Shotgun Charlie (18 page)

“Hoy, you ought to give thought to putting that overcoat on. I didn't outfit us for cold weather so I could be impressed with myself.”

Hoy Tompkins didn't respond to Randy Scoville, just kept riding, his head hanging like that of a whupped dog.

“I said—”

“I know what you said,” Hoy finally responded. “I'll dress myself when I'm good and ready.”

They rode a few moments more in silence. The snow, when it finally came, was a pelting, driving thing at first, pellets that stung the face so that the deputy had to scrunch his eyes to melt off the fringe of frosty snow that had gathered along his lashes. Then the snow eased into a less painful, but thicker mess. It accumulated with a speed Scoville found amazing. “Must be because we're up in the mountains,” he said.

“Huh?”

“You ain't going to listen to a word I say, are you, Hoy?”

“In case you hadn't noticed, you don't say an awful lot that bears listening to.”

Deputy Randy Scoville pulled up short, watched his traveling companion's snow-covered shoulders and head as the man slowly walked on. Then he shouted, “What is that supposed to mean?” He knew what it meant. He was surprised that Hoy Tompkins had the sand to say it. Heck, both he and his brother, Hill, God rest 'im, were meek as mice, at least whenever Scoville was around. But that stinging assessment, a truth Scoville didn't like to admit, shocked him. “Must be the grief getting to him,” said Scoville to himself.

He rode forward at a lope, calling to Hoy, “Hup there, fella. I don't wanna tell you again, but you got to put on that coat. You'll be useless to me otherwise.” He rode up alongside his partner, glancing at him and keeping an eye on the boulders that crowded in along this stretch of the trail. It had been difficult dogging the escapee, but he felt confident they were on the right trail. The dang snow didn't help one bit, though.

Then his eye caught movement up-trail to the left, off into the rocks. It was a coyote working away at something, didn't seem to see them, so intent was it at its task.

“Hold up there, Hoy,” whispered Scoville. He laid a hand on his companion's arm and the sullen man looked up, automatically tugging on the reins and bringing his horse to a stop.

“What?”

“Shhh, hush, now.” Scoville nodded toward the coyote, but only the rump could be seen. He winked at Hoy through the thick snowfall and slid his rifle free of the boot. “Gonna have us some fun.” He thumbed back the hammer slowly, brought the rifle to his shoulder, and sighted.

Hoy said, “You think it's wise to shoot now?”

Scoville's cheek muscles bunched. He squinted down along the barrel, tightened his finger on the trigger. Dang that Tompkins for being right. He wasn't so sure he liked this new side to Hoy. He liked him a whole lot better when he was with his brother. But those days were long gone.

He sighed, lowered the rifle. “Reckon I'll let him be. C'mon,” he said, thumbing the hammer off cock and sliding the rifle back in the boot. “See what he's so all-fired busy with in them rocks yonder.”

They heeled their horses forward. The coyote stood atop a tumble of smaller rocks, most no larger than a man's head, that looked as if they'd been wedged there by some slide from above, or else by human hands. The snow covered most of them so that they looked like a pile of dusted eggs. When they were within six feet of the coyote, he lifted his head and stared at them. A small splash of red gore hung from his mouth corner, and the lighter hair running along his black lips was streaked with a pink-red tinge.

“Go on!” shouted Hoy, waving his arms.

The thin doglike creature bared its teeth and growled.

“Get on out of there!”

Its storm-cloud-colored hide twitched and rippled and, as if by unseen strings, it danced upward among the higher rocks, then down again, following some path of its own. No doubt it wouldn't go far, for whatever it was snacking on was a prize it did not wish to give up easily.

“What you go and do that for?” said Scoville, grinning as they watched the critter depart.

“He was eating on something and I can't stomach the notion of killing and blood right about now.”

“Then, mister,” said Scoville advancing his horse so he could see what it was the coyote had been so all-fired interested in, “you ought not to have come on this posse ride.”

“As I recall I didn't have much of a choice.”

The deputy canted his head. “Hoy, I can't figure you today. Seems like you never talked to me this way before.”

“I ain't never had a dead twin brother before neither.” He dismounted. The snow reached halfway up his boots. He stamped them to get the circulation flowing. “You try it sometime. I tell you it's not a good feeling.”

