Wild to the Bone (27 page)

She was out like a blown lamp.

Raven scrambled to untie her other wrist.

Outside, a rifle cracked flatly beneath the moaning wind.

31

H
askell had sent the
horse back to distract the outlaws. That was ten minutes ago. Now he strode quickly along the west side of the barn, heading toward the front. He held his Winchester '66 up high across his chest, the hammer cocked.

The wind's moaning and the ticking of the blown dust against the barn wall covered the sound of his footsteps. He hoped the barn's shadow absorbed his own, so he couldn't be seen from the house that sat straight across the yard from him.

He was breathing hard from his run from the limestone shelf. Sweat slithered down his back.

Near the barn's front corner, he paused. He could hear voices, two men talking in hushed, anxious tones.

Bear continued to the barn's front, edged a look around the corner.

The horse he'd appropriated now stood outside the corral, facing the other horses inside. The others had come up to greet the newcomer. Meanwhile, the two men he'd heard talking were now slowly walking away from each other, holding their rifles up high and defensively, turning their heads back and forth, scrutinizing the ranch yard.

The horse had spooked them. They knew Haskell was here. They just didn't know where exactly.

Time to satisfy their curiosity.

One of the two killers was walking toward Haskell, whom the killer couldn't see because of the barn's shadow. The other man was walking in the opposite direction, his back to Haskell. They were about thirty yards apart and widening that gap with every step.

Haskell stepped out around the barn's corner, aiming the Yellowboy straight out from his shoulder.

He snarled just loudly enough for the nearer man to hear him above the wind, “Hold it right there, you son of a bitch.”

The man jerked with a start, began swinging his own Winchester's barrel around.

Haskell squeezed his Yellowboy's trigger.

Crack!

The bullet punched through the man's chest, just beneath his chin, and sent him staggering and triggering his own rifle skyward.

Crack!

Haskell ejected the spent cartridge casing, heard it clink on a rock behind him, and pumped a fresh one into the chamber. The other man was just now whipping around, his teeth showing white inside the silhouette of his hatted head.

Haskell figured his first shot had been fair warning for this
hombre
, so he didn't wait for the man to turn full around before he shot him in the head, blowing off his hat and causing him to lower the barrel of his rifle and shoot himself in the foot a half second before he hit the ground without so much as a grunt.

Haskell pumped a fresh round into the Yellowboy's chamber and dropped to a knee as guns flashed in the cabin windows. The flat barks reached his ears a wink later, one slug plunking into the front of the barn to his right, the other blowing up dust in front of him.

Haskell was about to return fire when a man yelled from the house, “Hey, Pinkerton, we got your purty partner in here! One shot in this direction, and we're gonna drill a bullet through her head!”

Haskell sucked in a sharp breath through gritted teeth. He let the Winchester sag in his hands. He jerked it up again when more guns crashed inside the cabin. He threw himself forward and lay belly-down against the ground, expecting the bullets to come screeching around him.

But they didn't come. The guns continued to pop inside the cabin.

A girl screamed shrilly.

Raven!

Bear scrambled to his feet and bounded out away from the barn, fairly hurling himself toward the house. He pumped his arms and legs, holding the Yellowboy across his chest with both hands, shouting, “You're gonna die, you sons o' bitches!”

He mounted the porch in a single stride, crossed it in half a stride, and threw his nearly two hundred and fifty pounds at the cabin door. He was surprised at how easily it came off its hinges. Suddenly, he was on the cabin floor, on top of the door, a wild screeching inside his ears.

His vision was blurry, and his head pounded.

Damn fool
, he told himself.
Damn near knocked yourself out
.

He was mildly surprised not to hear any more gunfire. He rolled onto his back to look up and see Raven staring down at him, a smoking pistol in her hand. Her blouse was open. He could see most of her breasts.

He looked around. The cabin was filled with the haze of gunsmoke. One man lay to his left in a pool of fresh blood. To his right, the whore from the Spotted Horse Watering Trough—
Ana?
—knelt with her hands laced behind her head, looking both surprised and incredulous.

Another man, whom Haskell assumed to be dead since he had a bloody hole where his left eye should have been, lay sprawled across an overturned chair.

Bear looked up at his partner. She was staring down at him, wagging her head slowly and pursing her pretty pink lips.

“You sure like to make grand entrances, don't you, Haskell?”

Bear winced as another lance of pain stabbed through his head. His ears warmed with embarrassment. Rising onto his elbows, he glanced at her chest once more and said, “Yeah, well, at least I don't go walking around with my tits exposed.”

Raven smiled. “Yes, but your tits aren't nearly as pretty as mine,” she said, and flashed him.

T
hey were up early
and on the trail at sunrise the next morning—Bear, Raven, and their two sullen prisoners, Dulcy and Ana. The two female outlaws rode behind the Pinkertons, their hands cuffed behind their backs. Dulcy had a nasty goose egg and a gash across her right temple. Bear had tied the reins of Dulcy's mount to his own mount's tail, the reins of Ana's mount to Raven's horse's tail.

Bear rolled a Cleopatra Federal from one side of his mouth to the other as he shook his head in befuddlement. “I just don't get it. I am truly baffled. Sometimes I think the world has gotten too complicated for the likes of this ol' boy from the Big Bend.”

