Read Last Lawman (9781101611456) Online

Authors: Peter Brandvold

Last Lawman (9781101611456)

BOOK: Last Lawman (9781101611456)
7.23Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

One Final Request

“Dusty…?”

Spurr grimaced as he placed a hand on the sheriff’s left shoulder. He was shot up bad. He might have been dead. He wasn’t moving. Spurr jerked the man’s shoulder slightly and was surprised when Mason stiffened and lifted his head a little.

The man grunted, tried straightening his back, but cursed softly and rested his chest back down against the grulla’s neck. His hat was gone, and his thin, sweat-matted hair was mussed.

“Easy, Dusty,” Spurr said. “I’ll get you down.”

Mason turned to him. Even the man’s face was splattered with blood—likely from the many wounds in his chest and belly. Blood slithered down from both nostrils, matting his mustache. He ground his jaws. His eyes were dark and flat with pain.

“Spurr…?” His voice was a wheeze that barely made it through his lips.

Spurr squeezed the man’s bloody arm, his own knees threatening to buckle. “I’m here, Dusty.” He blinked hard as tears oozed out of his eyes to roll down his cheeks.

“Spurr,” Mason said again, only slightly louder this time. His eyes bored into Spurr’s for a full ten seconds, his jaws quivering as he ground them together. And then he said between quick, shallow breaths, “Kill ’em….”

Berkley titles by Peter Brandvold

The Rusty Spurr Series
THE LAST LAWMAN

The .45-Caliber Series

.45-CALIBER CROSS FIRE
.45-CALIBER DESPERADO
.45-CALIBER FIREBRAND
.45-CALIBER WIDOW MAKER
.45-CALIBER DEATHTRAP
.45-CALIBER MANHUNT
.45-CALIBER FURY

The Bounty Hunter Lou Prophet Series

THE DEVIL’S LAUGHTER
THE DEVIL’S WINCHESTER
HELLDORADO
THE GRAVES AT SEVEN DEVILS
THE DEVIL’S LAIR
STARING DOWN THE DEVIL
THE DEVIL GETS HIS DUE
RIDING WITH THE DEVIL’S MISTRESS
DEALT THE DEVIL’S HAND
THE DEVIL AND LOU PROPHET

The Rogue Lawman Series

GALLOWS EXPRESS
BORDER SNAKES
BULLETS OVER BEDLAM
COLD CORPSE, HOT TRAIL
DEADLY PREY
ROGUE LAWMAN

The Sheriff Ben Stillman Series

HELL ON WHEELS
ONCE LATE WITH A .38
ONCE UPON A DEAD MAN
ONCE A RENEGADE
ONCE HELL FREEZES OVER
ONCE A LAWMAN
ONCE MORE WITH A .44
ONCE A MARSHAL
MANHUNT

Other titles

BLOOD MOUNTAIN

THE LAST LAWMAN

A RUSTY SPURR NOVEL

PETER BRANDVOLD

BERKLEY BOOKS, NEW YORK

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

THE LAST LAWMAN

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley edition / October 2012

Copyright © 2012 by Peter Brandvold.
Cover illustration by Bruce Emmett.
Cover design by Edwin Tse.
Interior text design by Laura K. Corless.

All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

ISBN: 978-1-101-61145-6

BERKLEY
®
Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
BERKLEY
®
is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

Table of Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

ONE

The kid cried, “Spurr, you whoremongerin’ ole devil—I’m all shot up over here!”

“I told you to stay to ground, you worthless pup!”

Guns blasted from the three front windows of the outlaw shack. Chunks of hot lead screeched through the air, thumped into the ground near where Deputy Sheriff Kenny Potter lay writhing, his rifle in the dirt beside him. He had both hands cupped to his bloody left side, holding his guts in.

“Spurr, I can’t get up!” the kid cried as a bullet blew up sand and gravel two feet beside his curly head. He whipped his face away from where the bullet had hit, screaming,
“Spurr!”

Deputy United States Marshal Spurr Morgan chewed out a frustrated curse, brushed the back of his buckskin glove across his patch-bearded cheek, and raised his ’66 Winchester to his bowed, old shoulder. He fired once, twice, three times, the rifle thundering and stabbing smoke and flames toward the brush-roofed, adobe-brick cabin.

The echoes sounded like shrill witches’ squeals as they chased each other around the New Mexico canyon.

The sun-washed outlaw shack fronted a lumpy stone escarpment about sixty yards away from the dry wash that Spurr was hunkered in. Two of his bullets hammered the gray wooden casing around two windows with loud, wooden
whumps!
The third slug winged through the window right of the Z-frame door, evoking a clipped scream from inside.

“Goddamn you, Spurr!” shouted one of the train robbers holed up in the shack. “You just blew one of my ears off!”

“Come on out of there peaceable-like!” the old lawman shouted, “or I’m gonna shoot off a helluva lot more than that, Philpot!”

Spurr, Sheriff Ralph Adams, and Adams’s deputy, Kenny Potter, had tracked the outlaw gang, known far and wide as Philpot’s Dogs, out of Jicarilla, New Mexico Territory, and into the nearby Jicarilla Mountains. Adams had been shot in the left leg the day before when Hector Philpot’s bunch had bushwhacked the three lawmen. Spurr had patched up the sheriff as well as he could and sent him back home for tending.

Spurr and the young deputy, Potter, whom Spurr doubted was a day past twenty and was as green as willow bark, had continued to the shack here along Turkey Gulch, in one of the range’s dry canyons. The gang of five was holed up inside with the eight thousand dollars they’d stolen from a payroll shipment belonging to a mine in southern Colorado. The mine had been contracted by the federal government, which had made looting it a federal offense.

Thus, Chief Marshal Henry Brackett had sent his most experienced, also oldest, deputy, Spurr Morgan, down from his headquarters in Denver to run the dogs to ground. Since Philpot’s gang had shot up Jicarilla on their southern dash to the border, Adams had insisted that he and his wet-behind-the-ears deputy throw in with the federal lawdog.

BOOK: Last Lawman (9781101611456)
7.23Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Creeping with the Enemy by Kimberly Reid
The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner
Cooking Up Love by Cynthia Hickey
The Endearment by Lavyrle Spencer
The Bay of Love and Sorrows by David Adams Richards
The Angry Tide by Winston Graham
The Doctor's Undoing by Allie Pleiter
Christmas at Promise Lodge by Charlotte Hubbard