Longarm and the Diamondback Widow (2 page)

Smith & Wesson .44 in his hand, Des Rainey ran between the breaking corral and the mounded rubble of the burned barn and into the yard.

He followed Garvey's screams, now to his right, running nearly straight out behind the cabin, past Garvey's mule that stood, reins drooping, fidgeting and stomping around near where the ground sloped into a ravine.

Garvey stopped at the lip of the ravine, which appeared to be a former creek bed. It was littered with rocks, old leaves, and branches that had fallen from the cottonwoods and aspens on both sides of it.

Garvey was at the bottom of the ravine, looking up at something hanging from a stout cottonwood branch arcing over the dry creek bottom. Rainey walked slowly down the slope, staring at a pair of well-worn boots hanging suspended above the creek bed. The boots twisted and turned slowly in the slight, hot breeze, the tarnished brass spurs flashing dully in the sunlight filtering through the treetops.

Feeling his heartbeat increasing, the sheriff slid his gaze up from the boots, to a pair of patched, faded denim jeans . . . to a wide, black belt . . . to a coarse wool work shirt and red neckerchief . . . to a dark copper face and droopy eyelids. The skin stretched across the high-tapering cheekbones and the thin, black mustache mantling the full upper lip were those of a young man.

A boy of maybe sixteen, seventeen years old.

One of the Bear-Runner boys, obviously.

Rainey had been staring at the boy instead of his path down the steep, leaf-strewn slope. His left boot slipped out from beneath him, and he hit the ground with a loud grunt on his butt.

“Shit!”

Garvey started walking toward the sheriff, eyes still stricken with his grizzly find. “Shit, you all right, Rainey?”

The sheriff cursed again as he rose to his feet and walked more carefully to the creek bottom, flushed with embarrassment and wincing at the pain in his tailbone. You old son of a bitch, he heard his inner voice castigate him. Why don't you just retire, for Christ-fuckin'-sakes?

Garvey stepped back, regarding the sheriff uncertainly before lifting his chin toward the boy hanging from the tree.

“George Bear-Runner,” Garvey breathed. He clucked and shook his head. “Sure as shit.”

Rainey walked up to within a foot of the boots that hung level with his nose. He looked the body over closely, walking around to inspect the dead boy's backside.

“No wounds,” Rainey said.

He walked around to the front and inspected the boy's face. The Bear-Runner boy had a split lip and a swelling around his right eye. Several buttons of his shirt were gone, exposing part of a threadbare long-handle top.

He'd been roughed up before he'd been hanged. He'd likely been led out from the house by one man while another shot the kid's family and burned the cabin.

“Why?” Rainey said, lower jaw hanging, as he stared incredulously up at the hanged half-breed boy.

He turned to Garvey. “Who would do this, Dan? Who had it in for these people?”

A shadow moved on the slope of the ravine behind the rancher. As Garvey turned to Rainey, slowly shaking his head and opening his mouth to speak, the sheriff sprang forward, shouting, “Look out, Dan!”

He bulled into the rancher, knocking him off his feet. Garvey yelled as he hit the ground on his back, Rainey on top of him. At the same time, a rifle thundered loudly.

The slug plunked into the left shin of the hanging Bear-Runner boy, nudging the body sideways. Rainey rolled off of Garvey and raised his Smith & Wesson, aiming at the shadowy figure bounding out from behind a tree halfway down the southern slope and scrambling up toward the ridge.

The sheriff's revolver belched twice, his slugs merely pluming dust and leaves at the bushwhacker's heels. He fired again, but the bullet merely plinked a tree as the shooter ran up and over the ridge crest.

“Jesus Christ—what was that?” Garvey shouted.

“Stay here, Dan!”

Rainey heaved himself to his feet and started running up the southern ridge. Halfway to the top, he had to pause and catch his breath. His chest ached and his throat was dry.

Good Lord, he hoped he wasn't about to have a heart seizure!

He drew a deep breath and continued climbing until he was within a few feet of the top of the ridge. He slowed his pace, breathing hard and holding the S&W straight out in front of him, edging a cautious look over the brow of the hill.

Seeing nothing but the few shrubs and yucca plants capping the slope, he continued to the top. From somewhere ahead, a horse whinnied. As hooves began thudding hard, Rainey ran straight south along the bluff and stopped, casting his gaze down the far side.

