.45-Caliber Desperado (31 page)

On the one hand, he wanted to kill Mason. On the other hand, he didn't want to endanger the gang, which he had already done when he'd chosen not to inform Mateo of his run-in with the deputy U.S. marshal known as Spurr. He wasn't sure why he hadn't told them, as he felt a strong allegiance to Mateo, despite the man's obvious carelessness and cold-bloodedness.

But without Mateo and Camilla, Cuno would have been hanged that day that now seemed so long ago but was only a month or so back; he'd have been tossed without ceremony into a mass grave behind the Arkansas River Federal Penitentiary, where so many other prisoners had been discarded like food scraps from the dining hall tables.

He didn't know why he hadn't told Mateo about Spurr. Maybe his allegiance to the killer wasn't as strong as he thought. Maybe he didn't want to see the old lawman with the weak ticker killed, which Mateo would certainly have seen to if he'd known of the man's existence. He'd have had his men scour the town for him and show him no mercy. No mercy to anyone the lawman was holed up with.

Maybe Cuno's belly had rebelled at that possibility, and not wanting to face it, he'd merely kept his own counsel.

Now, wondering if Spurr and Mason had followed him and the gang out here, Cuno swept the surrounding terrain with the field glasses. Under the climbing sun, he saw nothing out here but sand-colored cliffs and spurs and broad stretches of gravelly flats bristling with bear grass, thickets of mesquite and catclaw, and some scrubby oaks.

“Why are you so interested in the east?”

Cuno lowered the glasses and looked at Mateo, who narrowed a suspicious eye at him. The outlaw leader rolled his bloodshot eyes toward the southwest, waving at the savage Green River. “The stage is that way, gringo. That way!”

“Doesn't hurt to look around,” Cuno said. “Never know if someone might have followed us out of town.”

“I kept an eye on our back trail,” Mateo said. “I'm no fool. If anyone had followed us out of Diamondback, they would be dead by now and the coyotes would be tearing them apart and dragging them off. You just keep an eye on the stage, and when it is close to those rocks, you tell Skinner to send the final signal.”

Cuno glanced at Camilla. Sitting with her back to the scarp, she looked at Cuno from beneath the brim of her straw sombrero skeptically. She had a .45 in her hand, absently, nervously turning the cylinder. Her eyes acquired a question she did not give voice to, but she and Cuno had become close enough that he knew what that question was: “What troubles you, gringo desperado?”

Yes,
Cuno thought,
what troubles me?
He turned the glasses back on the stage that was a hundred and fifty yards away now and closing at a full gallop, the six-hitch team lunging deeply, dust broiling out behind them.

He was watching the stage round a curve and move directly toward him, a hundred yards away and closing fast. There were four riders ahead, all holding rifles either straight up or resting across their saddle pommels, and three riders behind. Cuno stayed low and sheltered the field glass lenses with his hands, as the four riders were swinging their heads around this way and that—all big men in dusters, cartridges winking from bandoliers or cartridge belts wrapped around their waists.

The stage driver was a scrawny but tough-looking desert rat with a canvas hat and a big beard. He wore two pistols in shoulder holsters. The shotgun messenger held a sawed-off shotgun across his thighs; he had another barn blaster beneath the seat; Cuno could see it between his high-topped, mule-eared boots. Both men wore bandannas against the dust kicked up from behind the racing, thundering team.

Cuno lowered the field glasses, and, keeping his head low to the ground, turned to look past Camilla and Mateo to where Frank Skinner stood on the scarp's north end. “All right,” Cuno said, handing the glasses back to Haines and absently running his sweaty palms on his denim-clad thighs.

He turned again to peer through the notch in the scarp just above his head. The first two riders galloped past the scarp, then the other two about ten seconds later. The stage came next, following the second set of lead riders about twenty yards behind.

