.45-Caliber Desperado (3 page)

Another eruption of wry laughter.

“I like him,” Skinner said. “A kid who can beat the stuffing out of Mule Zimmerman and has a sense of humor to boot. Damn, kid, I wish I'd gotten to know you better up in the daylight.”

“We'll shake hands tomorrow,” Cuno said. “Just before they let us drop.”

That had been an attempt to lighten his own mood. It hadn't worked. In fact, it had the opposite effect. A wriggly sensation flooded his bowels, and his chest grew heavy. Christ, he'd faced death many times in the few years since Rolf Anderson and Sammy Spoon had killed his stepmother and his father, and his young bride, July, had been killed by bounty hunters who'd come gunning for Cuno himself.

July and the baby she'd carried inside her, both dead. Murdered.

But he'd never been confronted by his own demise quite like this. Beat up and chained to a rock wall in a fetid, rat-infested, near-dark mine shaft. Had he always wanted to live this badly? You'd think, after all he'd been through—all the heartbreak and torment—he wouldn't mind dying so much.

Or maybe he just wanted to go out fighting. Not like this, trussed up like the fatted calf. But that's what was likely to happen. Even prisoners not sentenced to hang were hanged on the warden's whim. There was no proving they hadn't died trying to escape or from natural causes or even committed suicide, which happened every day, sometimes by twos and threes. He'd watched other prisoners led up from the Pit and over to the gallows, and they'd been chained so securely and guarded so closely that escape would have been impossible.

Cuno gave another furious tug on his chains, rattling them loudly.

“Forget it, kid.” Zimmerman sneered. “Once you're thrown in here, there's nowhere to go except heaven or hell. You'd best put the rest of your time getting good with your Maker.”

“Damned if I have one.”

Skinner laughed. “Damned if ya don't!”

“Such sacrilege,” muttered Arguello.

 

Cuno had never known a stretch of time to pass so slowly and miserably. Having his arms chained above his head, the blood draining out of them to pool in his shoulders, in addition to the pain of his broken nose, was exhausting.

It was also painful; he felt certain that his shoulders would pop from their sockets and hang by nerves and sinew.

For short periods, he could shove the pain into the back of his mind and doze, but that ability diminished as he weakened. The dripping of the spring seemed to grow louder and louder with every few drops until, when the sun had set and the pit was in total darkness, it sounded like the metronomic crashing of symbols.

The night became so slow and agonizing, every second seeming like a long, torturous hour to be endured, that he found himself eagerly awaiting morning and his journey to the gallows. Death would be his only relief, and he looked forward to it like a dry desert traveler anticipates a drink of cool spring water.

Sometime in the night, he must have slept because his beloved young half-Indian bride, July, came to him, knelt, and softly kissed his battered nose. Then his eyes and finally his lips.

So real was the dream that he thought he could smell the girl's own unique aroma of chokecherry blossoms and sage mixed with two or three other fragrances he couldn't name.

He opened his eyes, half expecting to see her there but consciously knowing he would not. But he savored the smell of her, anyway. Until the dream, he realized that he'd forgotten what she'd smelled like. His heart swollen with the bitter heartbreak he'd managed to suppress until now, he silently wept with his chin hanging low against his chest, hearing a couple of the other condemned men crying softly as well as they endured their own individual torments that would find relief only in death.

When morning came, he nearly wept again with relief. The bits of light slanting through the airshafts revealed the men around him hanging from the spikes in the walls, only half alive. The half that still lived was praying for death.

Beside Cuno, Mule Zimmerman sat with his chin dipped low, slowly shaking his big, bald head in misery. He was making a low mewling sound that was probably as close as the giant could come to crying.

When the guards finally clattered down the stone steps, unlocking and opening the heavy timbered door, light spilled down from the morning sun above, revealing four men still alive—Cuno, Skinner, Zimmerman, and Arguello, who was out of his mind and muttering softly in Spanish for his beloved
Jesus
to fly down and waft him away on silken wings.

The other five men slumped against the walls, arms above their heads bowed low in death.

