Desert of the Damned (16 page)

T
HERE WAS
a man standing over him when Reifel opened his eyes. It was the big fellow, Chet, who had been so hellbent to see him swung in the Cherrycows. He still looked that way but the sour quirk of his lips showed who was running things. “If you’ll step outa there now,” Lafe said, “I’ll git this door shut.”

Chet strode out very much on his dignity. Scowling blacker and blacker he finally growled: “Ain’t you figgerin’ to question this joker
a-tall?”

“Why, sure,” the Cochise sheriff replied. “Expect I will when I git around to it. If you’re comin’ back this way, an’ it ain’t too much trouble, I’d be considerable obliged if you could fetch this guy’s supper.”

“I don’t figger,” Chet scowled, “he will be here that long,” and struck off through the office like a cat with wet feet.

Old Lafe, frowning, stood silent till they heard the front screen slap. “That bank’s closed its doors an’ the news of what’s happened may very well break Lamtrill’s other one. Them boys won’t settle for anything less than your hide.”

Reifel’s head, on the arms folded over his knees, showed the oldster nothing but a mane of black hair somewhat clotted with blood where Chet’s pistol had rapped it. He growled, “What does it matter?” without bothering to look up.

“Boy,” Lafe said irritably, “if you want to strum harps just keep on the way you’re goin'. There’s a lot of riled people in this burg tonight. After you passed out the Big Wheel around here come pirootin up an’ demanded you be searched. Seems like you had some kinda paper they was wantin’ but all we could find was that bill o’ sale for Cog Wheel.”

He said then, plainly angry, “I been to a passle of trouble on your account, what with diggin’ up stiffs an’ trackin’ sign plumb to hell an’ gone. When I turned you loose in the Cherrycows I figured you was the sort of guy which would go straight given the right kinda chance. You had the savvy an’ experience Burt Mossman needed — which was why I talked you up to him. But if you ain’t got no more guts than you’re showin’ right now I might as well have run you in when I had you dead to rights with that damn paper in your pocket!”

Reifel’s head came up, narrowed eyes sharp with interest. “So you engineered that.”

“An’ you was playin’ possum.”

“Old man,” Reifel said, “you’ve got your tail in a crack. If you know I didn’t kill Turner what’s the idea dumpin’ me into this jail?”

“If I hadn’t,” Lafe answered, “you’d been dead by now. That bunch was all set to chop you up proper — ”

“This is Seeb Dawson’s county. You’ve got no jurisdiction — ”

“That hadn’t occurred to Nate Lamtrill when him an’ his foreman took off for the ranch. All upset like he was over that run on his bank I expect mebbe he supposed I was holdin’ you for Dawson who wasn’t around when we grabbed you. Mebbe he wanted it that way; mebbe he’d sent Dawson off himself. Some friends of his right now is talkin’ up a lynch mob down at the Sparrowhawk. Which is prob’ly where that Chet’s taken off to — ”

“Get me a gun and a fresh horse — ”

“It ain’t quite that easy. A bunch of Crawford’s tough hands with rifles is keepin’ close tabs on this crackerbox to make sure you stay put till that crowd at the Sparrowhawk gits into action. I thought I might git Joe Clinton to set fire to the Opera House — ”

A commotion out front thrust its racket through his words and he reached through the bars, handing Reifel a sixshooter he took out of his hip pocket. Then he moved toward the office but had not gone two steps before a grizzled old buck with a baked-brown skin showed up in the doorway with a look on his face that would have curled up an oak post.

“Black!” Reifel called, and the two old men locked eyes and stood glaring, each with a hand halfway dropped to his belt gun. “It’s all right,” Reifel told them, “we’re all in this together. Black’s ramroddin’ Cog — ”

“Ben,” Black said harshly, “them bastards have got Gert!”

Reifel’s boots hit the floor. His cheeks were like parchment, his eyes two black slits. An unreasoning fury had hold of him and Black said bitterly, “It’s that guy you left out there — the one the Old Man hired.”

Reifel said tightly, “Start at the beginning.”

“I got through with that wire about one o’clock an’ headed for Boxed Y. I found Kavanaugh sprawled at the bottom of the steps with a hole through his skull big enough to house a gopher — got it from behind an’ damn close by the look. Tracks show the girl put up a hell of a scrap before this skunk got the best of her. I seen where he loaded her onto a horse an’ follered sign far enough to make sure they was headed for Devil — ”

“Good!” Lafe cried, showing a jubilant excitement. “If we can pin this to Lamtrill — if we can show her on his ranch bein’ held against her will — ”

“You talk,” Black snarled, “like she’s a pawn in some chess game!”

