.45-Caliber Desperado (35 page)

“Nice and easy, now, Sheriff,” Cuno said, prodding the man with a gentle push on his rifle.

Mason held his own reins in his hands. Now, lowering the reins before him while sitting straight-backed and tense in his saddle, he tapped his heels against his pinto's ribs and started off down the trail. Cuno put Renegade down the slope, staying close enough to Mason, riding just off the man's left stirrup, in fact, to keep the Winchester barrel snugged against the back of the man's neck.

Cuno could hear Camilla's horse's slow hoof thuds behind him, following about five yards back. As Cuno rode, swaying easily in his saddle, he raked his gaze around the soldiers below and then to Spurr, whose craggy, chestnut face he could see peering over the top of a rock about fifty yards east along the rim of the mesa.

Renegade dropped gradually down the gentle grade, Cuno leaning slightly back in the saddle but keeping his right arm fully extended with the Winchester, holding the rope in the same hand against the rifle's neck. His arm was getting tired, but it kept him distracted from the continuing burn in his left forearm, a little worse now with all the tramping around.

Sweat trickled down his back. He was relatively sure the soldiers wouldn't disobey Spurr's orders, but there was no telling with raw recruits, which was what several of the young soldiers appeared to be. He'd be glad to get clear, though he had little doubt the soldiers and Spurr would follow him clear to the border. What would he do with Mason?

Kill him?

The man deserved nothing less. Cuno had already killed one innocent lawman, and Mason wasn't really all that innocent, after all. Besides, if he was as close to the border as he thought he was, he could kill Mason and hightail it with Camilla on down into the cool, blue Mexican mountains and never be seen or heard from again, his bills collected.

He and the girl could live the rest of their lives quite comfortably with the money in the sack dangling from her saddle horn.

He followed Mason onto the second switchback in the trail. Down, down they dropped until they bottomed out on the gravelly wash. The sergeant, who had a knotted white scar on his blunt chin, regarded Cuno stoically, a nerve in his cheek fluttering along his jawline. Cuno pinched his hat to the man.

“Through there,” he told Mason, nodding toward a gap between two mounds of granite-laced limestone. A well-trammeled trail lay there, between clumps of brown bromegrass and jimsonweed, angling south down a narrower wash intersecting with the main one. A soldier stood to the left of the gap, sort of tucked into the rocks there. He stared defiantly up at Cuno, freckles sprayed across his deep red cheeks, a strip of snow-white skin showing just beneath his hat band.

He held his rifle up across his chest, and he was flexing his right hand around the Spencer's neck.

Cuno kept his eyes on him, and as he and Mason approached the lad, the private's taut cheeks slackened. He slowly lowered his rifle to his side and slid his blue gaze away.

Cuno could hear Camilla's horse plodding along behind him.

A horse whinnied shrilly. Cuno jerked with a start and drew back on Renegade's reins. Wincing and canting his head forward, away from the rifle barrel, Mason drew his own horse to a stop. There was another whinny, nearer and shriller, and he whipped his head around to see Camilla's chestnut shaking its head as it sent the last notes of the scream careening toward the mesa ridge behind them.

The chestnut tried to rear. Camilla cursed and held the reins taut, keeping the horse's forelegs on the ground while it snorted and blew.

Cuno's heart raced. He looked around to see what had startled the chestnut.

Then he saw the soldiers' horses tied to a picket line off the right side of the trail, in an alcove of sorts amongst the rocks. A rangy bay stood sideways to the trail, regarding Cuno and the others curiously, its bright eyes white-ringed.

“Shhh,” Camilla told the chestnut, leaning forward to run a calming hand across the horse's left wither. “It's all right. He's just curious—that's all.”

Cuno glanced around at the soldiers. He winced slightly at the pain in his right arm but kept the Winchester snugged taut against the sheriff's head. When he saw that none of the soldiers appeared to be raising a weapon, he put his head forward once more.

Mason had turned his own head sideways, looking back at Cuno. Side teeth shone beneath his slightly upturned lip. Fear shone in the sheriff's eyes.

