Last Lawman (9781101611456) (8 page)

She was only half consciously aware that the dress did little to scuttle the lusty glances directed her way. And she had no idea that many of the single as well as the married men of the town were covertly licking their proverbial chops and fantasizing about how the widow of Daniel Wilde would look with her clothes scattered about their bedroom floors.

Erin was lushly pretty. Her full hips and bust, olive-hued skin, passionate eyes, and thick chestnut hair, which often defied her attempts at containing it in a conservative bun atop her head—all betrayed the heritage of her Irish mother. Her pragmatic, hardworking nature hailed from her Norwegian father. It was those practical, ever-hopeful eyes that she directed out the sashed window and into the wide, dusty street of Sweetwater just as the riders appeared on her right.

Led by a tall man in a top hat and cream duster riding a mouse-brown gelding and with a short, stout shotgun dangling against his belly, the group slowed their mounts and then walked them along the street toward the mercantile.
They were a hard-looking, dusty, unshaven lot. The leader appeared to have grease or something—possibly tattoos—on his broad, ruddy cheeks above a thick, scraggly beard.

Something about the gang made Erin uneasy. But she was a businesswoman, and that part of her hoped they patronized her store. Turning away from the window and nervously pressing her dress tight across her thighs with her hands, she left the office that still smelled of her late husband’s cigar smoke and descended the stairs to the main store below. She walked between the aisles of dry goods to the front of the store and looked through the glass upper panel of the door on which
WILDE MERCANTILE—DRY GOODS AND SUNDRIES
was stenciled in gold-leaf lettering.

The gang had stopped in the street fronting the store. They milled now, holding their sweat-lathered horses on tight reins as they looked around. Their dust was catching up to them, and the sunlight touched it, making it glow an ethereal gold-brown.

Several townsfolk had stopped on both sides of the street to regard the strangers with wary curiosity. One of the gang members (and that’s what they looked like, Erin decided now, as well-armed as they were—a gang) rode double with a young, sour-faced woman with long blond hair and very little on her body save for a skimpy, torn dress that revealed nearly all of her heavy breasts. Her pale legs were bare. She wore no shoes.

Erin stood frozen in place before the mercantile’s front door, staring out, her heart quickening dreadfully, palms tingling. The gang leader in the feathered top hat sat his horse straight out before her, about fifty feet off the mercantile’s loading dock. As more people gathered on the boardwalks around him, he lifted his chin and flared his nostrils and shouted, “I am Clell Stanhope and we are the gang known far and wide as the Vultures!”

The townsmen all looked at each other fearfully and shifted their feet on the boardwalks.

Their reaction apparently pleased Stanhope. He shaped a grin that made the two vultures tattooed on his cheeks spread their wings, and said, “Heard of us, have ye? Well, don’t fret. We’re just here to pack on some trail supplies and git on our way. Won’t pay for ’em, of course. If that’s a problem for any of you, please step out and say so now or forever hold your peace!”

A man had been walking along the far side of the street, heading toward the gang. Erin recognized town marshal Jake Mercer, saw the five-pointed tin star pinned to his blue shirt. The mule ears of his boots flapped as he walked, and the brim of his floppy felt hat bent in the breeze, flickering shade across his freckled, clean-shaven face.

Erin’s insides coiled when she saw Mercer approach the group, stop, and point a finger at Stanhope. “You, sir, are not wanted here. You’re outlaws. Common trail wolves. And if you think you’re going to loot my town, you have another think comin’!”

“That a fact?” Stanhope leaned forward on his saddle horn, regarding the lawman amusedly.

Mercer’s hard, authoritative look softened. His eyes flicked across the gang before him, gradually acquiring a fearful cast. His throat moved as he swallowed.

Stanhope’s right hand whipped across his belly. He brought up the savage-looking shotgun hanging from his neck by a wide leather lanyard. The gun exploded in his hand. It sounded like three sticks of dynamite going off.

Mercer jerked as though he’d been hit by lightning. He flew straight back into a water trough. The water splashed out of the trough, then closed over his lolling, lifeless body, arms and legs dangling down the trough’s wooden sides, his hat riding the surface above his forehead and squeezed-shut eyes.

