.45-Caliber Desperado (20 page)

He said thickly to Lilly, blinking back a wet sheen from his eyes, “A little thing like a torn ear don't take nothin' from your brand of beauty, sweet girl. If anything, it makes you purtier.”

Spurr took his whiskey glass, turned away from her, and went back over to the bed. His throat was dry; it had a throbbing knot in it.

He climbed onto the bed, leaned his back against the headboard. The girl had tucked her hair back down over her ear and secured it beneath the choker. She stood resting her hands on the edge of the dresser behind her.

Spurr patted the bed beside him. “Come on over here, my beauty. Let Spurr have another shot of this who-hit-john, and then you can see if you can get my third old wooden leg up far enough to give you a ride on it. If you don't mind climbin' into the saddle, that is. Truth be told, my old ticker ain't what it used to be, and . . .”

The girl had walked over to him, shedding the silk wrap. She tossed it over a ladder-back chair and climbed up onto the bed, full breasts jostling to and fro. Her nipples were pebbling. Her smile had returned, as well as that lusty sparkle in her eyes. Only this time it looked a tad more authentic. Her amber gaze and ruby lips stroked the old lawbringer gently, warmly.

“I can do that for you, Spurr.” She crouched over him and began using her hands to manipulate him, giving him a playfully admonishing sidelong glance. “Promise you won't tell?”

Spurr finished the whiskey, smacked his lips. “Your secret's safe with me. As long as you keep mine.”

“What secret's that?”

“I'm old and slow,” Spurr said with a sigh, setting the glass onto the bed beside him. “Though sometimes I'm old and way too fast.” He chuckled. “Tell no one.”

He clipped the chuckle with a choking groan. Lilly's hands were caressing him magically, unexpectedly sending little tendrils of desire through his belly.

Lilly smiled. “Secret's safe with me.” She lowered her head over his crotch.

Spurr spread his hand out across the top of her head. “One more thing.”

The girl lifted her head, wrinkling the skin above the bridge of her pretty nose.

“I only paid for an hour, but I done changed my mind. I'd like you to stay the night. An old man gets lonely, don't ya know.” He gave her chin a playful nudge with his thumb and tried once more to swallow down that consarned knot in his throat. “I'll settle up with Miss May in the mornin'.”

“You don't need to do that.”

“Yeah, I do. For me, not you. An old man gets spooky at night.”

Lilly's red lips spread wide, showing her small, white teeth in a genuine smile. Her eyes sparkled. She lowered her chin and closed her mouth over him, making soft sucking sounds. Spurr sank his hand into her hair again, soft as the first grass of spring.

She moved her head around.

Spurr sucked a breath and groaned louder as he discovered that, in the right company, he wasn't so old and slow, after all.

IN THE SINGLE sphere of magnified vision, curtains of sand and gravel blew this way and that on the savage wind. Cuno adjusted his spyglass's focus slightly until a ridge about three hundred yards away clarified slightly on the other side of a miniature badlands of broken rock and dry river courses carved through a spine of sandstone and limestone.

Three riders appeared atop the ridge—so vague from this distance and through the fluttering curtain of sand that Cuno would not have recognized them had he not been looking for them. He would have thought them inanimate objects blowing on the wind—large tumbleweeds, a trick of the light, or cloud shadows.

Cuno blinked, and when he looked again the riders had dropped out of sight in the badlands. There was only the howling wind and the blowing sand now, and the bits of weeds and whole tumbleweeds and other debris that the fierce northwestern wind had been kicking up for several hours.

Cuno lowered the spyglass and rubbed his cheek thoughtfully as he continued staring out across the badlands. Three riders. Could be part of Ed Joseph's bunch—those that had survived the dustup in the fledgling railroad town.

Or they could be lawmen.

Cuno and the other members of de Cava's gang had learned they were being followed nearly a week ago, when Mateo had sent an outrider to peruse their back trail and the man had come upon the still warm ashes from a recent cook fire and a recent set of shod horse hooves.