A rider was galloping away on a dun horse through a crease in the buttes, his elbows and saddlebags flapping like wings. Crouched low over his horse's neck, the bushwhacker held a rifle in his right hand.

“Hold it!” Rainey shouted, dropping to one knee.

The rider kept galloping away.

Rainey extended the pistol in both hands, taking hasty aim at the jostling figure, and fired twice. Both slugs landed far short of the quickly receding rider.

He fired once more. The bullet spanged benignly off a rock well behind the man.

Rainey cursed and lowered the weapon, holding his gaze on the rider, unable to make out much more about him than that he wore denims, a cream hat, a cream shirt, and a brown vest. He had short hair—hard to tell what color from this distance. He rode a dun horse with three white stockings. Nothing else he could see of the man distinguished him. Rainey did not recognize the horse.

When he was a hundred yards away, the bushwhacker looked back over his shoulder toward Rainey, but he was too far away for the sheriff to tell anything about his face. Frustrated, Rainey looked around carefully, making sure there were no other bushwhackers out there, and then he holstered his weapon and walked back down the ravine to where Dan Garvey was on one knee, looking nervous.

“You get him, Sheriff?”

Rainey shook his head and looked up at the dead Bear-Runner boy, who was partly turned away from him. The boy's long, blue-black hair blew in the breeze that funneled down the ravine. The rope creaked softly.

“You see who it was?”

“No.”

Garvey straightened, adjusted his funnel-brimmed Stetson on his head, and brushed his wrist across his short, blunt nose. “Why the hell you suppose he was shooting at us?”

Rainey felt the frustration well inside him. “Dan, you're askin' too many questions—you know that? Just too damn many questions.”

The truth was, Rainey himself was asking himself all the same questions, only he wasn't giving himself any answers.

He walked over to where the hanging rope had been tied off around a low branch, and said, “Let's get this poor boy down and dig us some graves.”

* * *

It was late in the day when Rainey tossed the last shovelful of dirt on the grave of the elder Bear-Runner.

All four bodies were buried side by side on a little knoll north of the burned cabin, overlooking the creek. The sheriff thought the Bear-Runner family would have a nice rest there. At least, as nice a rest as anyone could have, having been shot and burned in their own cabin.

Or hanged from a tree in their backyard . . .

Rainey sighed as he leaned on his shovel and looked toward the burned out, still-smoldering hovel. Garvey was sitting on a nearby rock, smoking and looking as tired as Rainey felt after pulling the bodies out of the rubble and digging four graves on a hot, late-summer day in the high desert country of central Wyoming.

Clouds were building, as they often did in the afternoon this time of year. Large, angry, brooding clouds moving in fast on a cooling western breeze that rattled the leaves of cottonwoods and aspens down along Diamondback Creek.

“Who do you think done it, Sheriff?” Garvey asked, sweeping his gray-flecked sandy hair back from his sharp widow's peak and blowing out a long plume of cigarette smoke. “Who would've done such a thing? The Bear-Runners—they may have been Injuns, but they left folks alone. They went about their own business. Sure, Tanner Webster claimed they long-looped a few of his beeves, but just between you an' me, that could've been anyone. Tanner just assumed the Bear-Runners done it 'cause they were Injun.”

Rainey pondered that information and then he let it go. Leaning on the shovel, he tended a bad feeling inside him.

He looked at Garvey. “Dan, did you know either one of the Bear-Runner boys to go to town much?”

Garvey stitched his brows together and then shook his head slowly. “Nah, I never seen 'em in town. That said, I don't get to town all that often myself. I never knew those boys to frequent the watering holes in Diamondback, though.” Keeping his brows knitted, he studied Rainey. “Why do you ask?”

“Ah, hell, I don't know.” Rainey looked at the clouds that were turning the late afternoon to an early dusk. “You'd better get on back to your ranch, and I'd best hit the trail for town, Dan. Gonna be rainin' soon. Thanks for letting me know about this, and for your help buryin' these poor people.”

“Don't mention it, Sheriff. I'm torn up about it, myself.” Garvey was walking beside Rainey as they headed for where they'd hobbled their mounts in the grass by the creek. “Just don't understand who could kill a whole family like that. Shoot 'em an' burn 'em . . . hang one of 'em. It's just like what happened east of the pass, three years back . . .”