Scoville shook his head. “Ain't likely to happen,” he said, climbing down out of the saddle. “I ain't even got a brother, let alone a twin.”

Hoy rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, but he said nothing.

Deputy Scoville lightly slapped the ends of his reins across Hoy's raised arms, handed them to him, and clambered, slipping and sliding, on up the man-height tumble of rocks, his curiosity spurring him on. The reddened snow before him was a promising sight. Maybe the coyote had gotten a rock rabbit. Certainly not a fawn of some sort. Wrong time of year for that.

He toed a loose rock aside, and it tumbled backward into a crevice. When he looked down to where the rock had resided, he saw part of a man's lower face. The cheek had been chewed away to reveal frozen bone and muscle and the bare long gleam of teeth where they curved impossibly long from the gouged-away meat of the lower jaw.

“Oh, oh,” he said, stumbling backward, shaking his head. He slipped and slid back down the rock, landing splay-footed back beside Hoy. The horses danced and backed away from him, but Hoy held firm to the reins.

“What is it?” he said.

“You don't wanna know.” Scoville's grimace told it all.

“Yeah, I guess I do.”

“Okay, then. It's a man. Who it is, I don't know. But somebody covered the man with rocks. Sure as shootin' he didn't do it himself.” He winked, smiled. “Rocks ain't all that warm a blanket, eh, Hoy?”

“You have never been funny, Randy. Just want you to know that.” Hoy handed the reins to the staring deputy and headed for the rock pile himself.

“Where you going?”

“To see what this is all about. Might be it's the man we're after. Might be we can get on back home with his body and be done with it.”

Scoville shook his head. “Oh no, you don't. We're going to dig him up all right, like I had planned before you opened your yapper. But this don't change a thing. We've still got to go on and find whoever did this. 'Cause even if this is the man we're tracking, that big boy who, I think, Marshal Wickham let go from the prison, then we still got to drag the ringleader of the gang back to justice in Bakersfield. It's my sworn duty.”

Hoy snorted, kept climbing, his hands sliding off the snow-slick rocks.

“Besides,” Scoville went on, “I aim to drag Wickham back too. Something ain't right with that old man, and I can't put my finger on it. But the more I think about it, the more I think maybe he's in on all this, yessir.” Scoville tied the horse's reins together and looped them over a stunty bush. It would do for a few minutes.

“Here, now, here, now,” he said, scrambling past Hoy. “You got to make sure you don't taint the evidence.”

For the first time in a couple of days, Hoy smiled. His longtime friend's natural annoying attitude never cased to amaze him. There was no way he was going to get in the deputy's way. Let him have the road, the glory as he would no doubt call it. For Hoy's part, all he wanted to do was investigate the body, see who it might be. If it was indeed one of the men who had helped kill his brother, then he would let his emotions dictate his reaction.

His mother had always told him that still waters run deep, especially when she looked at him as opposed to his dear dead twin, Hill. He always took that to mean that she thought he was a smart fellow, and that he wasn't afraid to think for himself. He'd done precious little of that, especially when in the company of Randy Scoville. It had always had been that way. And for the time being he saw no reason to think otherwise, but he'd let him have his way for now. For a little while anyway.

“Help me with these rocks, Hoy. But don't look at the man's face. Oh, but he's a hard character. I don't recognize him. You can look if you like, but he's rough.”

Hoy glanced at the man's face as they lifted free the rocks covering him. “I recognize him. He's not the man from the jail. The big one they caught, I mean. And he ain't the head of them all. Least not by the descriptions of him. He's one of the others, though. He's one of them, to be sure.”

Scoville paused. “You sure, Hoy?” There was a light in is eye, a gleam that shone like tiny tinder fires.

“Yep,” said Hoy, nodding, not slowing down on the rock removal. “We'll never get this done this way. Too cold and there's too many rocks on him.”

“Well, what do you suggest, then?” Scoville shook his head as if he were addressing a child.

“How's about we throw a loop around him, yank him out of there with a horse?”

Scoville nodded. “Now you're talking. You said what I was about to say, but you interrupted me.” He glanced at Hoy, then looked away quickly. Hoy was too busy cuffing aside a nest of smaller rocks lodged against the dead man's chest to respond. But Hoy did smirk.