“Ohh!”
Erin heard the exclamation explode from her throat as she opened the door and fairly bounded outside, fury and exasperation boiling through her.

As she marched across the loading dock toward the front steps, Stanhope jerked his head and shotgun toward her, narrowing one eye as he stared down the barrel at her.

“Ma!”

Erin froze, then whipped her head to the left. Her son, Jim, stood across the near side street, under the porch awning fronting Burnside’s Harness Shop. Earlier, she’d sent the ten-year-old out running errands, and he must have been heading back to the mercantile when the gang had ridden into town. Jim was a small, wiry lad with straight brown bangs cropped just above his eyebrows, beneath the brim of his floppy felt hat. His horrified eyes bored into those of his equally horrified mother.

“Stay there, son!” she yelled, throwing out a waylaying hand and turning back to Stanhope.

The outlaw slid his gaze to the boy, then returned it to Erin. He was still holding the cocked shotgun on her, his gloved hand steady. His evil, faintly sneering eyes flicked down her body and back up again, acquiring a cast of lusty approval.

His eyes glinted, and then he swung the pistol around at the other townsfolk, mostly men but also a few ladies in sunbonnets who’d been out shopping, standing around in hushed awe.

Bean Wilson and Edgar Longbow, who owned shops near where the sheriff flopped in the stock trough, walked meekly over to the lawman, casting their terror-racked gazes from Mercer to the Vultures sitting their horses in the middle of the broad street. Bean held a broom in one hand. Edgar Longbow, short and paunchy, stretched his pink cheeks back from his teeth in revulsion. Neither man was armed. In fact, she knew of few citizens in Sweetwater who went around with a pistol lashed to his hip. The only men she usually saw wearing pistols around here were cowpunchers from area ranches, in town for fun or business, or the occasional market hunters who visited Sweetwater for ammunition and trail supplies.

Erin could tell by the druggist’s expression as he peered down at Mercer that the town’s only lawman, the only man here who routinely carried a gun, was dead.

“Anyone got anything they wanna get off their chests?” Stanhope said, looking around at the fearful faces staring back at him.

An eerie hush had fallen over the town. There was only Stanhope’s voice, echoing around the false fronts of the main street. His cream duster blew out around him. His savage gun smoked in his hand.

“All right, then.” The gang leader let the gun dangle freely down his chest. “We’ll just be doin’ our business and be on our way.”

He rode back through the gang, yelling orders that Erin could only hear pieces of, when Stanhope turned his head toward her as his grulla clomped along the street. She turned to Jim, her heart racing, wanting only to get the boy out of harm’s way. She beckoned him off down the side street, then turned back toward the main street when she heard hooves clomping loudly.

Stanhope rode toward her, the man’s ugly face hard, his eyes—one brown, one gray—bright and leering as they roamed over her, more slowly this time. The men around him were yelling and howling and galloping off toward the various shops, a couple triggering pistols into the air. The men of Sweetwater yelled and the women screamed, scattering, some ducking into shops, others running off down the breaks between buildings.

“While you fellas are gettin’ whiskey and guns an’ ammo an’ such,” Stanhope shouted as he put his horse up to the hitchrack fronting Erin’s store, “I do believe I’ll lay in a few dry goods over here at the mercantile!”

Erin stared at the man. Her heart drummed a war rhythm in her chest. She wrung her hands against her belly and backed away, hating her fear. She had several rifles inside—none loaded, all for sale—but she should make a break for
one of the new Winchesters and at least try to shove some shells into its breech. She, like all the others in Sweetwater, should at least
try
to defend themselves.

What were they, sheep helpless against this pack of bloodthirsty wolves they’d all heard so much about—the Vultures?

Stanhope tossed his horse’s reins over the hitchrack, then, staring at her with that horrible, hard, ugly face with the vulture tattoos on his cheeks, with those pitiless, flintlike, mismatched eyes boring into her, raking her like invisible hands, he mounted the steps of the loading dock. His boots drummed a staccato rhythm on the boards, his large-roweled spurs ringing raucously.

Rage trickled over her fear. She hardened her jaws and her eyes and held his gaze with a cold, stubborn one of her own.

“Everything I have is for sale. I don’t give handouts to cutthroats.”

