The Killing Blow (10 page)

Clint couldn't make out what she whispered and didn't even try. Whatever they were, those words obviously weren't intended for his ears. He took a few steps back and waited until she straightened up, collected herself and started pushing the dirt back onto her son.

“Mark killed him?” she asked.

“Yes, ma'am. Josh had a gun drawn and looked ready to pull the trigger himself, but Mark did kill him.”

“So, maybe he had to and maybe he didn't. I guess I'll never know.”

“You don't seem too surprised by all of this.”

She shook her head slowly. “It's been brewing for a good, long while.”

“If you tell me what happened, there's a chance I could do something about it.”

Lisa Ordell looked at Clint as if she were staring all the way down to his soul. Her mouth was closed tightly and her hands were clasped in front of her so hard that her knuckles had gone white. “And just what could you do about it? You intend on bringing my boy back to me? You're too late for that. You intend on dragging my brother back here? I don't ever want to see that man's face again.”

“Why would Mark kill his nephew?” Clint asked.

Only now did Lisa look away from Clint's face. She seemed to have seen what she needed to see, which made her talk in a solid, unwavering tone. “Mark's been hunting things since he was a boy. My father hunted and even I hunted. But Mark started becoming something else. He became a killer and I don't know why.

“What I do know is that Mark started getting into fights just so he could fight. He got himself into bad spots so he wouldn't have any choice but to shoot his way out of it. At some point he stopped looking for excuses and he began to just kill for the sake of the kill.”

Glancing down at the cross, she said, “Somehow, Josh found out about it. My boy loved his uncle and followed him around whenever he was in town. One day he saw Mark chase down a man and run him through the woods like a deer. This is what he told me.”

“Go on,” Clint said.

“Josh went to him and found out that Mark had done this plenty of times. It took a while, but Josh finally came and told me about it when he heard that one man Mark killed didn't do nothing to nobody.” Blinking and looking at Clint, she added, “Josh used to see them notices at the sheriff's office about wanted men. He used to ask me if his uncle Mark ever caught one of them, so I guess Mark might have mentioned being a bounty hunter somewhere along the way.

“But Ed Gray never harmed a hair on a dog's head, much less did anything to warrant being killed the way he was.”

“Ed Gray?”

She nodded. “He was found gutted in the woods a year ago. Gutted,” she repeated. “Like an animal. Just the way Mark used to gut the animals he and our father used to kill.” Lisa shook her head as more tears streamed down her face. “I didn't know what to do. Josh wanted to confront Mark about it, but I told him not to because I knew Mark would hurt him. I just knew.

“Josh must have told someone else about it, because folks started coming to me and demanding I tell them what I'm telling you now. Right about then, Josh lost track of Mark. When that reward was posted for that bear, we both knew Mark would go after it. That's just the sort of thing Mark lives for.

“Josh got it in his head to find Mark by following that bear and then giving the reward money to Ed Gray's family or anyone else he could find that Mark had hurt. It sounds silly,” Lisa said in disbelief. “And I told him as much.”

“It's not silly,” Clint told her. “It sounds like the best solution he could come up with at the time. Anyone who would truly do something like that has their heart in the right place.”

“Thanks for saying so, but it don't make me feel any better. Mark killed my son and he's still out there doing whatever he pleases.”

“Tell me where to find him,” Clint said. “And I'll see about getting this resolved once and for all.”

She stared at him and nodded. “I believe you'd really do that. If you want to look for him, try my father's old hunting cabin. Mark loved that place and always thought he was the only one that knew about it. Josh also told me of a few spots where Mark was supposed to have taken some of the men that were . . . that were killed.”

“I'll find him.”

“Do what you want. Right now, I want to be alone with my boy.”

Clint gave her some time to mourn in peace.

Now that he had some names to go along with the accusations, Clint knew he could dig up plenty more regarding the wild things he'd heard about Mark Ordell. Even as he'd waited in the woods for Lisa to walk out to him, he had a hard time imagining those things were true.

Part of that was because Ordell didn't quite seem like the sort to do those things. On the other hand, Clint already had a suspicion that there was plenty running beneath the man's surface.

The part that got under Clint's skin the most was how he could spend time riding alongside a killer without knowing it. After priding himself for so long regarding how well he could sum up another person, Clint felt the sting of being tricked extra hard.

Going along with that was the fact that he'd had his own suspicions the entire time. If he'd done something about it sooner, perhaps things could have gone differently. Finally, he decided to cut himself some slack and admit there wasn't anything he could have done that would have made a damn bit of difference.

At the time, he had no reason to step in on Josh's behalf. Whoever those other men were that rode with Josh, they meant to shoot Clint and there was no other way around it.

Mark Ordell had, albeit unintentionally, saved Clint's life along with the lives of Allison and her son. Clint needed to remind himself of that just to ease the guilt, which panged at the bottom of his stomach like a hot fist punching him again and again.

The more he looked back on it, the more Clint realized he would have done the same thing and the same people would still have wound up dead. That was the part that stuck under his skin most of all.

After taking Lisa Ordell back to her house, Clint went to the first saloon he could find that was within walking distance of his hotel. He stood at that bar and thought about ordering a whiskey just to make it easier for him to get some sleep.

But by the time the barkeep asked what he wanted, Clint requested a beer. The rage was subsiding and the churning in his gut was going away thanks to the decision he'd made to get to the bottom of all the bloody stories he'd been hearing by finding Mark Ordell.

There were also those other men who'd ridden away to raise whatever hell they liked after allowing Lisa Ordell to get by them. Clint knew damn well there was plenty that they weren't telling him.

“Here's your beer,” the barkeep said as he set the mug down in front of Clint.

