.45-Caliber Desperado (30 page)

“Do yourself a favor and don't try to figure me. I've stopped tryin' to figure myself.” Cuno polished off the beer and the last egg and sleeved the hoppy malt from his mouth. “But I agree with you—I'd like to get to Mexico. But I'm gonna need some cash soon, so I'm willin' to risk waitin' for the stage.”

“Well, I reckon Mateo is, too. And it's his dance, so I reckon he calls it.” Skinner sighed and snapped his fingers for the barman to bring him another beer and a shot of whiskey. “Join me?” he asked Cuno.

“Nah, I'm gonna go out and stretch my legs, get my strength back.” Cuno slid his chair back, and rose, stretching, wincing at the tight knot in his left forearm.

“All right, kid. See ya later. I know I'll feel a whole lot better when we're down in Mexico.”

“Yeah, me, too,” Cuno said, grabbing his rifle off the table and heading for the front door. “With a few coins in my pocket.”

“If Mateo's right about this stage,” Skinner called, “it'll be more than a little, and you'll be knowin' you're in the right profession, after all.”

Cuno glanced back at him. The bartender had just set a fresh beer and whiskey shot in front of Skinner. He was nervously rubbing his hands on his apron. Skinner arched a brow at the man and said, “But all that'll stay under this roof here—won't it, pard?”

He grinned malevolently. The barman swallowed and shambled on back to the bar.

Cuno opened the door and went out into the soggy morning, lifting the collar of his denim jacket against the damp chill, looking around the gray, sodden town. A fine mist was still falling from a cottony sky. There were a few people out now—mostly shopkeepers sweeping tumbleweeds from their stoops or setting planks out in the street in front of their businesses on which potential customers could scrape the mud from their boots.

Aside from those three or four proprietors, the town looked as though it had been abandoned during the windy deluge. All that told Cuno that citizens remained was the smoke curling over and around the rooftops, emanating from both the north and the south side of town, where private dwellings and whores' cribs were arranged amongst stock pens and corrals and hay barns.

He walked down off the porch and into the street, his boots sinking heel-deep in the mud. Shouldering his Winchester, he walked westward along the street, his boots making sucking sounds in the mud, splashing in the puddles too numerous to be avoided.

When he'd walked a block and a half, he stopped in front of the stage relay station identified by the Gila Transport Company sign running along the roofline of the gallery. It was a shabby log building with a red dirt roof. It was rectangular, and its logs were silver with age. Likely, it had been the first building here, when Diamondback was only a relay station, before color showed in the Organ Mountains to the west.

Blue smoke curled from the tin chimney pipe. The front door was open, and an old woman with gray hair drawn back from her forehead and wrapped in a taut bun was sweeping dirt out the open doorway onto the porch where there were several wicker chairs and a sandbox spotted with chewing tobacco and cigarette stubs.

Three crows sat on the pole rail running along the right end of the porch, preening and digging mites from under their wings, one cocking its head to see what the old woman swept out.

The woman didn't lift her head toward Cuno but kept her attention on her work. She was getting ready for the stage. Cuno kept moving westward along the street and stopped after another block.

He was nearly at the west edge of town, where the soggy street became a soggy trail angling off through the sage and greasewood. On the left side of the street was a boarded-up general store with a faded green sign announcing LOGAN'S DRY GOODS.

A broad boardwalk ran the length of the place's log front wall, and on the far west end of the boardwalk, facing a rain barrel, a man was hunkered on one knee, holding his head down while reaching across himself, toward his left shoulder, with his right hand—obviously in some sort of distress.

Cuno canted his head to one side, studying the man with furled brows.

A rifle lay on the boardwalk right of the man's right, moccasin-clad foot. In the dense, morning quiet, Cuno could hear the man's raspy breathing, his desperate grunts and sighs. Cuno recognized the man's shabby, broad-brimmed slouch hat with a rawhide chin thong hanging down his hickory workshirt. He wore patched, smoke-stained buckskin trousers. His hair was brown and gray, and it hung several inches over the collar of his deerskin jacket. Cuno could see only the man's right profile, but he'd know the rest of his craggy, saddle-brown face when he saw it.

