.45-Caliber Deathtrap (4 page)

BLACKY GILMAN, OWNER
and operator of Blacky's Place in Spinoff Creek, twenty miles west of Columbine, looked around his dingy saloon, where four bearded men sat drinking and playing cards, and cursed. He rubbed his hands on his beer-spattered apron and walked out from behind his plank bar to the saloon's back door.

He poked his head out.

“Goddamnit, Chinaman, get in here and put some food on. I'm gonna have miners in here in a half hour, and if they don't get vittles from me, they're gonna head on up the road and get 'em from Gault. God
damn
your lazy, yella hide!”

Gilman cursed again, smoothed a stray lock of frizzy, colorless hair over his bald, bullet-shaped head, and let the door slap shut. His enormous gut bouncing and straining his leather galluses, he ambled back behind the bar and continued stocking his shelves with whiskey bottles from a wooden crate.

He'd arranged two more bottles when the back door creaked open and a slightly built Chinaman in overlarge denim trousers and a gray wool shirt shuffled into the long, narrow room with an armload of stove wood. Rawhide galluses held his pants on his skinny hips. His thinning, black hair was combed straight back from his domed forehead, and a thin growth of beard hung from his chin, something between a goatee and a beard. His feet were clad in beaded Indian moccasins.

“I must split wood, Mr. Geelman. The kid, he no split wood this morning. I must split for myself. That is why I slow with supper vittles. I hurry now, though.”

The barman snorted caustically. “The kid took sick. So you have to split wood as well as cook. My heart bleeds for you.” Gilman turned his sweaty face to the Chinaman, who was piling wood in the box beside the big brick fireplace along the far wall. “Where's your girl?”

“She clean fish—Li Mei. Clean fish for constable. You know how he like his trout for supper!”

“Forget the fish. Fetch her in here to start servin' drinks. If she's too slow again tonight, I'm gonna hang a price around her neck and let the boys take her into the back room for a little slap 'n' tickle.”

Several chuckles rang out from the table near the room's front. The Chinaman, Kong Zhao, dropped a log in the wood box and turned his glance toward the bar, scowling at his boss's back. He clenched his fists, then planted a hand on his right thigh, pushed himself to his feet, and shuffled over to the door.

“I get her now, Boss,” he said in his practiced, kowtowing English, bobbing his head. “I get Li Mei right 'way!”

He pushed the back door open, swung his gaze around the saloon's small backyard to the diminutive Chinese girl cleaning fish at a low work bench. Gutted brook trout lay in a slimy pile to one side of the bench, glistening in the early evening light angling over the canyon's tall ridges. Beside the girl's split-log chair was a wooden bucket partly filled with livery-colored fish guts.

Kong Zhao spoke several commanding words of Chinese. The girl set her knife down beside the fish she'd been cleaning, dipped her hands in a pan of water, and shuffled toward the saloon. She gazed fearfully up at her father, who stepped aside to let her pass through the door.

As she stepped over the threshold, he grabbed her slender arm. She swung toward him, her delicate face turned up toward his, her brown eyes questioning.

He muttered a question.

She nodded and, glancing warily about the saloon, turned back to her father. She pinched up the left leg of her baggy denim trousers. In a soft leather sheath strapped about her ankle lay a thin, silver-trimmed, ivory-handled stiletto.

Kong Zhao nodded and released the girl's arm. She walked past her father, tense as always when entering the saloon, and headed for the bar where Gilman was setting freshly filled beer mugs on a wooden tray.

At the same time, the gang of riders led by Clayton Cannady, who'd dubbed themselves “The Committee” during a night of heavy drinking, galloped along the narrow wagon road twisting along the south bank of Chicken Hawk Creek. They were eleven riders—hard, dusty men in various style of ratty dress, with six-guns on their hips, knives in their boots or sheathed between their shoulder blades, rifles in their saddle boots.

As distinctly as each was dressed and armed, there was one thing they all had in common—each had the reputation for being “touched.”

Loco as a peach orchard sow and deadlier than the Devil on a Saturday night.