Scoville's face burned hot in the white pelting snow. “Yeah, okay. I'll get the horse. You keep on tugging at them rocks. I daresay you'll make some headway one of these fine days. . . .” He chuckled, but it was not a convincing sound.

Behind him, Hoy's smirk faded as a fingertip poked the dead man's chest. It was stiff, cold, unyielding. As was his brother's body back home on the family dining table.

He straightened and sighed, closed his eyes a moment as the cold snow hit his face and melted against the warmth there. There would be no more tomorrows for his beloved Hill. But, Hoy vowed there would be an uncounted number of them for him.

And, he vowed, he would make certain that he spent each moment of each one tracking the vicious killers who laid his brother, his twin, low. And if he should lose his life in the process, so much the better. Even if he had to put up with Randy Scoville, old friend, old pain in the backside.

“Hey!”

Hoy opened his eyes and spun toward the voice of the very man he'd been thinking of. A frost-hard rope slapped him hard in the face.

“Wake up, dunderhead!” Scoville's bray carried off on a southerly wisp of breeze. Hoy pulled in a long, deep draft of breath, let it out slowly, and nodded. It would be a trial, but it was his burden to bear.

He scooped up the rope and looped it about the dead man's exposed torso.

It took them scant minutes to drag the dead man up, where he teetered, as if he were dithering about whether to leave his cozy rocky cocoon or allow himself to be dragged back down to the trail. Then the dead man toppled, still bent, down the rocky slope to lie wedged on his shoulder in the trail. His rescuers stared down at him for a few silent moments.

Finally Scoville said, “He's been savaged with what I'd guess was a knife.”

“Golly, Randy, what makes you say that?”

“Fact that his gut's been opened up.” He looked at Hoy, narrowed his eyes. “You know so much, you should search him,” said Scoville, hands on his hips. “Might be he's carrying more clues.”

Hoy regarded him a moment. “Might be,” he said, before bending to the task. He carefully pawed the dead man, whose body was a stiff thing, bent in odd angles from being stuffed into the rocky crevice.

Scoville wrinkled his nose and nodded. “Now, that's a dead, dead man. Hoo-boy, but I tell you what, he don't smell half as bad as he should. On account of the cold and all. We should be thankful for that. You know what I'm driving at, Hoy?”

Hoy stopped, looked up, one hand resting on his knee. “I believe I do. It seems I have a recent history with the dead. Which you seem to have forgotten.”

“Oh.” Scoville's face reddened. “Didn't mean to cause hurt there. But what I was driving at was something about when he was killed. You know, his gut being all opened up like that and all. Might be I could apply the training I've got to how he's been killed off.” He stood, rubbing fingers across his stubbled chin.

“Don't you think,” said Hoy, “that you would see more if you bent down and studied the man?” He tried to keep a grin from escaping the corners of his mouth.

Scoville reluctantly nodded. “Mmm, yeah.” He coughed, kneeled, still several feet from the body, pointed toward the dead man's belly. “Now, see there? That's a sure sign that something was wrong.”

Hoy sighed. “Randy, he was gutted with a knife. Anyone can see that.”

Scoville nodded. “Mmm, yeah. I was getting to that. But you are far too hasty to ever make a good lawman, I can tell you that.”

He neared the last steep cleft in the rocky trail, the cleft that would lead, hopefully before nightfall, to the old leaning miner's shack that Haskell knew to be there. At least he hoped it was still there. He could use the solidity of walls and a roof about him. And in this storm he would not be worried about sending up smoke from the old sheet-steel stove that had been in the corner of the cabin.

Might have to empty it of pack rat dung and send to hell the few critters who might have looked on the shack the same way Haskell did. Heck, he might even waste a bullet or two on their mangy little hides. Not as if he intended to go farther through the mountains until he'd done the same to the posse men who would surely be following anyway.

It took another two hours before the shack came into view. Seeing it was a relief for Grady. He'd half expected it would have blown down or had been burned—or worse, moved into—by some soul other than himself. He approached the tin-roofed structure slowly, halting his train of three horses on the near side of a last jutting jag of rock. From behind it he would be mostly unseen from whatever scanning eyes there might be within the shack.

Though there was no smoke rising from its leaning chimney pipe, Haskell knew that might not mean much at all. He leaned back against the rock, felt the chill and wetness of the snow. It had soaked into his boots, down his collar, through his old hat, and cold wetness had run down his face, caught in the stubble of his beard, and itched like dozens of little bugs.