Three days ago, Mateo had sent four riders back to wipe the shadowers from his trail, but the four riders had returned looking sheepish. They'd found no tracks where they were certain they'd spied the riders through field glasses, and found no more ashes from cook fires. It was as though the men had decided against their dangerous mission and simply gone back to where they'd come from.

Or maybe they hadn't been following the gang but were coincidentally crossing the same country. Other desperadoes, most likely, hightailing it toward Mexico.

The wily Mateo had not been satisfied with that explanation, however. He'd kept a rotating string of men out flanking the main gang, scouting a broad area around the gang's back trail. Cuno was one of those outriders today, and a half hour ago, around noon, peering through his spyglass from the ridge of a near bluff, he'd seen one of the riders cross a ridge—or what he'd thought had been a rider. Now, having seen all three from this ridge he now hunkered upon, between two cracked boulders, closer to the badlands, he was sure.

The gang was being shadowed.

He looked around at the vast country around him—distant mountains looming cool and blue in the west and south and northwest, dry washes scoring the nearer land bulging with bluffs, rocky spurs, and tabletop mesas on pedestals of red sandstone. Clay-colored boulders had been strewn around the rolling, sage- and greasewood-carpeted bluffs by ancient glaciers or sent to the earth's surface by violent quakes or gradual upthrusts.

They were somewhere in southern New Mexico, possibly skirting the Arizona line, not far from Old Mexico. It was impossible to know for sure, as they were following no beaten path, though they occasionally crossed a seldom-used stage road and even fainter Indian trail. Small, isolated mountain ranges cropped up everywhere.

Cuno had never been through this country—maybe a northeastern corner of it when he and his father had hauled freight for the frontier cavalry several years ago. There were no near towns. One knew such country only by its landmarks.

Cuno crabbed on his knees and elbows back down the hill. He heard something behind him, and twisted around, reaching for his low-slung .45.

He froze, his hand over the gun's carved ivory grips, and looked down the hill where Wayne Brouschard sat with three other gang members—Chisos McGee, “Dirty” Leo McGivern, and the squat man with the shabby bowler hat, little pig eyes, and silver eyeteeth—Eldon Wald.

Brouschard leaned negligently forward, gloved hands on his saddle horn, his yellow eyes slitted devilishly. He'd mostly healed from the pummeling Cuno had given him, but the cut high on his jaw was a long, thick scab outlined in red.

All four men were holding rifles. Wald held his out from his stout right hip, aimed at Cuno. It didn't appear to be cocked. The apprehension that Cuno felt nip the back of his neck when he saw his enemy here, out here away from Mateo's supervising eye, where anything could happen, settled to a mere prickling of the flesh.

Brouschard had something else in mind, all right. That was plain by his cunning, shit-eating stare, as well as that of Wald and the others. Apparently, he wasn't planning on back-shooting Cuno and throwing him into a deep ravine. The young freighter was a little surprised.

“You seen 'em.” Brouschard made it a statement, not a question, lifting his eyes to indicate the northern distance beyond Cuno.

“Yeah, I seen 'em.”

Cuno closed his spyglass against his knee and heaved himself to his feet, brushing off his denims. Already they were soft and sun-bleached, the dust ground into the tight weave despite the cowhide leggings he'd bought—or Camilla had bought for him, to his nettling chagrin—in Mayville. “There's three of 'em, all right. We'd best—”

“Uh-uh.” Brouschard grinned and shook his head. He raised his voice above the howling wind. “Not
we'd
best.
You'd
best ride on over there and get shed of them three . . . whoever they may be. You go on. You showed you can fight with your fists all right. But out here cold steel's the language spoken.”

The big devil gritted his teeth and jerked his head in the direction of the badlands. “Go ahead. Show us what you got, freighter boy!”

Eldon Wald, Dirty Leo Givern, and Chiso McGee all smiled, Wald keeping his Winchester aimed casually at Cuno. He had his thumb on the hammer.

Cuno hooked his thumbs behind his cartridge belt. “Mateo order this?”

“Mateo ain't here. I'm here. I'm ordering you to ride on over there and wipe them dung beetles off our trail. You do that, and then maybe you got the right to strut some. Then maybe you've earned the right to be pokin' Mateo's sister every night.”

