The Old Wolves (9 page)

“Shut up,” Elwyn said out of the side of his mouth.

Then he drew. A half a wink later, the others drew their own weapons.

Spurr's old instincts had kicked in. He'd sensed it coming. It was almost as though he'd inadvertently been reading Elwyn's mind. Spurr's hand jerked across his belly of its own accord, unsheathed the Starr .44, and ratcheted the hammer back.

It belched smoke and fire in Spurr's knobby hand.

Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam-bam!

Two of the three hard cases were blown back out through the jailhouse's open door and into the street.

Louis was the fastest of the three, and he got off two shots. One kissed the nap of Spurr's left coat sleeve before ricocheting off the cell door with an ear-ringing clang. The other, fired just after Spurr's first bullet had torn a quarter-sized hole in his heart, was triggered into his own left ankle.

“Oh,” Louis said as he flew back against the open door and stood there, his smoking pistol aimed at the floor.

The cutthroat stared down at the blood pumping out his chest, between the flaps of his bear coat, and he said, “Oh. Oh, shit.” And then he looked at Spurr in disbelief, his head wobbling on his shoulders, his eyes rolling back in his head.

He staggered forward, pinwheeled, and hit the floor on his back.

Silence.

Spurr's gun smoke wafted in the lantern-lit room. The fledgling fire, whose weak flames were dwindled, softly cracked and popped.

Behind Spurr, Boomer Drago whistled. “You old coot. You still got a few left in the chamber.”

Spurr himself was amazed. He looked down at the Starr and the old hand wrapped around it, as though they belonged to another person.

“Yeah, I got a few,” he said.

He walked over to the door and stared out at the two in the street. Neither was moving. He turned back into the office. Boomer stood up near his cell door, amazement lighting his lone eye. Burke was squatting against the far wall, his hair rumpled. He held his hat in his hands and was staring, pale-featured, at the hole in its crown.

He slowly lifted his eyes to Spurr and said in a low, shocked voice, “Bleedin' ricochet. Might have taken my eyes out.”

“Or your brains,” Drago opined.

Burke looked down at his hat again, nodding gravely.

Spurr flicked the Starr's loading gate open and began plucking out his spent shell casings, tossing them into a small wastebasket near the desk.

“Spurr.”

The old marshal looked at Drago.

“Them three were nothin' compared to the men in the gang comin' to fetch me. Come on. Let me out of here. You'll never make it against them. Hell, there's twenty, twenty-five of 'em. You did good here tonight, and I do appreciate it, but these three never were good with them hoglegs. Slow as molasses in January.”

Spurr stared at the old outlaw as he plucked fresh cartridges from his shell belt and slid them into the Starr's wheel, rolling the cylinder between his thumb and index finger, listening to the soft clicks. Burke continued staring at his hat as though the hole were really bird shit and he was wondering how he was going to get the stain out.

Spurr's heart fluttered. He'd had too much excitement for one day.

“I'm tired,” he said, shoving the pistol down into its holster and fastening the keeper thong over the hammer. “I'm gonna go stable my beast and then stable myself for a long autumn night's nap. I'll see you in the mornin', Boomer. Sleep tight. Burke, make sure his horse is saddled and ready to go at first light.”

Burke stared up at him, the barber/dentist's lower jaw hanging.

As Spurr turned and walked through the door and stepped over the dead men in the street, he heard Burke say behind him, “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary—that's just bloody wonderful!”

ELEVEN

Spurr stabled Cochise in a livery barn he'd seen on his way into town, leaving his prized roan in the hands of the black liveryman, Mortimer Lang, who assured Spurr the mount would get the best care in all the Rocky Mountains. Lang smiled broadly and held out his gloved hand for Spurr to drop several coins into.

For grub, Lang recommended the tent shack next door to the livery barn. For sleep, Lang said the man who owned the grub shack also had cribs behind the place, with cots as comfortable as any bed in Diamond Fire.

“The bedbugs there don't bite as hard as elsewhere around here,” Lang said, chuckling as he led Cochise into the barn's musky shadows.

Spurr walked down the wooden ramp and into the street. There were all brands of commotion up and down the narrow canyon housing the perdition of Diamond Fire, with bonfires burning here and there and shunting weird shadows of reveling men and women. The town reminded Spurr of a circus, as did most mining camps he'd visited. The raucous, darkly festive air about the place was that of a short-lived party. Soon, when the gold played out, the camp would go bust and all the revelers would be hitting the trail for other opportunities.

Spurr didn't recognize a man's anguished groan for what it was until he started walking into the small, log-frame tent shack just west of the livery barn. The groan got louder, echoing above the din, and Spurr turned to see a man walking out of a little gray cabin on the other side of the canyon.

