Trackdown (9781101619384) (17 page)

“You’re not fooling me for a second.” Tatum looked around at the others. “None of you are. You keep your hands off this woman, you hear? Nobody touches her.”

“Unless it’s you, eh, amigo?” Chico drawled with an insolent smile on his face.

Tatum knew it was the wrong thing to do, but he did it anyway.

He swung his fist and planted it right in the middle of that smile.

Chico probably hadn’t been expecting that punch. It drove him backward off his feet. That sent him crashing down on top of Eden. She let out a startled cry as the outlaw’s weight landed on her.

For a second, the butt of the revolver holstered on his hip was within her reach. She knew how to use a handgun. She could have grabbed it and opened fire on the men around her.

That would be the same thing as committing suicide. To protect themselves, the outlaws would have no choice but to return her fire. Hannah, especially, would be quick to do so, Eden knew.

Such a move would save her from the inevitable degradation she would suffer at their hands. Caleb might be able to keep them from molesting her for now, but sooner or later that would change. Either he would take her for himself, eventually tire of her, and turn her over to the other men, or he would decide not to cross Hannah and abandon her to the others right away.

Either way, she could spare herself that fate.

But it would mean giving up any chance of escape or rescue. It would mean never seeing Bill again.

In the split second those thoughts flashed through Eden’s mind, she knew she couldn’t do that.

Then Chico rolled off of her, and the gun was out of reach. The young outlaw might have been surprised when Caleb attacked him, but he recovered quickly. He threw himself at Caleb’s knees, tackling the leader of the outlaws and bringing him down.

Hannah pointed her rifle at Eden and warned, “Don’t try anything!”

Eden pressed her hands to the ground and sat up. She shook her head at Hannah, indicating that she wasn’t going to try to escape.

Chico scrambled on top of Caleb and swung his fists. Caleb blocked one of the blows but the other punch landed cleanly and rocked his head to the side. Chico twisted and tried to dig his knee into Caleb’s groin.

With a grunt of effort, Caleb heaved himself up off the ground and threw Chico off to the side. He rolled and kicked the younger outlaw in the belly. Chico gagged and curled up around the pain in his midsection, but only for a second. Then he struggled to his feet.

Caleb was up first and met him with a wildly swinging fist. Chico went over backward again, but as Caleb closed in on him, evidently intending to stomp him into the ground, Chico got a foot up and rammed it into Caleb’s belly, returning the brutal favor from a moment earlier.

Eden had witnessed enough violence so that she didn’t sit there horrified as she watched the two outlaws clash. As far as she was concerned, they could beat each other to death and it would be just fine.

Hannah continued to watch her, menacing her with the rifle. The other outlaws gathered around in a circle and yelled encouragement to the two battlers. As far as Eden could tell, most of the sentiment seemed to be on Chico’s side, telling her that Caleb’s hold on the gang might be more tenuous than it had first appeared.

After the kick in the belly, Caleb managed to stay on his feet, but he was too shaken to continue the fight for a few seconds. That gave Chico the time to roll away, come up on
hands and knees, and then surge upright. He lunged at Caleb, who recovered just in time to meet the younger man’s charge.

For a long moment they stood toe-to-toe, slugging away at each other, each man obviously more concerned with the punishment he could deal out than with the blows he was taking. Caleb finally landed a punch to Chico’s solar plexus with stunning force. Chico let his guard down, and Caleb hammered a looping left to his face, following with a right uppercut that put Chico on the ground again.

This time Chico didn’t even try to get up. He just lay there breathing hard and whimpering. His face was swollen, bruised, and bloody. He didn’t look handsome now.

Neither did Caleb, but he wore an expression of triumph as he turned away from his defeated opponent.

“Make you feel better to beat up a boy?” Hannah asked with a sneer. “A boy who didn’t do anything wrong.”

Caleb dragged the back of his hand across his bleeding lips.

“He got too big for his britches,” he snapped. “And that’s what any man’ll get who does the same.”

“Don’t worry, Caleb,” one of the outlaws said. “We know you’re the boss.”

Eden wasn’t sure, but she thought there might have been the faintest trace of mockery in the man’s voice. Several of the others glanced at Hannah, as if they were saying that they knew who the boss was, all right…and it wasn’t Caleb.

Caleb must have seen that, too. His face darkened. But he must have figured that there had already been enough trouble for one night, because he didn’t say anything else. Instead he turned away, and a couple of the men went to help a groggy Chico to his feet.

The fight hadn’t cleared the air. Tension still hung heavy in it during supper, so that later in the evening, when hoofbeats thudded in the night the sound made all the men stand up and turn toward them, hands hovering over their guns.

Judging by the sound, two riders were approaching the camp at a good clip, but they weren’t galloping as they would have been if the posse was hot on their heels.

The horses came to a stop while they were still outside the circle of light cast by the fire. A man called, “Hello, the camp! It’s just us.”

“That’s Lou,” Caleb said. He raised his voice to say, “You and Andy come on in, Lou.”

The two men walked their horses into the light. They seemed calm, which Eden found disappointing. If they had been upset, it would have meant that the posse was closing in.

Caleb waited until the men dismounted, then asked, “Did you find them?”