Cuno lowered his head again, turned to see Skinner come running at a crouch behind the scarp, for the lead riders were now in position to see him. Skinner doffed his hat and dropped to one knee, glancing at Mateo while reaching for his Spencer carbine with one hand. With his other hand, he unsnapped the keeper thong from over the hammer of his Remington .44.

Cuno's heart thudded when he heard a muffled rumble and knew that Nervo, Azuelo, and Calderon had caused the rocks to begin tumbling down the opposite scarp. It was their job to take out the four lead riders. The last three were up to Cuno's bunch.

“All right, amigos,” Mateo said with a desultory sigh, as if he'd rather still be whoring and drinking in Diamondback. He grabbed his Winchester and racked a live round in the chamber. “You know what to do, uh?”

Cuno drew a deep breath and looked at Camilla. She was standing now, glancing at him sidelong while running a hand down her Winchester's barrel—an oblique look, half inquisitive, half accusatory.

Cuno felt a ripple of annoyance as he grabbed his own rifle then followed Mateo, Skinner, and Haines out around the south end of the scarp, running at a crouch while the others took cover behind low boulders or barrel cactus. Camilla ran up behind Cuno, then dashed off to his right, taking cover behind a split, flat-topped rock.

The clatter of the boulders continued to Cuno's right as he dropped behind a gravelly shelf and a gnarled bit of catclaw.

The trail was forty yards straight out from him. The stage was about sixty yards to his right, and now he could hear the driver and shotgun rider shouting as rifles popped and horses whinnied. The first of the three trailing riders were just now passing in front of Cuno, riding side by side and trotting their mounts, holding their reins up close to their chests with one hand, rifles in their other hand.

The last pair of riders was about thirty yards to Cuno's left and obscured by the stage's broiling dust and cactus and shrubs.

To Cuno's left, Mateo's rifle cracked. The outlaw leader gave a high-pitched, ear-rending shriek as he ejected the spent cartridge, seated fresh, and took aim at a second rider through his own billow of powder smoke. Cuno held his finger taut against his own trigger as he saw the second rider, who'd just turned toward him, blown out of his saddle by Mateo's second shot.

“Two down, amigos!” Mateo bellowed, racking a fresh shell and turning to his left.

Haines had apparently already drawn a bead on one of the outriders, as a rifle barked in that direction. Out on the trail, a horse screamed shrilly.

Then Skinner, Mateo, and Camilla were opening up, as well, and Cuno realized that he was still staring straight ahead, at the trail where the first two shot riders' horses were fiddlefooting wildly, one apparently trying to rid itself of his own rider whose boot was hung up in his stirrup.

The horse buck-kicked and curveted, then finally, with another shrill cry, lunged left of the trail and galloped west across the desert.

Suddenly, the rifles stopping barking. The men to Cuno's left were whooping and shouting like lobos. Cuno turned to see Mateo, Skinner, and Haines running off across the desert, heading for the trail where a single man was screaming epithets.

Footsteps sounded to Cuno's right.

He turned to see Camilla running toward him on the trail of the others, gritting her teeth as she racked a cartridge into her Winchester's breech and glanced at Cuno, her eyes two brown saucers of yellow fire. “What're you waiting for? You want to rob a stage, but you don't want to do the work?”

Then she was gone, slamming her cocking lever home and sprinting off after her brother and the others.

CUNO JERKED HIMSELF out of the quicksandlike trance he'd found himself in as soon as the ambush started, and pushed off his knees.

More rifles barked from the direction of the trail. Mateo and the others were finishing off the wounded outrider. The man wailed, and then two more rifles boomed, and the wails fell silent.

Mateo laughed loudly, and Skinner said something.

Cuno heard running footsteps and then he saw all four of the gang running toward the horses they'd tethered in a shallow wash east of the trail. His head still reeling and only half catching up to what had just happened, Cuno broke into a run after them, weaving around the rocks and greasewood shrubs. He gained the wash a few seconds after the others. They were ripping their reins from branches and mounting their horses.