Feeling a dull satisfaction, his heart slowing, Cuno said, “Ahead, Sheriff. Nice an' slow . . .”

Mason touched his heels to the pinto's flanks. Cuno did likewise to Renegade's flanks, and the three continued on up the draw, Cuno glancing back to see the wash dwindling behind Camilla, boulders crowding into his view from both sides, the soldiers walking out away from the rocks now to track the outlaws with their baleful gazes. The trail angled around a large chunk of sandstone and mica-flecked shale shouldering into the canyon from the left, and the soldiers and the main wash were out of sight.

Only the mesa loomed, glowing dark copper now as the sun continued angling westward.

The trail continued angling on up the draw, the walls of which lowered gradually until the canyon leveled out on a broad flat peppered with more sage, catclaw, and gnarled cedars. Here, Cuno finally removed his Winchester from Mason's neck, but kept the noose on the man. They all three broke into a gallop and held the hard, ground-consuming pace until they stopped to rest their horses at a spring lined with rocks and small willows.

Cuno scouted the area on foot. The northern distance stretching back toward the mesa was clear. The Diamondback range humped up beyond the mesa—rocky and pink and striped with salmon.

Cuno looked around with his field glasses. No, nothing out there. Even the breeze had died. But he knew Spurr was there. Somewhere. The old marshal was keeping pace. Bad ticker and all. The mossyhorned bastard was not accustomed to losing, would not give up the chase until Cuno and Camilla had reached the border.

“Get over here, Mason,” he said as he headed back to the spring.

Camilla and the sheriff were sitting with their backs against a low, stone shelf on the far side of the spring. Camilla's rifle lay across her thighs, the barrel angled toward the sheriff, who sat with his hands tied behind his back, the noose still circling his neck. The bloodstain on his lower left side had grown. He and Camilla were both looking at Cuno.

“What for?”

“I said get over here.”

The sheriff looked at Camilla. She kept her dark eyes on Cuno.

“I won't tell you again,” Cuno warned.

Mason heaved himself to his feet and tramped heavy-footed over to where Cuno stood on the other side of the spring. He was breathing hard and sweating, his shirt basted against his chest and shoulders. He grunted softly, painfully, against the wound that had opened in his side.

“You gonna kill me now?”

Cuno shoved the man to his knees. “Put your head down.”

“I'll take it from the front.”

“Get your head down!”

Mason sighed and lowered his head to the ground. He felt a sharp pain against the back of his head, and he figured it must have been the bullet. He was dead. But then the pain awakened him. That and the thud of shod hooves growing louder. He heard a horse blowing nearby and the squawk of saddle leather.

“Good Christ.” Spurr's voice.

There was the soft crunch of moccasins in the gravel near Mason. Someone shook his shoulder.

“Sheriff?” Spurr's labored breath whistled in his nostrils. “You with us, Sheriff?”

Mason groaned, lifted his head, felt goat heads and gravel sticking to it. He blinked. Spurr reached up and brushed the gravel and burrs from the sheriff's forehead with a gloved hand.

Mason looked around, frowning. “What . . . ?”

No sign of the firebrand and the Mex girl. No sign of their horses, either. Nor of Mason's, which had been tethered to a cedar to the left of the stone shelf.

Mason brought his gaze closer in, saw the money sack sitting beside him, two feet away, just as Spurr picked it up and untied the rope around its neck with one hand. The old marshal looked inside the bag and frowned. He couldn't quite believe what he was seeing. Spurr had thought maybe they'd left him a couple of angry rattlesnakes.

He shoved a hand into the sack, pulled up a fistful of greenbacks, small bundles of twenty and hundred dollar bills wrapped in heavy brown paper bands.

“All of it there?” Rubbing the sack of his head where Massey had tattooed him, Mason looked incredulous.

“Looks like it. Won't know for sure till we count it.”

“Where's Wilson?”

“Worthless bastard's waitin' for us a mile north. I told him to stay put, wait for me to send a mirror message. He done sent a few of his boys back to Diamondback with the girl.”