Cuno lowered his Winchester from his shoulder and, snugging the butt against his right hip, tramped across the street.

The man must have heard the wet sounds of Cuno's boots in the mud, but he did not turn his head toward the young man approaching him. He was fooling with something in his right hand. It was a small hide pouch, and he was trying to bite the drawstring open with his teeth. His left hand appeared uselessly curled at his side.

As Cuno stopped beside the man, aiming his Winchester at him one-handed, the man whom Cuno would have drilled through the chest if the riled rattler hadn't sunk its teeth into the young freighter's arm popped something into his mouth.

He tossed his head back, and the stone-sized Adam's apple in his leathery neck bobbed as he swallowed. It was like a rock being shaken in an ancient deerskin sack.

He turned toward Cuno. His lilac blue eyes narrowed at the maw of the Winchester aimed at his neck.

“Hold it right there,” Cuno said.

The old gent who had a deputy U.S. marshal badge pinned to his shirt, just visible behind the flaps of his jacket and deerskin vest, lifted his implacable gaze toward Cuno's face.

“What can I help you with, sonny?”

“Don't call me sonny.”

“What should I call you?”

“Cuno Massey.”

The old man's shrewd, pain-sharp eyes held Cuno's stare. He was breathing hard but now after taking his pill he seemed to be in less distress than before.

“Who're you?”

“Call me Spurr.”

The old man sagged down onto his left butt cheek and pressed his back up against the wall of the abandoned drygoods store. The rain barrel was to his left. His rifle lay near his moccasins, and he gave it a faintly longing look.

“Deputy U.S. Marshal Spurr Morgan, that is. Most folks just call me Spurr.” He glanced at the maw of Cuno's rifle once more and scowled angrily. “If you're gonna shoot me, younker, go ahead and pull the trigger and get it done with.”

“It'd be so damn easy,” Cuno said softly. “A hell of a lot easier than back in them badlands.”

Spurr raised his eyes to the young freighter's face once more, and he narrowed an eyelid shrewdly.

Cuno said, “That was me who peppered that rock dust into your cheek. A diamondback saved your hide.”

Spurr nodded slowly, pursing his lips in fateful disgust. “Like I said, if you're gonna finish the job you started, go ahead and finish it.”

“Where's Mason?”

“Who?”

Cuno smiled without humor. “I seen Mason with you and the other gent. I would have drilled him first but I had an easier shot at you.”

“You won't get an easier shot than this one, kid.” Spurr spread his arms and looked defiant, challenging. “Might as well kill me now. Mason ain't here; he rode out to the Hackberry Creek outpost to get some soldiers. Should be here anytime, though.”

Cuno considered that for a moment, then remembered what Frank Skinner had said about the washes around Diamondback being filled with rainwater. He shook his head slowly and sucked a heavy breath. “After that rain? I doubt it.” He hardened his jaws and raised the Winchester butt to his shoulder, aiming down at the old lawman's forehead. “You tell Mason he's a dead man. Cuno Massey's going to kill him.”

“He was just doing his job, son.”

“And my job is to kill the son of a bitch responsible for locking me up in that goddamn hellhole of a federal prison. I'm gonna kill both you sons o' bitches for tryin' to take me back.”

“You killed marshals, boy. Where'd you expect 'em to put you?”

“I killed those men because they had it coming. Mason wouldn't listen to any of that. I was no cold-blooded killer.”

Again, Cuno spoke slowly through gritted teeth, narrowing an eye as he stared down the Winchester's barrel. “But I am now. And Mason's next on my kill list. You tell him that. Tell him if he wants me so bad, sees it his mission in life to lock me up again, he's got another think comin'. He can either find me or I can find him. But sooner or later, we're going to meet. And I'm gonna kill him.”

Cuno lowered his rifle, pressing the butt again to his right hip. He backed slowly away, keeping the gun on the old marshal.

Unbridled fury blazed in him. He knew he should kill this man called Spurr, but he needed Spurr to relay his message to Mason. He wanted Mason to know that he was now the one being hunted.

Besides, Cuno couldn't kill a man who had no chance at all. Especially an old one with a weak ticker. He didn't know why, but he couldn't. He'd likely regret it later, and he had to learn to kill when he had to, but he just couldn't kill the old man now.