He stopped before her, towering over her, and stared brashly down at her heaving breasts. He smiled, showing the ends of his sharp eyeteeth beneath his thick, dusty, sweat-damp mustache, as he returned his gaze to her face. “How ’bout you? You for sale?”

Erin said nothing. He waited, his eyes mocking her. Around her she could hear the gang shooting their pistols and yelling like wolves as they sacked the other stores. Vaguely, she recognized the pleas of several shop owners, but these were drowned by the echoing reports of the guns and the screeching of breaking glass.

“Nah,” Stanhope said finally. “You’re as much a handout as anything else in this town.”

His big, gloved hand lashed toward her like a striking snake, grabbing the front of her dress over her breasts.

“No!” she shouted, fighting him.

He was too strong for her. He swung her around and pulled her so brusquely toward the mercantile’s door that
she nearly lost her footing. She heard the soft gasp of tearing fabric, felt the dress across her bosom slacken.

“Ma!”
Jim cried.

Horror rippled through her as she heard footsteps running toward her from the side street. She’d hoped that Jim had run off as she’d ordered, but now she turned to see the boy mounting the loading dock from the direction of the side street.

“No, Jim—go!”
she shouted, hysterical now.

Stanhope stopped in front of the door. Erin’s momentum sent her stumbling past him and into the closed door itself as Stanhope turned toward Jim, the sawed-off shotgun coming up in another blur of quick motion. Erin had just glimpsed the movement, her brain having no time to digest it, before the gun was up and out.

Somewhere amidst the movement she heard the click of the shotgun’s hammer being ratcheted back.

“Leave my ma alone, damn you!”

Jim’s screeching shout was punctuated by what sounded like a boulder falling on a cabin. The explosion was a giant fist punching Erin’s head back against the door.

Her vision swam. Whistles blew in her ears. Her knees turned to liquid. They struck the loading dock with a solid thump that she could distantly hear beneath the ringing in her ears. She glanced toward where Jim had been running toward her, and again she felt as though a stout fist was hammered against her face.

There was a splotch of blood just above the steps on the north side of the loading dock, the side facing the street. She could see the underside of the sole of Jim’s right boot at the top of the steps. It was moving slightly.

Twitching.

“Ah, Christ,” she heard a man’s disgusted voice behind her.

In the periphery of her vision, the outlaw leader pushed
the mercantile’s door open and disappeared inside, leaving her alone on the dock and staring at her son’s twitching boot.

His name exploded out of her on a geyser of suddenly released horror. “Jim!
Jimmeeee!
”

Erin scrambled to her feet and ran over to the steps and gasped when she saw her young son lying sprawled down them, his head brushing the ground at the base of the dock.

Again, she screamed his name and ran down the steps. She sat on the bottom one and cradled his head in both her arms, rocking him gently. The blood pumping from the large, ragged hole in his chest was a savage, merciless fist hammering her again and again, knocking her senseless.

“Oh, Jim,” she said. “Oh, Jim. Oh, Jim. Please don’t die. Please don’t be
dead
!”

Then she started screaming for help—for someone, anyone to help her. She screamed for the town doctor, but as she continued to rake her gaze between her son’s inert face with its closed eyelids and growing pallor, she saw no one on the street except for the outlaws hauling goods of one kind or another out of the shops in burlap sacks that they lashed to their saddle horns.

She jerked her terror-stricken gaze toward where the town marshal lolled dead in the stock trough, the ground around the trough darkly muddy. In the window just beyond the marshal was the face of Edgar Longbow staring out the front window of his drugstore. He looked like a ghost hovering there.

“Edgar!” Erin screamed. “Help me!”

The druggist shook his head, then reached up and pulled the shade down over his window.

“Edgarrrr!”
the woman screamed, clutching her boy to her chest, squeezing him, feeling him growing cold, a deadweight in her arms.

Time seemed to stop. She cried and rocked the dead child as she’d once rocked him to get him to sleep at night. The
world around her became a blur. The whooping and hollering and sporadic gunshots grew distant, like some storm drifting off toward the next valley.

Suddenly, she was aware of a strong smell of horse and man sweat. Hooves clomped. The heavy, unyielding body of a horse pushed against her. She turned her head to look up and behind her. Clell Stanhope sat his tall grulla, reaching toward her with those cold, faintly leering eyes.