Spurr returned the several bundles of greenbacks to the bag and dropped it to the ground. He tramped around the spring and climbed atop the stone shelf, staring southward across a broad expanse of desert painted with the reds and pinks of a fast-approaching sunset and rolling away toward low, violet mountains that marked the Mexican border.

Vaguely, he saw two riders and one riderless horse galloping off across the flat toward the mountains. They were little larger than pinheads from this distance of nearly a mile.

Spurr shook his head, cursed under his breath.

Captain Wilson hadn't made it to Diamondback until early that morning. He said he'd been running down renegade Apaches before getting caught out in the storm, but Spurr had smelled hooch on the man's breath. If the man had gotten his soldiers to town just an hour sooner, Spurr would have had Massey in custody now.

Now, it looked like the gringo desperado had gotten plum away. Scot-fuckin'-free. No telling if he'd ever show his face north of the border again. Spurr didn't want to go after him—not really, for he felt the kid was in a situation he had little control over—but he had to. Running down desperadoes was his job.

“Forget it, Spurr.”

The old marshal wheeled in surprise. Mason was standing just on the other side of the springs that was turning lavender now in the late afternoon's tender rays. He was dusty, dirty, sweaty, and crestfallen.

“I don't forget nothin', Sheriff,” he heard himself say with a passion he no longer felt. “You local boys don't understand us federals.”

“Didn't you say we got some slavers who need runnin' down in the Nations?”

Spurr stared at the sheriff.

“Shit,” Mason said. “Massey and the girl'll be in Mexico by sundown.”

“You think 'cause he didn't kill you and left the money, we should let him go? I don't know why he did that—maybe he has
some
good in him. So do a lot of 'em. But he's a convicted murderer and an escaped convict from a federal penitentiary. That there's the sorta thing I don't never let go.”

“Let it go, Spurr.” Mason turned away, stared back toward Diamondback unseen across the vast, rolling desert.

“Why?”

“Because, goddamnit . . . !” Mason turned to glower at Spurr over his right shoulder. Lowering his voice, his features turning pensive, dropping his gaze to the grass around him as though searching for something he'd lost, he said, “I just been realizin' lately . . . I . . . I think I mighta made a mistake.” He paused. “You ever do that?”

Spurr looked around uncertainly. He puffed his chest out, tramped heavily on down the shelf toward Mason. “Of course I ain't never made a mistake. And I'm insulted that you'd suggest I ever had!”

“Christ, Spurr.”

“Come on, goddamnit,” Spurr said, poking his hat brim low against the falling sun as he tramped on back to Cochise. He hoped Mason didn't see the relief in his eyes. “Let's get you back to Diamondback. Get you back in June's bed and on the mend again. And then maybe,
just maybe
, I'll let you pound the trail o' them consarned slave traders with me up in the Nations. I'll be goddamned if I let a winter come without runnin'
them
wolves to ground!”

Mason felt his lips quirk a reluctant smile as he walked toward Spurr and the big, waiting roan. “Spurr, about you an' June . . .”

“That's none of your business.”

“Was that you an' her I heard the other night—?”

“I told you, Sheriff, that is none of your goddamned business. Another word out of you, and I'm gonna leave your sorry ass out here to fend for yourself against the bobcats and rattlesnakes. Lord knows me and Cochise could get to town on the lee side of supper if we didn't have to tote your rancid hide!”

“Ah, shit, Spurr.” Mason chuckled.

When Mason had climbed up behind the old marshal, Spurr heeled Cochise north toward Diamondback. He glanced once more over his shoulder, saw nothing but the darkling desert behind him.

The riders were gone, swallowed by the shadows of the far mountains.

Spurr glanced at Mason, narrowing a speculative eye.

He remembered the eyes of Cuno Massey staring down at him over the kid's Winchester. He'd had Spurr cold. He could have killed him, and he hadn't.

Had those been the eyes of a killer? No. More like the eyes of a young bobcat only wanting to be left alone.

Alone in Mexico with his girl.

Well, at least Spurr would get to spend more time with June in the days ahead while the sheriff healed. Quite a woman, June Dickinson. If they made the mattress sing again like it sang the other night, her skills as a doctor might come in handy . . .