.45-Caliber Desperado (14 page)

Cuno turned and walked in his stocking feet back to where he'd left his boots. “Tally the total for everything,” he told the proprietor, a witch's cold fingers of apprehension raking the back of his neck.

He stooped to pull one of White-Eye's right boots back on his foot, grunting with the effort and feeling the pain of the too-small boot shooting up his leg. “Shit!” He tossed the boot aside and went over to a shelf holding new ones.

Camilla turned from the open tent flap. “Lawmen, you think?”

Cuno was picking through the boots, looking for his size. “They don't look like it. Maybe bounty hunters. Possibly Pinkertons, but I don't see how they'd know we were here. It ain't like Mateo cables ahead.”

The shopkeeper had gone over to the open tent flap and was staring up the street, where the newcomers had gone, leading their horses, the derby-hatted man walking along to one side of the leader and thumbing his round-framed spectacles up his crooked nose.

“You recognize those fellas?” Cuno asked the proprietor, picking up a pair of plain brown Justin boots.

“Me?” the man said, turning his bald head sharply, his eyes suddenly bright with nerves. “Never seen 'em before. Likely game hunters for the railroad, here to feed the crews layin' rails farther west. Yeah, that's who they are. No doubt about it.”

Cuno liked that explanation. But as he pulled on both boots to test the fit, he wondered why the railroad would send that many hunters to feed a rail-laying crew of undoubtedly less than thirty men . . . His heart began to beat insistently. When he looked up, Camilla was staring at him, her eyes edgy.

“I got a bad feeling, Cuno.”

“Pay for my gear,” Cuno told her. “I'll pay you back soon as we hit a bank or somethin'.” He couldn't believe he was saying that, but how else was he going to make money from now on, riding with Mateo's bunch, unless he stole it?

Sheriff Mason and Warden Castle hadn't left him much choice.

“I'm gonna take these boots, too.” To the proprietor, Cuno said, “Mister, I'll take that Winchester carbine over there, and two boxes of cartridges, if you throw in these suspenders.” He held up the leather galluses, which he preferred to a regular belt, knowing he'd likely have to wear one or two cartridge belts around his waist from now on.

The proprietor looked at the 1876-model saddle-ring carbine hanging on the wall behind the counter. He seemed to hesitate, and the back of his neck turned pink. He pointed with a shaky hand. “That one there?”

Cuno frowned, annoyance mixing with his apprehension. “That's the only one up there, amigo.”

“Oh, yes. Of course. That one is twelve dollars. The cartridges are a dollar a box.”

“Camilla, you have that much?”

She nodded as she dug a wad of greenbacks out of a back pocket. “
Mierda!
You are an expensive boyfriend.”

“Yeah, but I'm worth it,” Cuno said with a chuckle despite his growing nervousness, thumbing the second suspender up over his shoulder and then walking in his squeaky new boots over to the counter, behind which the proprietor was reaching for the new rifle.

The man took his time totaling up the bill. As he did, Cuno stood in the open tent flap, staring up the street and thumbing fresh cartridges into his carbine's breech. “Come on, come on,” he said, warm and jittery as he looked over his shoulder at the bald proprietor still penciling figures on a pad.

Camilla looked at Cuno, flushed and rolling her eyes.

Cuno ran back to the counter, peeled a bunch of bills off Camilla's roll, and tossed them onto the counter. Then he grabbed his second box of .44 shells and took Camilla's arm, swinging her toward the front of the place. “Keep the change, mister.”

“Hold on there, sonny,” the proprietor called when Cuno and Camilla were halfway to the tent flap.

Cuno turned back around, then rammed his left shoulder hard against Camilla, throwing both the girl and himself to the floor. At the same time, the shotgun that the proprietor had produced out of seemingly nowhere went off like a hundred-pound keg of black powder.

“Cristos!”
Camilla cried, squirming around under Cuno.

Awkwardly, he rolled off the girl, rose to a knee, and levered a cartridge into the Winchester's breech. He kept his head down beneath the level of a table between him and the hardware proprietor. He could hear the man sort of groaning and wheezing fearfully as he shuffled around, likely maneuvering for another shot.

