stone protruding from the larger mess of fossilized minerals between him and Mason.

He kept staring down his Winchester's barrel, right eye narrowed. In the periphery of his vision, he saw Mason glance at him. He wanted to tell the sheriff to keep still, stay his ground, but he'd have to shout madly to be heard above the wind.

He had a feeling that the de Cava riders, as canny as the rest of the bunch, were stealing up slowly, probably afoot, to the bank of the dry, rocky riverbed. That's what Spurr would have done, expecting a bushwhack. Again, he'd wrongly assumed they'd storm into the bed like wildmen, flinging lead every such way to try to bring their quarries to ground before they forted up in the rocks.

Spurr had sent a telegram to the little New Mexico town, Cicorro, that lay somewhere south of here—he wasn't sure how far. There was a cavalry outpost nearby that had been set up to handle the Mescalero Apache problem.

Spurr had sent the telegram to the post commander, alerting the man of de Cava's breakneck ride south on a course that would take him and his band to or within close proximity of the village, which was a little supply settlement for the mining camps in the mountains owning the same name and looming tall in the northwest. He wanted like hell to reach the town and the dozen riders Captain Wilson had promised to have waiting there. As it was, out here, Spurr's trio was badly—one might even say
hilariously
,
terminally
—outnumbered.

A gust of windblown sand slithered along the riverbed from Spurr's left to his right. When the tan-colored curtain had passed, Spurr spied movement on the opposite bank—just the quick jerking movement of a hatted head and a rifle slanting down from a low boulder and a snag of juniper the wind was wildly beating, smashing almost level with the top of the bank itself.

There they were.

SPURR LOOKED AT Mason.

The man was aiming his Henry just right of where Spurr had seen the rifleman. Mason didn't see the shooter.

Spurr picked up a small rock, side-armed it, bouncing it off Mason's back. The sheriff turned with a start. His face was an angular brown smudge beneath his low-tipped hat brim, his mustache a slightly darker line beneath his nose.

Spurr canted his head toward the opposite bank. Mason turned to look across the wash and hunkered lower, tensing. When he glanced at Spurr again, the old marshal gestured with his head once more, this time indicating up the wash on his left. He couldn't tell if Mason had understood, because just then the wind threw more sand and grit between them. Just the same, Spurr stepped back from his boulder cautiously. He turned and made his way through the rocks, finding a circuitous route that roughly paralleled the wash for about thirty yards. Limping slightly on his gimpy ankle that wasn't so gimpy now that he'd gotten some blood to it, he crossed the wash and pressed his left shoulder against the steep-cut bank.

He blinked against the sand and tightened his grip on the Winchester. Damn hard to get your bearings out here in this dry prairie blowup. He was liable to waltz right up to one of the de Cava men before he knew it, get himself gut-shot.

Swallowing back his apprehension—he hoped to hell he wasn't losing his gravel along with his health and his youth—he climbed the slick, eroded clay bank, grabbing roots and then a shrub at the top to help hoist him up. Slowly, he made his way back along the wash.

He hoped Mason had gotten his message and wouldn't spy his movement and drill him. The de Cava men were enough to worry about.

Setting each moccasined foot down carefully and holding his rifle straight out from his right hip, Spurr walked twenty yards, then thirty. He meandered around buckbrush clumps, prickly pear, and rocks.

A rifle barked in the distance, the report swallowed almost instantly by the wind.

Spurr stopped. There were two more quick shots, then another and another. Was that a man's shout? The sounds were swirled and tormented by the hot, demonic wind, but they seemed to be coming from the wash's opposite side, possibly farther back in the rocks than where he'd left Mason and Joseph. Spurr's mouth dried, tasted like stale tobacco. He moved forward, quickening his pace.

A rifle bellowed from nearly straight in front of him. The sound, so loud and close on the heels of the more distant though no less menacing reports, caused him to nearly leap out of his moccasins.

The rifle exploded twice more, and Spurr saw the blue-red flames stab in the direction of the wash on his right. They were flashes in the blowing grit. Just then there was a lull between gusts, and Spurr saw a big man hunkered in the brush at the edge of the bank. About six feet in front of Spurr. He wore a duster. A felt hat hung down his back by a leather thong. He had thin, sandy, sweat-matted hair, a bright pink, bulging forehead and a yellow-blond beard.

Spurr racked a fresh shell into his Winchester's breech. The ejected cartridge arched toward Spurr and dropped in the gravel in front of him.

The man must have sensed or glimpsed Spurr a half second after Spurr had nearly stumbled over him. He rolled onto his left shoulder, bringing his rifle to bear, yellow teeth flashing, yellow eyes widening and brightening.

He screamed with shock and savage fury. But Spurr had him.