“Your brethren above is ready for their entertainment,” the warden bellowed.

His laughter boomed throughout the mine shaft that had overnight become catacombs.

CHAINS CLINKED AS the four weary prisoners stumbled up the stone steps of the pit.

The light was like spears impaling Cuno's eyes; it set up a vicious pounding in his already aching head. Connected to Arguello by a chain at the waist, he stumbled up the steps, stubbing his toes but barely registering that relatively minor pain below the other more severe misery in his head, face, and shoulders.

The Mexican was still muttering prayers as he shuffled barefoot up the cracked and pitted steps toward the grinning countenance of Warden Castle, who stood silhouetted in the open doorway at the top. Behind Cuno came Mule Zimmerman, half dragging Frank Skinner, who, Cuno had learned, had been in the Pit for three days. It was a wonder the man was still alive, if you could call his condition living. If the position you were chained in didn't kill you, the lack of food and water did. Skinner had survived, he'd indicated, by lapping up a rivulet of spring water tricking down the wall near where he'd been secured and killing a rat in the manner he'd instructed Zimmerman.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” the warden said, clamping a hand on Arguello's shoulder in a mock gesture of brotherly love. “Did we all sleep well?”

The pain subsided in Cuno's eyes enough that he was able to hold a scowl on the man as he stumbled past him and out into the yard. Castle was grinning, his teeth white beneath his impeccable mustache. His eyes were like flint. Cuno hadn't wanted to kill someone so badly since he'd hunted the leader of the outlaw gang who'd killed his beloved July—Page Hudson.

Before that, Rolf Anderson and Sammy Spoon.

Now, if he could have managed the maneuver, he'd have lunged at the man and, with no other weapon handy, torn his throat out with his teeth. Castle turned his head to follow Cuno into the yard with his eyes, chuckling tauntingly as though reading the young man's mind.

“Warden, sir,” Mule Zimmerman said behind Cuno, “kindly go fuck yourself. Lord knows you likely haven't gotten it from anyone else in years.”

“Oh, no—he's gotten it,” Skinner said in a low, breathy growl that was all the voice he could conjure in his condition. “I think him and Dunlap been boning each other in the stables of a lazy summer afternoon.” Skinner gave a droopy-eyed half grin.

Dunlap was one of the Pit guards coming up behind Skinner now. A man nearly the size of Mule Zimmerman, he raised a leg to kick Skinner, but Castle stepped forward to slap the man's shoulder with the back of his hand.

“Now, Sergeant—is that any way to treat our prisoners?” He pitched his voice with mocking admonishment. “Besides, if you kick him down, you'll likely have to carry him up the gallows steps. I don't think the poor man—the fierce train robber himself!—has an ounce of strength left in his wasted carcass.”

“Like I said, Warden,” Zimmerman said as the doomed procession was hazed eastward along the morning-bright prisoner yard, “kindly go fuck yourself, sir.”

Just then, as he stumbled along behind Arguello, noting the other prisoners watching from their barrack cells or from out in the yard, he heard a sonorous voice begin singing “Bringing in the Sheaves.” Cuno wasn't sure who was singing the hymn, as he was still too disoriented from the night in the Pit and from the fever in his brain to get his bearings in the bright yard, but at first he thought the singer, a former choirboy judging from the quality of the man's voice, was trying to add comfort to the condemned procession of shuffling, squinting, chain-rattling prisoners. But then a certain buoyancy in the voice and a few snickers rising around him, told him the man was only mocking.

Mocking the walking dead men. Cuno felt little acrimony toward the singer. He'd likely been here long enough to know the score. Every man here was one lost fight or one verbal misstep from the gallows himself.

As the guards led them around the barracks at the eastern side of the yard, the warden sauntering along to one side in his straw boater and flicking his quirt casually against his thigh as he strolled, Cuno was to the point that he just wanted to get it over with. He'd always found some comfort in believing, or at least hoping, that he'd see his pa and ma and stepmother and July and the baby again in some other world, and that prospect somewhat eased the fear in his shuddering heart.