Raven, riding one of the outlaw horses to his right, glanced sidelong at him. “It wouldn't be so baffling if you'd kept your pecker in your pants and actually done some detective work.”

“If I'd kept my pecker in my pants, Miss Fancy Britches, you'd likely be feeding the buzzards with ol' Jeff Myers about now, while these two and their friends ran that gold shipment down and ruined poor ol' Duke Shirley.”

“Poor ol' Duke Shirley!” Ana scoffed, spitting to one side as though the man's name were excrement she'd picked up on the breeze. “Shirley is a
pendejo
! A
bastardo
!”

“Oh?” Bear said, glancing over his shoulder at her. “I don't think it was
your
stage line ol'
Shirley
was robbin', now, was it, ladies?”

Raven said, “There's far more to the story here, Bear. None of it excuses these two or their friends in town, but all the same, there's more.”

Bear rolled the Cleopatra around between his lips, took a puff, removed the stogie, and blew the smoke out on the cool morning breeze. “Pray tell.”

“He's a lecher,” said Dulcy behind Bear. “A lecherous bastard. He lied to us both.” She raised her voice even more, leaning forward in her saddle, the goose egg on her temple turning crimson. “He fucked us both and told us it was so much more than that. He lied to us!”

“He used us!” Ana screamed.

Bear glanced at each woman in turn and then said, “Shirley's a married man, ain't he?”

“A little thing like being married and being a father to two small boys didn't stop Duke Shirley,” Raven said coolly, facing straight ahead. “He's a cad. A wolf in sheep's clothing. He lies, cheats, steals from women, telling them anything they want to hear, and when he's tired of them, he puts them out with the morning trash.”

Bear glanced at Dulcy. “That right?”

The blonde's green eyes were hard as she said, “His wife was out of town last year. He delivered some supplies to my ranch, ended up stayin' the night. Told me he and Mrs. Shirley were divorcing, and she was taking their babies to live with her mother. He came out several nights after that, told me he'd help me sell the ranch, move me to town, marry me. Then I didn't hear from him for several weeks. I went to town, saw that his wife was back. He pretended not to know me.”

Dulcy wrinkled her nose, shook her head. “Yeah, I was a fool to listen to him. That's what bein' lonely'll do for a girl. Being lonely an' poor. He knew just what to say, the black-hearted bastard!”

Bear looked at Ana. “What'd he promise you?”

“What do you think?” Ana said defiantly. “He told me the same thing he told Dulcy, that he and his wife were divorcing and that he was in love with me. He didn't care that I was a whore. He loved me and wanted to marry me and give me a better life.—
Sí
, right! A better life!” She sniffed and shook her hair back behind her shoulders.
“Bastardo!”

She looked at Dulcy. “We should have killed him—but oh, no, she wanted to ruin him slow and take his money! You should have listened to
me
, Dulcy!”

Bear frowned at both girls. “Who's this ‘she'?”

Ana and Dulcy shared a conspiratorial look. Dulcy glanced at Bear, glanced away. “Never mind.”

He looked at Raven. “I don't want to say anything yet,” she said. “Not until I'm sure.”

Bear stared at her, befuddled. He glanced behind at the other two women. They all, including Raven, rode with similarly grave, somber expressions.

Bear drew on his stogie once more. “Well, can I at least ask who in the hell them boys back there were? The ones we dragged off for the bobcats to sup on tonight?”

“Griggs's bunch,” Dulcy said. “They all grew up out here, turned outlaw when most of the ranches went belly-up. Got my brother to throw in with 'em.” She sighed. “Now they're all dead, and I reckon me and Ana'll hang, huh?” She gave Bear a faintly beseeching look.

Despite her not deserving it, Haskell had to admit he felt sorry for the girl. He didn't feel quite so sympathetic when he reflected on the killings. “Who killed the lawmen out at the Devil's Creek station?”

Dulcy and Ana shared another look. When Ana only shrugged, Dulcy said, “Griggs and the fellas intercepted a telegraph from Sheriff Price to Roscoe Peete, announcing when Peete and them two marshals was headed to Spotted Horse. The boys decided to ride out and intercept them.”

“I guess they did, all right,” Ana said.

“Griggs got to thinkin' later they should have dragged off the bodies, in case more lawmen came lookin' for 'em. So he sent Danny out to do it later . . . and he ran into you.”

“You two didn't have no part in killing the lawmen?” Haskell asked them skeptically.

Dulcy glared at him. “We didn't want no part in the killin's. We only wanted to ruin Shirley and steal the gold. We ain't killers!”

“No, but you rode with killers,” Raven said.

“I reckon you threw in with the wrong bunch,” Haskell said with a fateful sigh. “The law's got a term for what the judge is gonna call you two.”

“Accessories to murder,” Raven said. She looked back at their two prisoners. “That reminds me—do either of you know who might have killed Vera Walking Thunder?”

Again, the two young women shared a conspiratorial look.

“All I can tell you,” Ana said snootily, “is it was neither one of us.”

That appeared to be just the answer Haskell's partner had expected. Raven turned her mouth corners down and turned her head forward to stare gravely ahead at the powdery trail meandering through the buttes.

Haskell said, “Who kill
who
?”

“I'll tell you later. Suffice it for me to say, in the words of Loretta Waddell, there have been sinister forces at work in Spotted Horse.”

Haskell reflected that during his ride out to the Stoveville ranch, he'd missed out on a hell of a lot.