Chisos McGee sneered and let his cold eyes rake Cuno up and down. “Thinks he's some young bull in the studdin' corral.”

Wald laughed, spittle showing at his mouth corners.

“All right.” Cuno walked over to where he'd tied Renegade to a sage shrub. “You're the second in command, I reckon. I follow your orders, Brouschard.”

He looked at the big man and grinned. Then he swung into the saddle. He was tired of Brouschard. He wished he'd killed the man when Mateo had sanctioned it. Now he was just tired enough of him to want to do what the big man obviously thought was a tall order, a damn near impossible challenge, and shove it back in the man's face. It would be the best payback Cuno could think of.

His voice was hard, toneless, his sunburned cheeks flushed with fury. “If they have badges, I'll bring 'em back in about an hour or so. Sound good to you?”

Brouschard narrowed a skeptical eye and said out of one side of his mouth. “You do that. Three tin stars.”

“And what'll you do for me?”

Brouschard pressed his lips together.

“You get off my back,” Cuno said, holding Renegade's reins taut. “And stay off my back. And Camilla's back. One more cross-eyed look at me, one more ogling look at her . . .” He shook his head darkly. “And I'm gonna drill you for keeps without one word of warning. One forty-five pill through your fat gut, and I'm gonna watch you crawl while your miserable life drains out.”

Cuno turned the horse around and galloped off down a crease between the bluffs, heading for the badlands.

Behind him, the four devils stared after him. Brouschard's nostrils flared.

 

Foolhardy machismo had compelled Cuno to follow Brouschard's order, to accept the challenge. He knew that, and he didn't care. He had no reason not to kill the lawmen—if lawmen they were. Out here, if he didn't kill them, they'd likely kill him. Besides, he'd already killed another lawman.

They can only hang you once.

Besides, lawmen or those who professed to ride on the side of the law were little better than Mateo de Cava's pack of unabashed gun wolves. Lawmen had tried to take Cuno's life away for no good reason. He owed them nothing.

They'd made him a wolf, so he'd live like one. From now on it was kill or be killed. He'd live for himself and only himself and whatever girl was warming his blankets at night.

He intended to kill the three men on his back trail, and it didn't matter who they were—bounty hunters, lawmen, or three nuns who'd decided to take up bounty tracking to make a little money for the orphanage.

They'd die however Cuno had to do it.

And he'd ride back to Mateo's camp, laughing like a banshee, and he'd toss those silver stars at Brouschard and relish the expression on the fat man's scarred face.

He found a game and cattle trail into the badlands that appeared to have once been an ancient riverbed, the water having wildly eroded the gray rock into bizarre and twisted shapes, with meandering corridors carved between sheer stone walls. From the cracks in the stone walls, brown, bristly tufts of brush grew raggedly.

As Cuno put Renegade toward the broadest corridor he could find and which appeared to lead in the direction of the other side of the bed, he saw part of a stark, white cow skeleton. The skull had bits of hide remaining around the ears. Otherwise the carcass was completely nude, most of the smaller bones having been carried off by carrion eaters.

Clucking to his horse, Cuno rode on into the corridor that was so narrow in places that both walls often scraped his knees. Mud swallows flitted and shrieked above his head. The wind here was cool and fresh against his face, drying the sweat on his chest and back, but there was also the tangy stench of mineral springs.

Not far from the corridor's mouth, a man's skeleton in ragged cowboy garb sat back in a dim alcove, the skull dipped toward the sun-bleached chest, the white ribs bulging through a tattered and frayed denim shirt.

An arrow protruded from between two of the ribs. A Schofield revolver lay near one of the man's bony hands. Cuno glanced at the boots that were stylishly red though the color had been faded by the weather. Stars had been tooled into the toes.

Cuno wondered how long it had taken the poor drover, who may have ridden down here after stray cattle, to die after his tussel with the Indian who'd killed him. He must have been alone, and he'd likely crawled in here to escape his attackers, never to see the light of day again.

The young freighter shivered involuntarily and rode on down the corridor, the moaning of the wind sounding even eerier now in light of his grisly discovery.