“Thanks,” Clint said. “By the way. Have you ever heard the name Ed Gray?”

Reflexively, the barkeep pulled in a quick breath and winced. “You heard about what happened to Ed? I guess a story like that would tend to travel a ways.”

“What's your version?”

“I didn't know him very well, but he seemed like a good enough sort. He came in here every now and then to uh . . . indulge.” When he said that last part, the barkeep nodded toward the other end of the room.

Clint looked over there and immediately picked out a set of three girls clad in low-cut dresses who were more than willing to give him a better glance once they saw him look their way. After waving to the working girls, Clint turned back around toward the barkeep.

“Someone found Ed in the woods,” the barkeep said. “Cut open from top to bottom. Damn Injuns. There was a price put on their scalps by the law, but that came only after some locals threatened to take things in their own hands.”

“Who paid the bounty?”

“Same locals. It's always easier to fork out some money than to get your own hands dirty.”

“I suppose so.” Clint took a drink of his beer and asked, “Who collected the reward?”

“Same fellow that collected on that bear skin hanging down the street.”

After everything else, Clint wasn't too surprised to hear that.

As a group of loud mill workers stomped into the place, the barkeep excused himself and tended to the fresh batch of customers.

The beer helped calm Clint's nerves and the one after it helped him get some sleep. Before he went to bed that night, Clint had his things packed and ready to go for an early morning ride.

 
Clint was up before the sun rose the next day. He saddled up Eclipse and rode into the woods as the sky was just shifting from purple to blue. The air was crisp and still damp from the night before, which got Clint's blood racing through his veins.

It took a while before Clint was able to enjoy the weather. In fact, he took the first few hours of his ride to sort through everything that had happened so he could try and make some sense of it all. One thing was perfectly clear: it was all one hell of a mess.

The only thing he could be certain about was that he'd be glad when it was all straightened out.

The trees closed in quickly on either side of the trail. Before too long at all, Clint was hard-pressed to recall that there was a town anywhere in the vicinity. All that lumber rising up around him felt like a wall and the branches stretched out over his head were thicker than most roofs. He was no stranger to the woods, but he already knew that Mark Ordell was perfectly at home in them.

Thinking back to how the older man had moved when he was after that bear, Clint barely recalled Ordell making a sound. In fact, he'd seemed out of his element when he had paved road or wooden slats under his feet. The woods were most definitely Ordell's home.

If half the things Clint had heard about Ordell were true, he wasn't exactly a man to take trespassing lightly.

Clint snapped the reins and rode on.

The days wore on and Clint only covered a fraction of the miles he would have covered if he had simply been trying to get from one spot to another. First of all, he was moving through a section of woods that only got thicker as he drew closer to the border of Oregon Territory. Nearly half the time, he was forced to walk and lead Eclipse by the reins due to thick tangles of branches that hung down to within a foot or two of his head.

Secondly, he wasn't just trying to get from one spot to another. He wanted to get to the cabin that Lisa Ordell had described before her brother Mark got there. Clint had no way of knowing for certain that Mark was headed in that direction, but it was the best lead he had. Actually, it was the only lead since Mark Ordell had vanished after putting Westerlake behind him.

Clint had tracked his share of men, but he wasn't stupid enough to think he was better at it than Mark Ordell, himself. He knew damn well that Ordell wouldn't leave any tracks if he didn't want to. Besides, the woods were such a mess of fallen branches, logs, leaves and animal tracks that Clint doubted he could find his pocket watch if he dropped it. Trying to pick out one man's trail would have been like trying to find a specific needle in a stack of more needles.

To that end, Clint tried to move as quickly as he could while doing his best to keep from being spotted himself. As he traveled, he kept a weapon in his hand at all times. Whether it was his rifle or pistol, Clint was always armed and expecting to be approached at any second.

There was no telling if Ordell was still in a sociable mood. At the end of the day, Clint still wanted to straighten out what he'd heard before simply believing it all and gunning for Ordell like those who'd already taken on that job.

Before leaving town, Clint had asked around a few places and found out that the mountain man and his two Indian partners had headed in the same direction that Clint had chosen. When he heard the snapping of twigs coming from somewhere ahead, Clint brought Eclipse to a stop and listened.

Sure enough, he heard a few horses stomping over what had to be some fallen logs. Clint wrapped Eclipse's reins loosely around a tree and circled around the source of those sounds. Just as he was about to take another step, he spotted a section of bushes moving against the flow of the wind.

He crouched down behind a tree trunk and froze.

That subtle bit of movement, which didn't match the way the rest of the bushes were moving, had been enough to mark the spot where one of the Indians stepped onto the narrow trail. He was the bigger of the two that had been with the mountain man and he stalked through the bushes like a creature half his size.

Clint had to hold his breath and focus on moving nothing more than his eyelids as he peeked around the tree. His muscles tensed and his heart sped up at the notion that he might be discovered any second. The Indian, however, moved effortlessly from one spot to another, gazing around with sharply focused eyes.

As Clint watched him, he remembered the mountain man calling that Indian Crow. As if living up to his name, the Indian glided past a branch where other birds were nesting without making enough noise to even draw their attention.

Clint's grip tightened around his rifle as Crow stepped behind one tree and practically disappeared from sight. When Crow reappeared, he was holding a tomahawk in his hand while carefully studying a spot not too far from where Clint was hiding.

And, like a bird that suddenly decided to take flight, Crow snapped his head in another direction and was gone.

Clint didn't dare move right away. For all he knew, Crow was circling around him from another direction. Possibly, the Indian was gathering up his partners before making his move. Or maybe he'd already moved along to another spot.