Each one had killed more times than he could count on both hands. Each man had a bounty on his head, but very few bounty hunters, let alone bona fide badge toters, valued their lives so little as to fog the gang's trail. U.S. marshals had been known, when spying more than one or two members of the gang in one place, to turn around and walk the other way.

“Hey, Cannady,” said Ned Crockett, riding off the outlaw leader's right stirrup. He jerked a nod at the wooden sign marking an intersecting trail just ahead and closing. “What say we head on over to Blacky's Place in Spinoff Creek and get us a drink?”

The outlaw leader frowned and checked his horse down to a trot. “Blacky's Place?”

“It's a little dive this fat bastard from Arkansas put up along Spinoff Creek. Last time I was through, it was the only wooden building in town.”

“Don't got time for side trips,” Cannady growled.

“It's only two miles,” said the small, half-Mex child killer named Waco, riding just behind Cannady. “I was through there just last month. Good whiskey. And the trail circles around that mountain, leads back to the main trail ahead. Wouldn't be like we'd be backtrackin' or nothin'.”

Cannady reined his horse to a halt, swept dust from the hummingbird tattoo beneath his blind left eye. “Do I need to remind you boys we got us a bank to rob?”

“Not for four days,” said Ed Brown, the only black man in the bunch. Six feet four and nearly three hundred pounds, he'd long ago discovered that only a hefty mule could carry his gargantuan carcass for any distance over a mile. He was clad in smelly deerskins and wore a leather, narrow-billed immigrant cap. A heavy Sharps rifle hung by a leather lanyard down his broad back.

“We can make it to Sundance in three days easy,” said Ned Crockett, puffing the quirley so perpetually wedged in one corner of his mouth that it had carved its own black furrow in his lips. “What's the hurry?”

“Yeah, what's the hurry?” said Young Knife, the only full-blood Indian, a Ute, in the bunch. “Me, I'm thirsty!”

Cannady looked around at the rocky ridges lining the trail, then glanced at the wooden arrow pointing south along a shaggy two-track wagon trace. “If you boozers need a drink so goddamn bad, then I reckon we'd best get you one. But only
one
. I don't like side trips!”

Later, as the group trotted their horses through a small canyon carved by Spinoff Creek, Ned Crockett turned to Cannady riding to his left. “What's eatin' you, Boss? Is it Sylvester?”

Cannady turned his head to spit tobacco juice over his left stirrup. Running the back of his gloved hand across his mouth, he shrugged. “Sylvester don't do well on his own. Never has. Hell, I had to bottle-feed the whelp till he was eighteen years old. I swear, he'd never have eaten a damn thing, and he'd have left the house without his gun or bowie knife.” Cannady plucked a tobacco braid from his shirt pocket and eyed it thoughtfully. “You know how he is. Hell, he's even crazier than I am. Takes after our ma's side.”

“You left three good men with him, Clayton. He'll be all right. Hell, they'll probably start out tomorrow and catch up to us in time for the holdup on Tuesday.”

“We left three men who I thought could feed and clothe my little brother and tend his wound,” Cannady said. “None of 'em can shoot worth shit, if it comes to that. Rodeo—he's good in a knife fight—but I only brought him into the group 'cause he's Waco's cousin, and I owed Waco a favor.”

Crockett scowled at the gang leader, smoke puffing out the side of his mouth not holding the cigarette. “Clayton, you're just a damn worrywart, you know that?”

Because he and Cannady had both left Missouri together just after the War, Crockett was the only man in the bunch who could rib the outlaw leader without getting carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey, or having the barrel of a six-gun shoved up his ass and fired.

“Shit,” Cannady said, cracking a sheepish smile. “You're right, Ned. I think too much, and that leads to worry. I'm with the savage—let's get a drink!”

He gave a rebel whoop and gigged his zebra dun into a gallop, the rest of the gang following suit. They didn't gallop far before the little tent town of Spinoff Creek appeared around a bend in the trail—a dozen or so dirty white tents, a mud-and-brick livery stable with two peeled-log corrals and a windmill, and a two-story saloon with a broad front porch.