Reifel’s eyes were like fires in a face dark as thunder. “Quit the goddam jawin’ and let me out — ”

“You’ll git out,” Lafe remarked, “when there is some point to it. I don’t want Seeb Dawson comin’ in to find you loose. An’ I don’t want him seein’ that gun.” He slanched a frowning glance at the cell’s high window. “I ought to git word to Mossman — ”

Black spun him round. “I been in the dark long enough! What the hell’s goin’ on here? How come Ben’s locked in this boobyhatch an’ how do you git the right to be passin’ out the orders?”

Lafe told him, flashing his badge to back it up. “Any minute that bunch — ”

“Hell, the skies may fall but we don’t hev to set here an’ wait fer it! I’ll pull them gundogs’ eyes away — ”

“No,” Lafe decided, “we’ll let Clinton handle that. I’ve cached a couple horses out back of Ed Jones’ gunshop. Pass Clinton the word to build a blaze in that theater and, while he’s about it, you latch onto a fresh bronc an’ wait for us where I’ve left them horses. Try to keep outa sight an’ act mad enough, goin’ out of here, to tear the dadblame roof off. That way, mebbe, they won’t think to put a tail on you.”

Black, swearing noisily, headed for the street.

Lafe, staring after him, detached a key from a ring and, with a kind of dour grimace, passed it through the bars to Reifel. “This’ll open your cell in case that bunch at the Sparrowhawk happen to git up here before we cut our stick. I’ll be snuffin’ these lamps soon’s the chance looks ripe.”

• • •

Reifel knew when the fire commenced attracting attention.

Because the old theater building was about two hundred yards away he caught the lifted panicky shouts which heralded its discovery almost four whole minutes before the soaring flames began to throw writhing patterns across the bars of his cell.

Running feet pelted by outside his grilled window, but this was too high up in the wall for him to see anything from it save a handful of stars. Since it had no glass he could hear the excitement on the street pretty plainly.

With the speed of an avalanche its contagion was spreading. Not all those voices were raised in consternation, not all were alarmed lest the fire get out of hand; more than a few vicious threats were hurled at Ben’s window, and abruptly he was seeing the refracted light of the holocaust. The sound of the devouring flames became an all-pervading roar, carrying through and above the bedlam cries of those who were afraid for their personal possessions, for a threatened livelihood or — in some few cases — for the future of the town.

Lafe appeared to have hit on the one sure thing which could take these people’s minds off his prisoner. Was he brooding in Dawson’s office over the cost of what he’d done? Could a sheriff get away with deliberate arson, trading destruction for one man’s life? And what of Gert Kavanaugh, lashed to a horse and rushed away through night’s darkness, a lone white chip in a no-limit game? — a hostage that Lamtrill, turned uncaringly desperate, might salvage the shape of his stolen cow empire.

Reifel groaned in the grip of his fear for her safety, in his mind’s eye seeing the white flesh of her body under the lecherous hands of that blasphemous Crowdy; and then a great gust of smoke obscured the cell window. The smell of the stuff filled the corridor, half strangling. And the roar of those towering distant flames was like the sound of a fast freight crossing a trestle, entirely engulfing that outside shouting; and suddenly, through it, he caught the dim cries of men in the office, the muffled blast of a sixgun, the thinner, more vicious crack-crack of a rifle.

Something struck the floor heavily and again that sibilant saddle gun spoke with a rattling clatter of falling glass. Smoke mushroomed upward with a whoosh of trapped air and a blinding sheet of pure lavender flame completely filled the uncovered archway connecting these cells with Seeb Dawson’s office.

Reifel’s mind, translating these things swift as lightning, got an appalling picture of their true significance. One of Devil Iron’s crew must have tied that burning theater to Lafe’s prisoner and grasped the whole pattern of the sheriff’s ingenuity. Before the old man could put his jailbreak in motion this fellow, perhaps with others, had invaded the office and gunned him down. Consistent with orders from Lamtrill then they had shattered Seeb Dawson’s hanging lamp, turning that office into a blazing inferno.

There was no back door to this jail and Ben knew it. There were no windows low enough to be of any use. There was just one way to get out of this place — straight through the glare of that oil-soaked front office.

