.45-Caliber Desperado (2 page)

Zimmerman swayed, staggered, tried to raise his fists.

Cuno kept his own fists swinging, hearing his own grunts with each of the savage blows he brought up from his heels to smash against the big man's brick-thick skull. When he saw and felt the man's nose give and turn sideways against his face, he stepped back, feeling the warm spurt of the man's blood against his own bloody cheeks and chest.

He stepped in with his left foot, cocking his right arm back, but before he could release the jab, Zimmerman twisted around in a complete circle, stumbled, and fell on his back. Dust wafted around him.

The crowd fell almost deathly silent.

From one of the guard towers came the squawk of a Gatling gun being turned on its swivel base. This was a decisive time for the guards. In the wake of the weekly bare-knuckle matches, almost always fought to the death on the warden's orders to temporarily relieve the man of the boredom of his lowly station at this remote federal outpost when he believed he was worthy of so much more, riots were always a threat.

Cuno stared down at Zimmerman.

The man was all blood, sweat, and dust. Only the top of his bald pate appeared unmarred and unstained. His blood-sodden mustache was stretched wide, showing yellow, crooked teeth also stained with blood dribbling down from his nose. His eyes were pinched down to little diamond chips of misery as he stared seemingly sightless up past Cuno toward the brassy Colorado sky.

His enormous chest expanded and contracted like a bellows.

In the sudden, funereal silence of the prison yard, the giant set his big hands palm down against the ground and lifted his head, trying to rise. He couldn't even lift his back. With a great, ragged sigh, he collapsed, causing more dust to waft up around him.

A soft snick sounded to Cuno's right.

He turned his battered head, rubbed blood and sweat from the corner of his right eye. The warden's bowie knife with its ivory-gripped handle protruded from the clay-colored dust at an angle. The glistening steel blade had been stropped to a razor edge. Cuno shifted his gaze to the balcony of the nearest brick barrack. The warden stood there, wrists and ankles casually crossed.

“Finish him,” Castle said.

Cuno glanced at the big knife again, wondering how many throats that steel had slit here in the prison yard. So many, he knew, that the desert sand around this area of the yard was dark red with the spilled blood of fallen fighters. Some had likely had no business fighting; they hadn't been trained for it. Warden Castle didn't care. He chose his entertainment according to whim, like a perverted moron snickering as he chose which rats to feed to his pet diamondback.

“I said finish him,” Castle repeated, louder.

Cuno looked at Mule Zimmerman lying groaning at his feet and shook his head. “You want him dead, you come down here and finish him yourself.”

Fire blazed in the warden's eyes as he scowled down at Cuno for a full fifteen seconds. The entire yard had fallen silent as a cellar at midnight. The only sounds were the blacksmith's hammer clanging down at the smithy's shop near the barns, stock pens, and other outbuildings that supported the prison.

Several of the guards, holding their shotguns high, swung slow, ominous glances at Cuno, quirking their lips with the expectation of more entertainment.

Murmurs rose around the yard. Cuno held the warden's stare, but he could feel the Gatling guns boring hot spots into his sweating body, imagined the fingers of the eager guards twitching and drawing taut against triggers. They were likely flicking glances at the warden, awaiting Castle's deadly signal.

Cuno felt himself jerk with a start when the warden suddenly yelled, “Shackle him. Shackle both of 'em and haul 'em down to the Pit!”

The murmuring around the yard grew, the other prisoners turning knowing glances at each other—some scowling, some grinning at the prospect of two of their brethren being sent to the warden's notorious Pit deep under the prison. Few men emerged alive from the place. When some did manage to keep breaths in their bodies, and make it out of that deep, stony, rat- and snake-infested hole, it was only to be led off to the prison gallows on the other side of the yard, beyond the three-deep cell barracks.

That was their last, long walk—the few feet from the heavy timbered door to the Pit on over to the gallows fifty yards away. Not all that long. But in the three months Cuno had been here, sentenced to life for killing four deputy U.S. marshals, he imagined quite a few lifetimes would pass during the walk.