By the light of a fire burning near the small stoop of the cabin, whose large shingle over the front door read simply
BEER AND SANDWICHES
, Spurr saw the man stumble out the front door, slamming the door back against the cabin's front wall. He was clamping his hands over his belly from which what appeared to be a knife protruded.

The flames shone on the knife's dark, silver-capped handle.

The man—hatless, wearing a striped blanket coat—dragged his boot toes out onto the stoop, spurs chinging on the floorboards. He stumbled down the stoop's three steps, dropped to his knees in the street, and fell face forward in the dirt and gravel. He lay jerking with death spasms.

The men and the few women in the area didn't pay much attention to the fast-dying gent. A big man and a copper-haired woman were fornicating against the wall of the next building over from the beer and sandwich place. The man held the woman up against the building, her bare legs wrapped around his waist, and he was hammering his bare hips against her, bobbing her up and down.

His pants were bunched around his ankles and tall miner's boots. His bare white ass jerked back and forth. The woman's dress was pulled up to her waist. A high-heeled shoe dangled off one of her feet grinding into his back. The other shoe lay on the ground near the miner's feet.

The big, fornicating miner merely glanced over his shoulder at the man and then continued diddling the grunting woman.

As Spurr watched, another man strode through the same door as the dying man. He was tall and lean, and he wore a wolf vest over a plaid shirt. He calmly descended the porch steps, kicked the now-still gent over onto his back, planted a boot on the man's right hip, and jerked the blade out of his belly.

The man wiped the blade off on the dead man's pants then held it up to inspect it, making sure he'd cleaned it thoroughly, and slipped the knife into the sheath on his left hip. The tall man looked around slowly.

If he saw Spurr staring at him from across the streambed, he didn't show it. He merely swung around, mounted the porch steps, and ducking his head under the low doorway, disappeared inside the beer and sandwich place.

Spurr looked at the dead man. He supposed he should do something about the killing, but he had no inclination. He was tired, and when you got down to brass tacks, the murder was not in his jurisdiction. True, there was no lawman here in Diamond Fire at the moment, so that officially made the killing his business, but he was dead-dog tired.

His heart felt heavy and sore in his chest.

He should look into it, but this was his last assignment, and he just wasn't going to do it. He was going to pad out his belly with grub and whiskey-laced coffee and roll up in a mattress sack. He needed a good night's rest before lighting out on the western trail toward Cameron Pass again tomorrow.

He ducked through the tent shack's flap. There were three long tables and benches, not enough lanterns hanging from low beams to keep a man from tripping as he walked to a table.

Only one of the tables was occupied by two old, long-bearded salts hunkered over their plates and eating in silence. As Spurr sat down at a table right of the graybeards, a black man looked through a curtained doorway at the back.

“Supper?” he called to Spurr.

“That's why I'm here. Coffee. Whiskey, too, if you got it.”

The black man said, “Fifty cents a shot for the good stuff. Twenty-five for the bad.” He was a little older and heavier than the black man in the livery barn, but they otherwise owned similar features.

Spurr chuckled at the family operation and wagged his head at the cost of the tangleleg. But this far up in the high and rocky, beggars couldn't be choosers.

“Bring me the bad stuff,” he said, allowing for his soon-to-be dwindling income.

A minute later, the black man—round faced, early thirties—brought out a plate of pork roast, potatoes and gravy, boiled greens, and a hot cross bun, and set it on the table before Spurr. He set a bottle and tin cup on the table.

“You look like an honest man,” said the black man. “I'll trust you to count your shots.”

He rolled a sharpened stove match from one side of his mouth to the other and pinned Spurr with a stern look.

“Bad luck to cheat a trusting man,” Spurr said and popped the cork on the half-full bottle. “Your brother said you got some cots out back.”

“Cousin.”

“All right.” Spurr poured whiskey into the cup. “Which leg you want for a good night's sleep?”

“Keep your leg, mister. Cots are fifty cents.”

“Well, that's reasonable.”

When the man went away, Spurr ate the good food hungrily. He imbibed four shots, hoping like hell he'd still have some money to get him down to Mexico. He didn't want to get hung up anywhere in between and die in some snowy mountain range, wolves gnawing at his old, withered limbs.

Damnit, he deserved to go out better than that.

“But now you're just feeling sorry for yourself, you miserable cuss,” Spurr said under his breath as, his plate cleaned, he look into the remaining whiskey at the bottom of the cup. “You have not lived well. You've trifled away your years. You could be in Mexico by now, with a good woman who almost loved you, if you hadn't been so damn afraid of death that you clung to your job as though it were life itself. Damn fool!”