He was scared, more scared than he’d thought a man could be. With shaking hands he thrust the bit of metal Lafe had given him into the lock, already convinced that in the sheriff’s abstraction he’d been given the wrong key. But it worked. The door opened and he was in that bright corridor, recoiling from the blast of heat that swept toward him.

Life to Reifel was as precious as it is to most men, yet he was not thinking in that moment of himself. His mind was occupied with Gert, held helpless, at the mercy of men like Crowdy and Breen to whom the word “virtue” was nothing but a jest to be shared with lewd fellows.

He threw his arms above his head and lunged through the flames, crashing into Dawson’s desk, caroming off it and tripping over Lafe’s body just inside the outer door. It flung him headlong, arms wide, sprawling, spilling all the saved breath out of him; but instinct pulled him onto his knees and that way, crawling, he crossed the outer threshold and slid bumping down the two plank steps and between the legs of a man dashing fireward with two buckets of water.

A lot of that water went over Ben Reifel and nothing had ever been half as welcome. He was onto his feet almost swift as the man was, knocking the half-lifted gun from his hand. The man’s snarling mouth was stretching wide in a yell when Ben’s left fist, coming up from his bootstraps, toppled him backward into the dust of the street. Reifel, stumbling away, walked straight into a tierack and only then realized there were horses before him. They were wild with excitement, two were squealing and kicking, a third had its head back trying to yank loose.

Reifel caught that one’s reins just as the horse jerked them free. He got a hand on the horn before the animal could wheel and the crash of a Winchester made him quit trying to quiet it. He got a toe set in stirrup just as the bronc tore into a run.

Behind him that saddle gun beat up the echoes and the fronts of near buildings flung them back in lost fragments. When he no longer heard the swish and slap of blue whistlers Reifel wearily pulled himself erect on the leather. Taking hold of him then he drove the horse east on a speed-blurred tangent designed to intersect the rutted wagon road to Devil Iron, praying deep inside him that he would not be too late.

No one had ever told him how far it was to Lamtrill’s, nor had he any kind of notion how far he’d actually come when he saw the lemon glimmer of Devil Iron’s lamps. Once he had believed the most ecstatic moment he could ever hope to know would come when he was facing Breen across a leveled sixgun. Now, with that moment only negligibly distant, both the man and the meeting were in the nature of a chore — a burden laid on him, a cross he had to bear. All his thoughts were saved for Gert.

Twice in the last half mile he’d vaguely caught the rumor of hoofbeats; he had given this no attention nor did he listen for it now. What difference who came? Let their paid gun-hands snarl. He would find a girl’s brown eyes smiling at him from beneath shining hair the color of pulled taffy and he would carry her away from this castle built with stolen dollars. It was a thought which cut deeply into him, startling him — not the carrying away but this matter of stolen dollars. His mind backtracked to Gert but did not find her smiling now. There was a mask between her eyes and his, the folds of a raised bandanna, and she seemed to be trying to tell him something but strangely he could not read her lips and he could not hear her through the crash and pound of thundering hoofs.

How blind he had been when she’d asked for his aid and he had gone sneaking off for a bitch in heat who had nothing behind what stolen dollars could buy for her.
Christ,
Reifel thought,
how big a fool can a man get to be?
Marta May was mirage where Gert stood for honesty, a man’s kind of woman with the courage to do what had to be done. There was no hankypanky about Gert Kavanaugh.

And there was no hankypanky about this deal coming up. There’d be gunsmoke and blood and a hell of a racket; but Gert was the main thing — get her clear. Stealth they’d expect and be on the alert for. But who would look for the man they all hated to ride straight up and pound his fist on the door?

His bright stare swept the face of Lamtrill’s headquarters where it sat in a grove of wind-tossed willows with the big house in front, the lesser buildings drawn up behind like a squad of foot soldiers taking their ease. But Ben was not fooled — there’d be no ease here. More than one pair of eyes would be watching him come and the way that he did it could make all the difference between getting in and dying outside. Lamtrill, sure in the power he’d enjoyed for so long, would not creep or crawl in a deal like this but would have the girl right there in his house where he could enjoy her plight, playing cat-and-mouse with her till she was willing to deed over all her old man had left. That, at least, would probably be his intention. But when he learned how stubborn she could be he would try other things … the kind of things Breen and Crowdy were good at.