Two guards handed their sawed-off shotguns to two other guards, then ran over to one of the stout wooden boxes arranged strategically around the yard. One unlocked the heavy padlock, threw the lid wide, and dragged out two sets of leg irons and manacles. Chains rattled and squawked as the two guards, one a Mexican, one a tall Englishman with a red spade beard and cold green eyes, came over and got busy throwing Cuno down on his belly and trussing both him and Zimmerman.

The big man appeared to have regained his senses, and now he just looked wary as he shuttled his gaze from the warden to Cuno and then to the two men brusquely shackling them both. Cuno met the giant's gaze, saw the fury there. The gaze told Cuno that Zimmerman would have preferred his throat been cut than to be sent to the Pit.

Most men would. Cuno, however, wasn't in the business of killing innocent men, even one who'd been forced by the whims of a blood-hungry warden into nearly killing Cuno himself. Cuno had killed the four marshals, all right, but only because they'd been intent on raping the girls Cuno had been leading to safety from an Indian raid across the Rawhide Mountains.

No, he wasn't in the business of killing, he thought as, glancing once more at the warden, he was brusquely hauled to his feet, pain pounding through his broken nose and sending shafts of fire through his brain. But killing would likely come much easier for him given another few days here in this death house masquerading as a federal penitentiary.

If he was alive in a few more days.

As if in response to Cuno's unspoken musings, the warden said, “Today, the Pit,” as Cuno and Mule Zimmerman were led off across the yard, the Gatling guns squawking as they turned on their swivels to track the two bloody fighters. “Tomorrow,” the warden added tightly, “they'll be hung with the others.”

A SOFT SCRATCHING sounded, faint as fingertips brushing a rock wall. Cuno felt movement against his left thigh.

The sensations nudged him from the mercy of a light sleep. He lifted his head from his chest, opened his eyes and winced against the tightness of the swelling. Light was faint here in the Pit, sifting weakly down from airshafts along the high, timbered ceiling of what had once been the main shaft of a silver mine.

All Cuno could see were several blotchy brown blurs moving around him. He had heard the rats piping and scuttling when he and Zimmerman had been led down here at shotgun point, their wrists now shackled to chains hanging from iron stakes driven deep into the cold, pitted stone wall. Now, as if knowing he'd fallen asleep, they'd come out to sniff around for food. Or maybe to seek out his body warmth.

Something moved on his left, and he looked over to see a rat sitting on Mule Zimmerman's upraised left knee. It held its spidery front feet to its mouth, eating something. Cuno gave a repelled grunt and opened his mouth to yell but stopped when Zimmerman said, “Shhhh.”

Cuno turned to the man shackled to the wall beside him, frowning. He'd thought Zimmerman had been asleep, but in the dimness he could see the giant's eyeballs gleaming faintly from between his swollen lids.

“Shhhh.” Teeth shone beneath the ragged raven's wing of the bald man's mustache. “I'm growin' kinda fond o' this one here. Might make him my pet.”

Cuno sighed and made an effort to suppress his innate revulsion. “Good thinkin'.”

“He's kinda cute, you ask me.”

“He's ugly as sin. I think your brain's swollen up like your nose, and you can't think straight.”

Zimmerman groaned. As he pulled on the chains suspending his meaty arms above his head, the rat peeped and disappeared from his knee in a brown blur. “Shit,” the big man said. “You're tougher than you look, kid—at least, from the neck up.”

“Mule skinnin'.”

“Freight?”

Cuno nodded.

“That'll build ya a set of shoulders. What kinda freight were you haulin' to get you thrown in here?”

Cuno merely scowled.

Thinking about the recent past only made him anxious not only about his own fate but about the fates of the three children and two young women he'd escorted in his freight wagon out of the mountains, fighting marauding Indians most of the way. He'd been wounded in the last attack, when his old partner, Serenity Parker, had been killed by the Ute pack trailing them toward Camp Collins. Cuno himself had turned himself over to Sheriff Dusty Mason, who'd been on his trail since finding his dead colleagues, in exchange for the sheriff making sure the three children and their attendant, Camilla, as well as Michelle Trent would be trailed to the safety of the fort.