He was thinking of a particular woman, a pretty, aging percentage gal who called herself Abilene. Spurr had called her “Texas” for kicks and giggles. He'd known her down in Texas and then he'd seen her again in Wyoming. They'd talked half seriously, half drunkenly of running away together, but Spurr had lit out after outlaws and never got around to returning for her.

The last time he'd seen her, she'd been married to an old rancher from the southern Big Horns.

“Damn fool!”

“What the hell's the matter with you, mister?”

Spurr looked at the two graybeards sitting on the far side of the long table to his left. They were both scowling at him. The one who'd spoken to him squinted his washed-out eyes inside his beard and said, “Which one of us you callin' a fool?”

The other one pounded the end of his fist on the table. “You're the damn fool!”

“That's right—I am a damn fool.”

“Then what you're callin' us fools for?” asked the man who'd first taken umbrage.

“I wasn't. I was . . . ah, hell.” Spurr threw his whiskey back and slammed the cup back down on the table. “Go to hell, both of ya!”

He rose from his table, feeling low-down mean and angry though the two graybeards had nothing to do with it. If he were twenty years younger, he'd go looking for a fight. But his chest ached and he was tired from the ride and from killing, and he was downright frightened, too. He'd ridden into a job up here he hadn't been expecting—one that was much larger than either Henry Brackett or even he, himself, thought he was capable of seeing to a satisfactory conclusion.

This job that was supposed to be routine. His last job that was supposed to have given him something else to think about besides the girl who'd taken a bullet meant for him.

“What the hell's going on here?” the black man said, stepping out from behind the rear curtain, wiping his hands on a towel. “Can't you three get along? Look how old you all are!”

Spurr laughed at that. He'd thought the graybeards were older than he, but now, upon closer scrutiny, he saw that they were probably around his age. They returned his look with owly, indignant looks of their own. If he and they were about thirty years younger, they'd likely be throwing chairs and fists about now, none of them knowing why.

Spurr laughed at that notion, too. He was just drunk on the whiskey and altitude and the general nonsense of life. He was needing a bed bad.

“What do I owe you?” Spurr asked the black man.

The black man figured the charge for the meal and the whiskey and then he added on the fifty cents for the cot. Spurr paid him, gathered his gear and his rifle, and left through the rear kitchen where a black woman was scrubbing pans, her hair in her eyes.

Another tent lay directly behind the rear one, a little black boy perched on a stool beside the pucker. He wore a wool watch cap, a thick gray scarf around his neck, and a man's ragged wool dress coat that sagged on his shoulders. He clutched a lidded wooden box in his lap.

The boy held out his wool-gloved hand. Two of the fingers were worn so that his fingers showed through. “That'll be one dollar, mister.”

Spurr scowled. “What's that?”

“Cots are one dollar.”

“Oh, are they? Well, I heard they were fifty cents. In fact, that's just what I paid your pa in yonder!”

The kid jerked his hand impatiently. “Fifty cents in there, fifty cents out here. And he's my uncle.”

Spurr laughed and shook his head. He was too tired to argue even if he'd had the gumption to argue with a shaver with holes in his gloves. He slapped two coins into the kid's hand and pulled the cloth cap down over the kid's eyes.

The boy laughed. Spurr chuckled and pushed through the pucker and into the hotel tent. There were eight or so rickety cots along either side of a narrow alley. Only three cots were taken, it still being early. They'd no doubt fill up fast around midnight.

Spurr chose one farthest away from the snoring men as he could get, dumped his gear on the floor, and undressed as quickly as his popping bones would allow. Outside, a gun cracked.

Spurr jumped.

There were two more pops followed by another as though in afterthought. The shots had come from a long ways away. They were followed by muffled shouting.

Spurr sighed and, clad in only his balbriggans and socks, sagged onto the edge of the cot. Such commotion likely went on all night. His heart fluttered. His nerves were shot. He was exhausted. He'd be glad to get back out on the trail tomorrow, even in the company of a notorious old outlaw trailed by the outlaw's savage gang.

He rolled up in the flea-bit blanket, turned onto his side. “Spurr, you retired one job too late, didn't you?” he rasped to himself.

He drew a long, deep breath, let his lids slide down over his eyes.

He was asleep before he realized it—long, deep, and dreamless. Only a couple of times did he rouse even slightly when other men came in to undress and to claim the empty cots around him.

When he woke fully, it was to the loud, ratcheting click of a gun hammer and the cold barrel of a pistol pressed against his forehead.