“Yeah,” one of the outlaws replied. “We saw the light of their fire and got closer on foot so they wouldn’t hear our horses. It looked like a posse, all right.”

“How many?”

“More than a dozen,” the other outlaw said. “Fifteen or sixteen, I’d guess.”

“We thought about trying to cut down a few of them with our rifles,” the first one said. “They wouldn’t have known what hit ’em.”

Eden went cold all over at the thought of a bullet screaming out of the darkness to strike Bill.

“Then we figured that it might be smarter not to let them know we were there,” the second outlaw said. “They might have been able to follow us back here, and we knew you wouldn’t want that.”

Caleb rubbed his jaw and frowned in thought.

“I was hoping we’d lose them on the rocks,” he said. “They must have managed to stay on our trail, though. How far back are they?”

“Six or seven miles.” The man who had spoken nodded toward Chico, who stood off to the side wearing an angry glare on his battered face. “What the hell happened to Flynn?”

“He got too friendly with our hostage,” Caleb snapped. “I had to keep him in line.”

The two men who had gone on the scouting mission glanced at each other and shrugged. Eden thought they looked like they were just as glad they had missed the ruckus.

“If those damned lawmen are still that far behind us, the
chances of them catching up to us before we make it to the badlands are pretty slim,” Caleb went on. “We’ll keep moving fast, though, just to make sure.”

Eden felt her spirits sinking at Caleb’s words. She wanted to remain hopeful, but it was getting more and more difficult.

“Maybe they’ll give up and go back home before they ever get that far,” one of the men suggested.

“Maybe. I wouldn’t count on it.”

Eden couldn’t speak for the other men in the posse, since she didn’t know who had come with Bill, but she knew in her heart that her husband would never turn around and go back to Redemption without her. He would keep coming until he found her, no matter how far he had to go or how long it took.

If he had to come alone, though, what chance would he have against this band of ruthless killers? Maybe it would be better if he
did
give up and assume that she was lost to him. He would be safer. He could go on with his life…

And that would never happen, she thought. Not Bill. “Quit” wasn’t in his vocabulary.

Virgie hadn’t snuck out of the house the previous night, but Tom didn’t expect her to go two nights in a row without seeing her lover.

So he wasn’t surprised when he heard the faint creak of the floorboards in the hallway as he lay in the spare bedroom, pretending to sleep.

Not wanting Virgie to hear him reacting, he remained motionless. It was possible that she
wasn’t
going to leave the house, that she had gotten up for some other reason. Tom didn’t believe that, but it wouldn’t hurt anything to be certain of what she was doing.

Things had been chilly as always between them. He had ridden out to the ranch to work some more with the gray stallion, and she had spent the day—so she said—at her parents’ house. When he’d asked her how her father was doing after the bank robbery, she had said that he was all right but still angry that he hadn’t been able to go along with the posse.

The idea of dried-up old Walter Shelton riding with a posse after a bunch of outlaws was laughable to Tom. He could imagine his own father doing that, but not Virgie’s.

He supposed he believed her about where she was during
the day. It would be hard for her to rendezvous with Ned Bassett in broad daylight. Somebody would be too likely to see her sneaking into his house. He might have customers calling, too. He was a watchmaker and both sold and repaired watches and clocks.

After a minute Tom sat up and noiselessly swung his legs out of bed. He hadn’t undressed tonight, except for taking his boots off. He stood up and moved to the window, parting slightly the curtains that hung over it.

A shadow moved outside the house.

With his heart pounding, because a part of him—still, after all this time—hoped he was wrong, he watched. The slender figure moved through the shadows in back of the house, and Tom knew he was right.

There she went, off to meet Bassett.

Tom left by the front door, hurrying but not being careless. He didn’t want his wife to know that her affair had been discovered, not just yet. He would take a different route to Bassett’s house. He actually knew the streets of Redemption better than Virgie did. He had lived around here longer.

He was ensconsed in the thick shadows under the tree when she ghosted past and went to the house. He held his breath, but his heart seemed to be beating so hard and so loud that he was a little surprised she didn’t hear it.

His heart slugged even harder when his fingertips brushed the butt of the gun tucked into the waistband of his trousers.

It would serve them both right, he thought. He could burst into the house, catch them all tangled up with each other, and empty the revolver into them. Bassett wouldn’t be able to stop him. The man probably didn’t even have a gun of his own in his house.

Nobody else would do a damned thing about it, either. It was the unwritten law. A man had every right to kill an unfaithful wife and her lover.

The more he thought about it, though, the less Tom wanted to kill Virgie. He might hate her, but he still loved her at the same time. He supposed he could even forgive what she’d done, if she would just go back to the way she used to be, before she decided that she hated him.

Bassett, though…that son of a bitch deserved to die.

Not tonight, Tom told himself. Soon, maybe, but not tonight. And once Virgie saw the light, maybe Bassett would just slink on out of town and Tom wouldn’t have to kill him at all.

Tom stood there for an hour or so that seemed more like a day. Then the back door of Bassett’s house opened and Virgie snuck out, the same way he had seen her do several times in the past. She and Bassett embraced and kissed, then she started toward home.

Home, thought Tom. That was laughable. The house he shared with Virgie wasn’t a home and might never be. Not unless he was able to set things right.