Mateo glanced at Cuno. “What the hell you doing, gringo? If that arm is slowing you down, I'll have to shoot you!”

His molasses-brown eyes blazed with the thrill of the chase and the kill. Whipping his reins against his horse's withers and gouging the mount's flanks with his savage spurs, he gave another raucous bellow and galloped off in the direction of the stage.

None of the others looked at Cuno as they booted their own mounts up out of the wash and took off after their leader. Cuno swung up onto Renegade's back and tried to clear his mind of the screams and the shooting, to replace them all with visions of a strongbox brimming with greenbacks. He booted the paint after the others, galloping off across the desert and onto the trail and then swinging northward to follow the trail behind the others until the stage came into view.

It looked tiny sitting there in the purple shade at the base of the high, shelving escarpment. Ahead of it, dust rose from the pile of boulders freshly tumbled off the incline.

The horses were blowing and stomping. There were three men on the ground, twisted and unmoving. Another was crawling into the brush off the right side of the trail. Female screams emanated from inside the stage, and they grew shriller and louder as Cuno pulled up behind the others, who'd stopped beside the coach.

Mariano Azuelo squatted atop the stage, his red neckerchief billowing. He grinned victoriously, eagerly, as he held his rifle across both shoulders, hooking it there behind his neck by his arms. The short, bandy-legged, Indian-dark Mexican, Franco Nervo, was strolling after the man who'd crawled off the trail.

“Leave him,” Mateo told Nervo, then cast a hard look at Cuno. “Gringo, do some work for a change.” He jerked his head toward the man whom Cuno could hear thrashing in the brush to his right, panting and wheezing desperately.

Cuno glanced at Camilla. She met his gaze with a faintly challenging, inquisitive one of her own.

“Sure.”

Cuno swung his right boot over his saddle horn and dropped to the trail. Hefting his Yellowboy in both hands, he followed the scuff marks the crawling man had made in the trail out into the desert. He could hear the man sobbing and groaning, and when Cuno had walked several yards, he saw the man half crawling and half running, dragging his bloody left leg.

He was a tall man in a powder-blue suit, with a string tie and a crisp white shirt. The back of his suit, just up from his right hip, glistened with fresh blood. Thick auburn hair curled over the collar of his jacket. As he glanced back toward Cuno striding after him, Cuno saw that he wore a dandy's pencil-thin mustache tight against his upper lip. He stretched his lips back, showing a full set of straight, white teeth.

He was one of the moneyed folks, likely a speculator of some sort, who frequently took the Gila Transport line to Snowflake and other burgeoning mining settlements in the mountains. The three Mexican gang members had done a job on him. He was leaving a red trail of bloody scuff marks in the sand and gravel behind him.

“Please,” he begged as Cuno walked up beside him. He dropped to his right hip, and clutching his bloody leg with one hand, the bloody hole in his lower belly with the other, he stared horrifically up at his assailant. “Please . . .” He sobbed, tears running down from light brown eyes to streak the dust on his pale, fleshy, clean-shaven cheeks. “Oh, god—please don't kill me!”

Cuno felt his own chest rising and falling sharply, heavily, as, boots spread, he stared down at the man. A girl's screams continued to emanate from the stage as did the occasional horse clomp and whinny. The morning was so quiet that Cuno could hear his fellow gang members talking amongst themselves.

He kept his eyes on the wounded man before him, who probably wasn't much older than Cuno himself, whose eyes showed such an animal horror that Cuno's spine shriveled at the sight of it.

Cuno glanced toward the stage. Mateo had climbed to the top of the carriage and he was standing there with his feet straddling the strongbox, fists on his hips, staring toward Cuno, his head tipped nearly down to his left shoulder. The shorter Azuelo flanked him, staring curiously over Mateo's shoulder.

Cuno turned his head back quickly toward the mustachioed dandy and raised his rifle. Blood oozed over both the man's hands. His eyes were desperate, pain-wracked, pleading.

“Oh, god. Oh, god. Don't do this.”