“Mister!” Cuno shouted, “you're one dead son of a bitch!”

“Not yet, you young devil!” the man returned, his voice quaking. “There's gotta be a bounty on your head, and I aim to get it!”

Cuno jerked his head up above the table. The man had moved out from behind his counter and was ducking under some deerskin leggings hanging from a rope. He jerked his head toward Cuno, eyes wide and glassy. Grinding his teeth, he slid the double-bore shotgun toward his target.

Cuno quickly drew a new bead on the man and triggered the Winchester. He fired twice more until three bloodpumping holes shone in the center of the man's aproned chest, forming a triangle pattern. The man shot a hole in his floor with the barn blaster, twisting around and staggering backward before falling behind a table strewn with miscellaneous hardware including tin pots and pans. He hit the floor with a heavy thud and a liquid sigh.

“Madre Maria!”
Camilla said, gaining her feet and looking at the smoking carbine in Cuno's hands. “You should never shoot a man with his own gun. It is very bad luck.”

Cuno reached down for the box of cartridges he'd dropped. “It's not his anymore. You bought it from him, remember?”

“Oh,
si
!” Camilla ran around the tables to the counter, swept her pile of wrinkled greenbacks off the pine boards, and stuffed them down her shirt. “He doesn't need them anymore, right?”

Cuno laughed again from nerves and the excitement of this new life he'd suddenly, unexpectedly found himself in. “Come on!”

He ran to the tent's open flap, the canvas around it torn by the proprietor's shotgun blast, and looked up the street in the direction the gunmen had gone. There was only the churned dust of their passing. Boots thumped behind him, and then Camilla was beside him, anxiously flushed and staring up the street.

“Clear so far.”

Cuno moved on out of the tent and headed up the street. It wasn't much more than a trail, twisting amongst the tent shacks and a few timber dwellings that had been placed willy-nilly though generally along the spur-line tracks. The smell of latrines, chickens, and horses was heavy on the warm air.

“We have to warn Mateo,” Camilla whispered.

Cuno nodded. He was about to tell the girl they'd work around to the back of the hotel, but just then they rounded a broad beer tent—empty now but likely patronized by the track layers after hours—and Cuno could see the brothel. It was easily one of the two or three largest, most permanent structures in town.

Headed back away from it and toward him and Camilla were three men carrying rifles.

Cuno recognized the three from the group that had gotten off the train. They'd come back to check out the gunfire. The others were positioning themselves around the hotel while one led the horses on up the street and out of the line of imminent fire.

Cuno pushed Camilla back behind a stock pen in which goats milled, staring at the pair through the ocotillo slats. A man shouted. Cuno gritted his teeth and, levering a round into the Winchester, bolted out from behind the pen. He dropped to one knee as he pressed the rifle's butt against his right shoulder.

The three men walking toward him stopped suddenly, jerked their own rifles up. Behind him, Camilla screamed in Spanish, “Mateo!
Emboscada,
Mateo!
Emboscada!
”

Ambush!

Firing and levering, Cuno dispatched two of the riflemen before they could get a shot off. One sent a round screeching just over the crown of Cuno's new hat before Cuno drilled the man in his lower belly and sent him stumbling dustily backward, lowering his head and shaking it fiercely and yowling as his rolling-block repeater tumbled into the street at his boots.

From the direction of the hotel came the screech of breaking glass and then a raucous scream, like that of a moon-crazed lobo. A man on the street shouted. A rifle boomed. Then there was more breaking glass and men shouting in Spanish and English.

Cuno could see dust puffing in the brothel's windows, heard girls screaming, saw bullets hammering the brothel's walls as others plunked into the street and sent the riflemen scattering.

One ambusher clutched his upper right leg and dropped to a knee. Another bullet silenced his wails as it snapped his head violently sideways and tore his hat from his head. He crumpled, his duster forming a shroud, and lay still in the street.