The old marshal's aged Winchester barked three times, the spent cartridges flying back behind Spurr's right shoulder. The big man fired his own Winchester one handed, kiting the slug over Spurr's head. He fell back hard, then slid headfirst down the bank to the wash, his spurs grinding against the clay.

Rifles continued thundering in the windy distance across the wash. Spur could see no movement, only ragged, obscure glimpses of the rock wall and ledges through the blowing grit.

He moved ahead quickly, but when he figured the other three de Cava men were no longer on this side of the wash but had attempted the same maneuver that Spurr had tried in reverse, he dropped down the bank and lit out running toward where he'd left Mason and Joseph.

He lost his bearings, and it took some time to find where his cohorts had been. They weren't there. Only the body of a short, stalky gent, his silver eyeteeth showing in a death grimace. Spurr's heart thudded. The gunfire had fizzled to only sporadic bursts originating from somewhere deep in the stone corridors. It echoed eerily. Spurr tried to hone in on it and stole down a gravel-floored hallway with slanting walls and a slanting ceiling.

From ahead emanated the rotten-egg odor of burned powder. Something lay on the ground against the right side wall.

He slowed his pace as he approached, then crouched over Ed Joseph. The bounty hunter's rifle lay beside him, one hand on his belly, the other over the rifle barrel. Blood bibbed the black-haired man's shirt and his silver crucifix. His dark eyes stared sightlessly at the stone ceiling, blood trickling from a corner of his mouth.

Spurr heard another shot from somewhere ahead. He continued forward and followed a right-angled dogleg. Ahead, another corridor intersected Spurr's. Wind blew sand through it, pelting the gray stone wall beyond. A shadow slid across the wall. Spurr stopped, dropping to one knee and extending his Winchester out from his shoulder.

A dark, man-shaped figure appeared—short and wiry and wearing a calico shirt and a bleached-yellow Stetson with a torn brim. The man turned toward Spurr. His eyes widened, and just as he started to swing his carbine around, Spurr shot him through the brisket.

The thunder of Spurr's rifle in the close confines set the old marshal's ears ringing.

The slug plowed through his target's chest and spanged off the stone wall behind him, painting the wall with blood. The man fired his carbine into the ground at his boots, stumbled back against the wall, then dropped straight down to his rump. His head sagged to one side, eyes squeezed shut. Holding the rifle across his knees, the man let his head drop to the gravelly ground and shook violently as he died.

Spurr ejected the spent cartridge, heard it cling to the gravel at his boots. He rammed the lever home, seating a fresh shell, then freezing there and pricking his ears to listen. There was only the moaning of the devil wind in the sky above the gray stone walls, the occasional sift of sand down the walls around him. The walls themselves were absolutely still and dumbly silent.

No more shots sounded. No more cries.

Spurr continued forward, hearing now the soft crunch of gravel beneath his moccasins. In here, the wind's cries were farther away, muffled, but just as eerie. They seemed to be taunting him. Jeering. He heard something just as he approached the dead man at the intersecting corridor. It came from his right. He held his Winchester steady, then stepped around the corner, spreading his feet and tightening his trigger finger.

He held fire.

Another man lay facedown on some stone rubble littering another gap on the corridor's left side. Thick blood was gushing out around the rocks beneath his body and head. His right hand was draped over one of the rocks, squeezing it desperately. Otherwise, he was still.

Beyond him, Dusty Mason sat againt the corridor's right wall. Mason's hat lay beside him. One of his legs was stretched out wide, the heel of the other one curled under the knee. His chest rose and fell sharply as he clamped his left hand over a bloody hole low on his right side. He had a cocked pistol in his right hand, but when he recognized Spurr in the rocky shadows, he depressed the hammer and cursed raspily.

Spurr moved forward. “How bad?”

“How the hell should I know?”

“You ain't never been shot before?”

“Nope.”

Spurr looked at the man wagging his head against the wall behind him. “Really?”

“First time.” The sheriff winced then pounded the ground with his pistol. “Hurts good, too. Hot.”

“Let me see.”

“What the hell can you do?”

“I can look at it,” Spurr growled in irritation.

“I think it musta cracked a rib or two. It hurts like holy hell to breathe. Feels like my ribs on that side are gonna splinter apart.”

Spurr set his rifle aside then leaned forward, pried Mason's hand away from the bloody hole above his right hip, and examined the wound. He couldn't see much but blood. The sheriff was losing it fast. Spurr tipped him forward.

“Ouch! Goddamnit, Spurr—what're you . . . ?”

Spurr pushed Mason back against the stone wall. “Can't tell if it went all the way through or not. If it's still in there, it'll need to be dug out.”

“Not by you!”

“No, hell, I wouldn't dig around in your yaller guts!” Spurr brushed a pensive fist across his nose and looked around.

“Joseph?” Mason asked him.