As the two men swung into their saddles, Garvey turned to Rainey once more. “Hangin's usually done for folks caught rustlin', Sheriff.”

Rainey nodded. “Yeah, it is.”

“You think maybe George was caught rustlin' and whoever owned the beef he rustled made his whole family pay?” Garvey winced at the thought.

“Could be,” Rainey said. But he didn't think so. He gigged his horse across the creek. “Thanks again, Dan. I'll be checkin' in with you again soon.”

“See ya, Sheriff,” the rancher said as he turned his mule southwest along an old horse path that ran along the creek.

Rainey followed the secondary trail northwest to the main trail and then headed east toward Diamondback. He was so busy pondering the situation and tending that raw, burning feeling inside him that he wasn't aware it was storming until his sorrel started at a nearby thunderclap.

Lightning flashed on Rainey's right, flickering across the sky like two witches' fingers. The twin bolts hammered the top of a bluff on the far side of the creek, blowing up dirt and rock from a clump of boulders and causing a small rockslide.

It had been raining up to then, though Rainey had been only vaguely aware of the drops splattering his face. But now it was like a dam had broken loose, and the rain came in cold, white, buffeting sheets out of a sky the color of ripe plums. The sorrel whinnied and shook its mane but kept jogging up the winding trail that rose slowly toward Diamondback.

By the time the town appeared in a broad flat in the middle of the mountain-ringed basin, horse and rider were thoroughly soaked and mud-splattered. The horse was in a hurry to get in out of the rain. Rainey was, too, but he'd had a long think on his way into town and had more pressing business first.

He rode through town along its soupy main street to the other, eastern end of the modest little settlement. On the street's right side sat the long, low, mud-brick, brush-roofed building that was the Diamondback depot for the Wyoming Stage Company and also housed a telegraph and the local post office. Beyond the building was nothing but sage, yucca, prickly pear, and piñon pines studding the mountains all the way to Chugwater on the Wyoming-Dakota border.

Rainey put the sorrel up under the roof overhang, so that the cascade of rainwater missed the mount's hindquarters by a foot or two, and swung down from the leather.

He flung the reins over the hitchrack and then walked up onto the long front porch built of unpeeled pine poles, where he gave the closed plank door a tap and then tripped the string latch and pushed inside.

“Edgar, you here?” he called into the dingy shadows, his soaked clothes hanging on him.

A gravelly voice rose on the sheriff's left. “For cryin' out loud, Des, you don't have to scream at me! I'm sittin' right here and I may be hard of hearin' but I ain't deaf!”

Rainey turned to his left. Edgar Winthrop sat at one of the depot's long, pine-log tables, smoking a cigarette, a steaming mug of coffee on the table before him. A liver-colored cat stood atop the table, near the coffee cup and an open newspaper. It arched its back owlishly at the stranger who'd burst into the building unannounced and likely disturbed its nap there atop the newspaper.

“Sorry, Edgar,” Rainey said, doffing his hat and wincing when a cupful of water sluiced off its crown and its brim to splash the scuffed pine floor at his soaked boots. “I'm just wonderin' if you can send a message to Denver for me.”

The gray-bearded old depot agent/telegrapher/postmaster shook his head as he drew on his hand-rolled quirley, the coal glowing in the room's near-darkness. The rain hammered on the roof, punctuated by frequent thunder booms and the heels of lightning flashing in the windows.

“Wire's down,” Winthrop said, blinking beneath his green eyeshade. “I'm thinkin' lightning mighta struck up on Murphy Butte east of town and caused rocks to slide and mow down one of my poles. I'll send someone to check on it as soon as the weather clears.”

The older man studied the Diamondback sheriff closely. “Say, you not only look soaked to the gills, Des, you look like someone danced a two-step over your grave.”

Rainey said, “I just rode out to the Bear-Runner place.”

“I heard about that from Calvin. You was supposed to meet Dan Garvey. Who you suppose killed those poor people, Des?”

It was no surprise to Rainey that word of the killings had already traveled around Diamondback. Garvey's hired hand had most likely let the cat out of the bag in the Dragoon Saloon several hours earlier, and it had probably run around Diamondback twice since then.