Right now all he wanted to do was get in that shack, stir up a warming fire, and dry himself out. He wanted to be in good shape when the storm was over. If he knew much about posse men, and he'd had his share of scrapes with them, then he knew they rarely trekked toward their prey in the midst of a little blizzard such as they were now having.

He felt safe in this judgment. After watching the shack for a full two minutes, he saw no shadowy movement, no sign of breath rising from a window—the only one visible to him was a paltry window covered with the remnants of sacking tacked up on the inside. As Haskell recalled, that sacking had been there when he was here last, about two, two and a half years before. Had anyone been here since?

“Well, horse,” said Haskell to the hangdog mount standing closest to him, “looks like we'll be sleeping pretty tonight.” He looked at the horse. “Leastwise I will be. You, you sorry old soap sack, and your two compadres, will be outside. You better pray the snow lets up. I ain't got but a few handfuls of feed left for you all. But I daresay you can eat through the snow and find yourself something. Won't matter. I'm fixing to make a meal or three out of one of you anyway. Whichever of the three of you looks worst will be the one to go in the fry pan. The other two, I have use for. So you stay fit.”

There were no tracks in the snow, leading to the shack, no depressions in it to indicate anyone or anything had ventured there at the least since the snow began the day before. Haskell cradled his rifle and leading the horses he strode purposefully to the shack.

He poked the snout of the rifle in through the flapping window cloth, parted it, and saw nothing inside save drifted snow, the stove, and the rough log bunk in the corner. The little lopsided table with the fancy turned legs still stood by the door. Grady smiled and led the horses around to the lee side of the shack. “Enjoy yourselves. I got housekeeping to get to.”

Grady sighed, squinted into the slowing snow. The clouds still hung low, dark, shapeless masses that threatened more of the chilling white stuff. It took Grady twenty minutes to get the stove cleaned out. The stovepipe hadn't been clogged, and for that he was grateful. Must be my lucky week, he thought, a scratchy laugh bubbling up his throat. Another few minutes and he had the shanty as cleaned out of debris and snow as he was likely to do. He laid the rest of the gear—money bags first—on the rough bunk.

He set the coffeepot and fry pan, both filled with water, on the little stove top, to melt. He chewed slowly on a strip of jerked beef, parted the window rags once again with the rifle barrel, and gazed out. He saw only his own tracks. The trail beyond the little cabin could represent trouble, should someone somehow get beyond him and double back, or come at him from the northeasterly direction toward which the trail led. But he doubted it would happen.

It was more likely that any attacks would be from the same direction he'd come. But one thing still bothered him, and that was Dutchy. In truth, Haskell had had his doubts about the man. He'd not seen eye to eye with him since he first met up with Pap and his gang. He'd also recognized that the man was not your average lazy thief. He was a man out for himself, for anything he could grab.

That was a trait Haskell himself knew only too well. He'd been surprised that it wasn't the big, sullen Indian who'd lived through it all, the one who'd been a pain in his backside, the one to cause him grief. But no, he'd been the first of the gang to die. At least he'd provided a welcome slowdown, distracting the crazies from that town long enough for him to plug Pap and then ride hot on out of there.

But now Dutchy was nowhere to be found. Before Haskell had split with them all on the trail, he'd told them he'd meet up with them, that he had to go on ahead and make sure things were as he expected on up the trail. And to prove he wasn't leaving them to fend for themselves in the dust, he was letting each continue to carry the money they'd all ferried from the bank.

Ace and Simp looked as though they'd bought it. And the fact that they were still heading toward the rendezvous point verified their foolish acceptance. But Dutchy, that man was a different piece of work altogether. He'd looked at Haskell with something like humor in those two dark eyes. Even as his mouth grinned and his head nodded, Haskell knew that Dutchy was on his own page of the book.

But to abandon them and make a run for it on his own? Not hardly. No, Haskell didn't buy that gambit one bit. And that was why he suspected Dutchy was fixing to ambush him, rebound, and set a trap for him. After all, he knew where Haskell was bound. Might even have watched him make his way here, from one of the high-rock places that ringed this little spot.

“Nothing for it,” said Haskell, swallowing the last of the jerky. “Have to kill that rascal before he does for me.”