Cuno was relatively certain that Michelle Trent and the Lassiter children had been given passage to relatives back East, but after he'd been taken into custody, he'd seen no more of Camilla. He worried about her now. Few good things came to young women alone on the frontier. Especially pretty young Mexican women alone on a remote military outpost, without friends or family.

And he'd found himself liking the girl more than a little . . .

In frustration, Cuno jerked on the chains holding his arms up high against the wall. More than anything, he wanted to lie down and sleep, but the chains made sure he remained upright, his shoulders bulging from their sockets.

“What's the point of these goddamn things?” he grunted, looking around the dingy, smelly environs. “It's not like we could get out of this hellhole without the chains.”

“Torture.”

The voice, high and almost feminine sounding, had come from the shadows on the other side of the dungeon. Cuno squinted and was finally able to make out three vague figures probably chained to the opposite wall as he and Zimmerman were chained to this one. He'd figured more men were down here, for he could smell the stench of sweat and human waste.

A while ago, he'd thought he'd heard something gurgling.

“Who's there?” Zimmerman called much louder than he needed to. In spite of his beat-up condition, he still had a good set of lungs. His voice echoed like thunder off the stone walls. “That you, Arguello?”

“Si, si.”
A pause, then the voice came more pinched and strained. “When'd you come, Mule?”

“I don't know—hour or two. Been catching up on some much needed shut-eye, I reckon. Good place for it, eh, Christiano?”

“Not much else to do,” came the thin, defeated voice. “But come tomorrow, I won't have to worry about it any longer. Neither will Ralph and Moeller. I think Frank Skinner is down here somewhere, too, but I haven't seen him since the sun moved. Maybe he's gone to the saints.”

“Not yet,” someone grunted far off to Cuno's left, in another misty cell. “Can't believe I have to share a basement flat with a fuckin' bean eater. I hope they hang me sooner rather than later. As for the rats, Zim, try to catch one between your knees and rip its head off with your teeth. It's all your liable to get down here between now and your meetin' with St. Pete. The warden don't believe in feedin' the livin' dead. I just been sittin' over here prayin' St. Pete's got him a nice steak and a big baked potato waitin' on me. Maybe a side of garden greens covered with sweet butter and salt. And I sure wouldn't mind dancin' with his daughter, if he's got one that ain't too plain-faced.”

“Shut up, Frank!” This from the Mexican, Arguello. “Don't antagonize the saints on the eve of your death, fool!”

Skinner chuckled. A couple of others laughed, as well, causing echoes to mingle and drown out for a time the tinny drip of water from an underground spring. The air was cool and damp, and Cuno yearned for the sun on his broken nose and aching eyes.

There was a long silence and then Skinner said in a desultory voice, “How'd you and Junior end up in here, anyway, Mule? I figured you for the warden's favorite bare knuckler.”

“I was,” Zimmerman said grudgingly. “Can you believe the shaver damn near beat the livin' shit out of me?” He sounded truly surprised and indignant. Cuno could feel the giant's exasperated eyes on him . . . as far as the big man could open them, that is.

“You best work on your footwork.” Cuno hiked a shoulder slightly and winced at the pain it caused. “And don't get overly confident just because you're bigger than your opponent.”

“Don't you get so damn big fer yur britches. You can't kill a man to save your own hide. All you did, bucko, was get us both in a helluva deep pit o' shit. I'd just as soon be dancin' with Ole Scratch as slummin' down here with Skinner and that Mex, smellin' their piss.”

“Skinner's is the bad-smelling piss,” Arguello said, and Cuno thought he could see a vague flash of teeth through a halfhearted smile. “Phew, he stinks like a Yaqui!”

“I wish I woulda cut your ears off when I had the chance, that night down in Juarez,” Skinner growled.

A low eruption of laughter. Whoever had been gurgling continued to gurgle somewhere off in the shadows near Skinner. The man had likely been down here awhile and was half dead. Or he'd been half dead when they'd tossed him down here.

“I don't suppose,” Cuno said, as the grimness of his situation suddenly swirled through the pain of his battered face to his consciousness, “that there's any way of bustin' outta here?”