The saloon looked like something out of Cheyenne or Denver. No question it had been built by a man with full confidence in Spinoff Creek's booming prospects. The dull green paint peeling off the sun-blistered boards, however, and the lack of other significant buildings surrounding it, attested to the builder's chagrin.

The gang tied their horses where other horses were tied at the two hitch racks and, slapping their hats against their thighs and raising a miniature dust storm along the shaggy main drag, mounted the porch and split the batwings to enter the saloon.

The Chinaman, Kong Zhao, had just walked out of the saloon's back kitchen, carrying a heavy iron pot with two thick wedges of leather, when the batwing doors creaked and spurs chinged loudly across the puncheons. He paused halfway to the fireplace, and swung his gaze toward the front of the smoky, low-ceilinged room.

Men filed in. Hard-faced riders, well-armed, with the looks of seasoned killers about their sharp eyes and craggy faces. After seven years on the American frontier, raising a young daughter, Kong could smell the evil of such men from a long way off.

The newcomers, boots pounding and spurs singing, dropped into chairs or lined out along the bar. Kong snapped his gaze to his daughter. Head bowed, jet-black hair hiding her face, Li Mei arranged beer mugs on the wooden tray at the bar.

“Beers for my boys!” intoned one of the hard cases, pounding both fists on the bar planks. “And shots all around. For the good gentlemen over there as well,” he added with a nod to the four bearded prospectors, who'd recently come in from their diggings.

The miners nodded; one raised his near-empty beer mug in salute.

While the hard cases talked in their harsh, ebullient tones, lighting cigarettes or cigars, coins clanging on the bar top and a deck of cards being riffled, Kong Zhao hung his stew kettle over the fire. He cast dark, furtive looks at the newcomers while he stirred the stew with a long-handled spoon.

As Li Mei carried a beer tray toward the prospectors' table, the glance of one of the hard cases found her. The man with curly blond hair poking out from beneath a battered brown derby, and sitting at a table near the bar, regarded her wryly, his cold, appraising eyes running up and down the girl's lithe frame. As Li Mei set the beer mugs on the prospectors' table, the blond hard case's eyes sharpened while his near-toothless smile grew, and he poked the brim of his dusty hat off his forehead.

“You gonna deal them cards, or you just gonna stare at the kitchen help?” barked the giant black man sitting to his right.

“Don't get your bloomers in a twist, Brown,” the hard case said and, turning his gaze to the other cardplayers, began flipping the pasteboards around the table.

“Hey, Chinaman, you gonna stir that stew all day, or you gonna dish it up?” one of the prospectors said.

Kong jerked his head around. The prospector who'd spoken stared at him expectantly, a fat stogie clamped in his teeth.

Bowing and muttering his apologies, “So sorry, so sorry,” Kong quickly scooped stew into four wooden bowls, and delivered the bowls and silverware to the waiting prospectors. He shuffled and bowed, arranged the forks and spoons beside the bowls, then shuffled back to the table by the fireplace to retrieve a loaf of crusty brown bread.

When he'd set the bread on the table, he turned toward the bar, where Gilman was frantically filling mugs from the beer tap and slopping whiskey into shot glasses. Kong stopped suddenly. The lead hard case, standing at the bar, stared angrily toward him, as if trying to see through him.

“Get the hell outta the way, Chinaman.” The man with the hummingbird tattoo beneath his milky left eye waved Kong aside. “You're blockin' my view!”

Kong frowned, confused. Shuffling aside, he turned to follow the hard case's stare to one of the prospectors whom Kong had just served. The prospector stared past Kong toward the bar, a steaming spoonful of stew held halfway to his mouth. His eyes grew large, and his bearded faced turned red.

“Lowry Gemmell,” said the man with the tattoo, issuing the prospector a rock-hard grin. “Well, well, well.”

As the hard case shoved away from the bar and strode toward the prospectors' table, his right hand released the thong over his revolver's hammer.

“Wait a minute now, Cannady,” said the prospector, dropping his spoon into his bowl and leaning back in his chair, holding his hands chest high, palms out. “I couldn't come back fer ya. That posse was all over me like ants on honey.”