When he was half a block away, he turned around and tramped back in the direction of the hotel.

BECAUSE OF THE flooded washes left in the wake of the storm, the stage was delayed by three days.

Luther Haines, a Yankee desperado from Abilene, Kansas, lowered his field glasses and turned to Mateo de Cava. “Here she comes, Boss.”

“Alabar a Dios—es sobre tiempo!”
Praise god—it's about time!

Mateo was hunkered down behind a rocky scarp with Cuno, Camilla, Luther Haines, and Frank Skinner, using a Green River knife to trim his fingernails. He looked like a man waiting for a train. Cuno could smell the hooch on him, and on Haines as well. Their eyes were bloodred. “How many men are guarding it?”

Haines lifted his field glasses again to gaze through a slight notch in the lip of the black-rocked scarp that humped just beyond a wash that was nearly dry again after the storm. Cuno lifted his head to follow the man's gaze.

He saw the stage moving up from the south across the distant desert, following the meandering stage road behind a brown blotch that was its six-horse hitch. With his naked eyes, he could see a couple of the outriders in front of the stage, but none behind it. They were still too far away, and the cedars and junipers were thick amongst the boulders that some glacier had dumped here eons ago.

Haines drew his lips back from his teeth as he stared through the glasses. “Holy shit—there must be six.” He narrowed his eyes and moved the glasses slowly from left to right, tracking the stage through the chaparral. “No . . . seven.” He lowered the glasses and turned to Mateo. “Seven outriders. One shotgun messenger.” The gray-eyed man grinned. He wore a gold stud earring and a snakeskin armband. “She's comin' in heavy, Boss!”

“Seven outriders, nine men total,” Frank Skinner said, sitting with his back against the scarp a little ways from Mateo. “How many we got now?” Quickly, he counted them off on his gloved fingers. “Mateo, Camilla, Cuno, Calderon, Azuelo, Nervo, Luther, and myself. Eight.”

He pooched his lips and arched his brows as though he thought the odds weren't so bad that the job wasn't doable. Challenging but doable.

“Eight left of nearly twenty men,” Camilla said awfully, shaking her head and eyeing her brother who continued to trim his nails with the obscenely large, razor-edged knife. “My god, Mateo—we should have headed straight for the border.”

“We did head straight for the border,” Mateo said with a bored air.

“I mean we should have headed straight for the border without stopping in that railroad town so you could fuck whores and get half your gang whittled away by bounty hunters!”

Mateo snapped his dark eyes to his sister, his chest heaving. Before the outlaw leader could respond to his fiery-tempered sibling's tirade, Cuno said, “No point in arguin' over that now. What's done is done.” He took the field glasses from Haines but cast an admonishing look at Camilla who was still staring, flushed with fury, at her brother. “Now we'd best get into position to take that strongbox.”

He raised the glasses to his eyes and stared off through the chaparral. As he brought the stage up in his magnified field of vision—a big Concord painted green with yellow doors on which GILA TRANSPORT CO., LAS CRUCES, NM. TERR. was stenciled in gold letters, Mateo said, “Frank, signal the others.”

Skinner rose and walked out to the far edge of the scarp, keeping the mound of flat, black boulders between himself and the oncoming stage and its seven outriders. He held his rifle up high above his head and waved it three times. Cuno turned his field glasses on another scarp about a hundred yards north and west of his position, saw the return signal—a rifle waved three times above Mariano Azuelo's sombrero-clad head.

Azuelo was hunkered in the rocks on the side of that distant escarpment with Enrique Calderon and Franco Nervo. A good bit of loose rock clung to the scarp just beneath them, and when they received a second signal from Skinner, they were to kick the rocks down the incline to pile up in the trail below, sealing off the stage's trail to Diamondback, three miles north.

Skinner as well as Cuno and Camilla had convinced Mateo to effect the robbery out here, away from town, where there was more open ground and no danger of townsmen involving themselves. Cuno liked the idea, too, because there was was less chance of innocent people being killed. He wondered now if the old lawman, Spurr, had followed the gang out here with Sheriff Mason. In that regard, Cuno felt conflicting emotions.