One of the gunmen who was sidled up to a tent shack on the street's left side triggered a rifle toward Cuno. As Camilla returned the man's fire, Cuno wheeled and dove back behind the goat pen. Camilla bolted around a corner of the building as several rounds hit the ocotillo slats of the pen and dropped to a knee beside Cuno.

“Shit!” she cried. “I told Mateo we shouldn't stay here so long!”

“The whores yonder must be right talented. Makes me wish I'd have checked 'em out myself.”

Ignoring the quip, Camilla said, “What are we going to do? They're trying to surround the whorehouse! They'll have us surrounded soon, too!” She cursed and punched her thigh as she looked around the front of the goat pen toward the brothel. “My crazy brother is getting careless. He's been a lucky bandito for too long!”

A savage fusillade rose from the direction of the brothel. It sounded like all-out war. Men shouting and screaming. Bullets hammering wood and lifting angry whines as they ricocheted.

There was a shrill cry and then the loud smashing thud of what was probably one of the outlaws being shot out of a window of the brothel. From the south side of the street, one of the ambushers raised a victorious cry.

Cuno ran crouching toward the other end of the pen in which the goats were bleating and running in tight, frantic circles. He edged a look around the pen, saw the brothel with smoke puffing from its broken windows on both floors. The man who'd fallen out of the window lay stretched in the street before the place, ankles crossed. He was clad in only his socks and neckerchief. Blood pooled in the dust beneath his head. A rifle lay nearby.

On the south side of the street, to Cuno's left, the ambushers had taken up positions behind rain barrels fronting the timber and canvas shacks. Some were stretched out prone on rooftops. Others were shooting from the gaps between the buildings. Some had fallen dead where they'd been shooting.

Cuno's stomach heaved. It was already a bloodbath and it was fast getting bloodier. He was only vaguely surprised to feel such a strong alliance with Mateo and the other outlaws. They were all he had now. Somehow, he had to help them get out of the brothel and over to the stable where their horses waited.

If he could work around behind the ambushers, he might be able to take down enough of them that the others would get discouraged and call a retreat. At the very least, he could thin their ranks, though he could hear by the intermittent yowls and screams that Mateo's men, despite the bender they'd been on, were holding their own.

He turned and ran back toward the other side of the goat pen. He stopped suddenly, jaw falling slack. Camilla was sitting back against a lower slat of the pen, clutching her upper right arm and wincing, breathing hard.

“What the hell'd you do?” Cumo admonished the girl.

“It's just a nip.”

“Nick,” he corrected her, not so sure.

Cuno saw the bullet hole in the slat near her arm, heard several more thumps as the ambushers, knowing part of the gang was here by the pen, triggered lead in Cuno's and Camilla's direction. Soon, a couple would peel away from the main bunch and work around them. So much for Cuno's idea. They had to get out of here fast.

Cuno ripped off his neckerchief and quickly tied it around the girl's arm.

“Ouch! Not so tight!”

“Shut up.”

“You're mad at me, damn you!” She gave him a petulant look as he lifted her to her feet.

“I get that way when girls I like get themselves shot.”

He'd said it before he'd realized that he was voicing his fear of losing another woman he'd fallen in love with. She studied him curiously as he steadied her, then handed over her rifle, which she'd leaned against the pen.

“Never mind,” he said. “Come on.”

Glancing over his shoulder to make sure none of the ambushers was closing on them, Cuno ran east, keeping the goat pen between him and the riflemen. He and Camilla passed behind the hardware tent, saw Renegade and Camilla's mount standing outside the timber, shake-roofed box that was the town's only café.

They'd left the horses there after they'd had breakfast a little over an hour ago. The café's long-haired half-breed cook was hunkered down behind a rain barrel on the little front stoop, hands clamped over the side of the barrel as he stared toward the sounds of battle, wearing an expression much like that of the horses.

Cuno stopped, remembering the cartridge boxes he'd seen lined up in the hardware tent. “You go on over and fetch the horses. I'm going back for more ammo. Didn't realize we'd be going through it this fast.”

Camilla nodded, her face tight with pain, and jogged on over to where the horses waited, stretching wary looks behind them and flapping their tails.