The prisoners who'd been let out of their cells to watch the hanging moved as several loose groups around the yard, following the prisoners under the watchful eyes of the many shotgun-wielding guards. In the two guardhouses on the gallows' side of the yard, the Gatling guns swung on their pedestals as the guards, standing under the towers' peaked, shake-shingled roofs—two to each tower—kept the brass canisters with their six barrel spouts trained on the prisoners.

The gallows stood bathed in buttery morning sunshine rising over the southern Colorado desert of sage and bristly cedars. The log and pine board scaffold stood constantly rigged with nooses, so that all that needed to be done for a hanging was to lead the prisoners up the ten steps to the platform, drop the nooses around the condemned men's necks, and trip the wooden lever that released the trapdoors beneath their feet. The oily musk of the creosote-slathered boards and logs made Cuno's eyes water.

There was never a preacher around, or even an executioner. Only the warden and his guards, all wearing their mocking, eager smiles.

Seeing that grin again on the warden's face as he shuffled up the steps behind Arguello, Cuno knew one last blast of hot fury. He hoped he could return just once to this miserable world after he'd passed to haunt Henry Castle until the man died of a long, slow stroke that blew up his heart like a good portion of Magic Dynamite.

When Cuno and the other condemned prisoners had been released from their chains by the four guards who'd followed them onto the platform, the nooses were placed around their necks and the knots tightened. Cuno felt his pulse throb against the rope digging into his neck. Below him, on the floor of the prison yard, the warden turned and shouted for the singer to stop singing now, or he'd join the condemned on the platform.

The song broke off abruptly, mid-note.

The warden turned toward the condemned, flashed that smile again.

“Anyone have anything they'd like to say?”

Cuno had lots he'd like to have said, but he saw little point in it. Castle was only mocking him and the others again, as always. The other men must have realized that he was only trying to goad them into making fools of themselves. All, including big Mule Zimmerman standing slumped to Cuno's left, remained silent.

On the other side of Zimmerman, Frank Skinner, who must have been forty or older, stood with bent knees, silver-blond hair blowing around in the dry morning breeze. The Pit had finally almost gotten the train robber who had to be tough as whang leather to have survived as long as he had.

Now, like the others, he was just waiting for the relief of a quick death.

Cuno hoped the sandbags were weighted properly. Otherwise, he and the others would merely hang beneath the scaffold and choke to death, which is probably how Castle had planned it, anyway. Oh, well, the longest it had taken the other men he'd watched die was four minutes. One they had to hang a second time, but Cuno couldn't be that unlucky, could he?

Castle doffed his hat, twirled it on his finger. “Well, since you're all gonna be so grim about it, and it's already starting to get hot, I reckon we might as well get this show on the road.”

Cuno saw a sudden quick movement in the guard tower on the prison's southeast corner. His mind barely registered the movement. He had other, more important matters at the moment. But then he heard the sudden chirp of a Gatling's swivel.

As Castle turned toward the man standing at the end of the gallows, whose hand was on the lever that would drop the trapdoors out beneath the condemned men's feet, there was a short burst of rapid fire that sounded like a hammer hitting an empty steel barrel four or five times very quickly. The bullets tore into the ground like giant raindrops, blowing up dust and horseshit. Cuno slid his glance to the mustached man with his hand on the trapdoor lever, and now he saw a black splotch on the man's forehead. A thin stream of red sprayed out the back of his skull.

Warden Castle screamed.

Cuno turned his eyes forward to see the warden's knees buckle as he flung his left hand out behind him to grab the back of his left thigh. His white teeth shone beneath his impeccable mustache in an agonized grimace.

The guard who'd been about to pull the trapdoor lever dropped straight back to hit the ground without breaking his fall, a look of dumb awe making his heavy lower jaw sag. At the same time, all the other guards swung around toward the wounded guard, bringing rifles and shotguns to bear.

Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam
-
bam!

A line of four guards jerked as the bullets ripped through their uniform tunics, spraying blood into the dirt behind them.