.45-Caliber Widow Maker (28 page)

The cracks of the man’s rifle echoed off the buildings to either side of him. Cuno could hear his cartridge casings clinking into the dust behind him.

Somewhere along the street, someone suddenly started cursing sharply—either wounded or enraged or both.

Cuno edged another look around the corner of his covering building. The man at the head of the gap squeezed off another shot across the street and jerked his cocking lever down. He was a big, hatless gent with a cap of dark curly hair sitting close against his broad skull and long, broad sideburns. He wore a doeskin vest and brown chaps over black Levis.

His tan slouch hat lay crown down against the side wall of the building to his right, as though it had been blown there by the wind or a bullet. Cuno stole toward him, holding his Winchester up high across his chest and staying close to the wall on his left.

He wanted the man dead, but he couldn’t shoot him in the back. Cuno had to give him a chance, even if it was only half a chance.

As the man ducked down behind the rain barrel to begin thumbing fresh shells from his cartridge belt, he gave Cuno his profile. Cuno took two more steps, adjusting his grip on the Winchester.

Suddenly, the man, having apparently spied Cuno in the periphery of his vision, snapped a look down the gap. He dropped his gaze back down to the Winchester resting with its loading gate up across his knee.

Frowning, he turned toward Cuno once more. His eyes widened and his broad nostrils flared.

“Hey, who . . . ?”

He didn’t finish the question. He didn’t know who Cuno was, but his instinct told him he wasn’t on his side.

The man flung the Winchester aside and, keeping his startled gaze on Cuno, reached for one of the two Smith & Wessons jutting up from his tied-down holsters. Cuno snapped his own Winchester straight out before him and fired.

He winced as the man yelled loudly and, straightening, fell back over the top of the rain barrel. He hung over the top of the barrel, kicking as the hole in his chest drained the life out of him, his chaps flapping like giant batwings, and his big head swinging from side to side.

Cuno racked a fresh round and, crouching and staring cautiously into the street over the dead man on the barrel, moved forward, running his left shoulder along the building’s unpainted, plank-sided wall. He didn’t like that the gunfire had died off considerably, with only a couple of pistols popping from the direction of the pink-and-white house angled left across the street.

Oldenberg’s boys had likely become savvy to the wolf in their fold—Cuno. The tentative shooting from the house told him the Colorado Bob group was puzzled, as well.

Cuno stopped at the building’s front corner. He dropped to a knee, the rain barrel shielding him from the other side of the street, and glanced around the front of the building.

A man was crouched behind the rear wheel of a farm wagon parked at the edge of the street, just beyond the boardwalk. He had two Colt pistols aimed toward Cuno, holding them high so that they framed his gray, cunning eyes beneath the brim of a coal-black derby hat. He was grinning wolfishly, poking his pink tongue out between his ragged teeth, the silver cross thonged around his unshaven throat glowing in the sunlight angling under the porch roof.

Cuno’s eyes snapped wide as both pistols exploded simultaneously, belching smoke and flames.

He drew his head back behind the wall as one slug chewed into the wood before him, peppering his cheek with stinging splinters, and another barked into the wall of the building on the other side of the gap.

Cuno dropped the Winchester, clawed the borrowed .45 from the borrowed holster, and snaked his arm around the corner.

Two quick shots—
k-pow! k-pow!
—and the derby-hatted gunman threw both his half-cocked pistols up over his head with a startled yelp and flew back against the wagon wheel. There was one hole in his cheek, and another beneath the silver cross at his throat. He was still staring, stunned, at Cuno, as a rifle popped on the other side of the street.

The slug hammered into the rain barrel.

Cuno dropped down behind the rain barrel, holstered his Colt, and picked up his Winchester. He racked a fresh cartridge as the gunman across the street, hunkered down behind a pile of crates in front of a drugstore, snapped off two more rounds into the water barrel, the heavy-caliber rounds echoing loudly, like thunder.

At the moment, he was the only one shooting, the other guns—even those inside the pink house—having fallen silent while the shooters tried to figure out who was who and what was what.

The man sent several more fifty-caliber rounds into the water barrel or skimming off the walls to either side of Cuno. The burly blond freighter sat tight, cheek pressed against the barrel’s cool, smooth oak, squeezing the Winchester in his hands. A cricket of apprehension was scuttling along his spine.

The man across the street was trying to keep him pinned down while others flanked him just as he’d flanked them. Cuno had to keep moving.

Thwack!
Another heavy slug rocked the rain barrel.

Cuno rose to his knees and slid the Winchester over the top of the barrel. A pale, creased hat crown protruded from above the crate pile on the other side of the street and left. Drawing a bead on it, Cuno fired three quick rounds.

The hat crown disappeared behind the wafting smoke veil. Cuno fired three more quick rounds, but before the sixth slug had hammered the crate pile, the man rose from behind the crates, screaming and staggering back against the wall behind him.

“Shit!” he cried, dropping his stout Spencer repeater. “I’m
hiiiiit
!”

Then he slithered around the corner of the building and dropped to his knees and out of sight.

Cuno bolted off his heels and, squeezing his empty Winchester in one hand—he’d have to find a secure hole to reload, for he sensed men trying to gain position on him—he ran onto the boardwalk before the building on his right. A second later, he was in the gap on the building’s far side, sprinting down the gap toward the building’s rear, lifting his knees high, hearing his heels thumping in the hard-packed dirt and gravel, his own breath rasping from exertion and nerves.

Those were the only sounds. The shooting had stopped. An eerie, brain-pulling silence had descended over the town.

Cuno had only accounted for three of Oldenberg’s men. There were two, maybe three more. He had to buy some time to reload his guns. Getting pinned down between buildings, with an empty Winchester and a .45 holding only four rounds, was a sure way to end his journey.

As he bolted straight out the back of the gap between the buildings, he glanced to his right. His senses hadn’t tricked him.

Smoke puffed from behind the livery barn, and the rifle’s crashing report reached his ears at the same time the .44 slug threw up a sage clump in front of him, tossing it a good foot higher than Cuno’s head.

“There!” the man who’d fired on him yelled.

Cuno gritted his teeth and angled slightly left, toward a two-hole privy sitting at the end of a well-packed trail and abutted on both sides by spindly cedars. His blood quickened as another gun popped behind him to the left, the slug slicing across his left cheek and spanking a boulder ahead and right of the privy.

Both men fired once more as Cuno bounded around the privy’s right wall and dropped to a knee behind it.

There was a rustling thump to his right. He jerked his head with a start, sucking a tense breath. A coyote wrinkled his black-tipped nose at him and withdrew into a shadbush thicket. In front of the thicket lay a still-trembling cottontail splashed with blood.

The thumps of pounding boots and chinging spurs rose on the other side of the privy, as did the rasps of strained breaths.

“Is he behind the damn outhouse?” one of the men yelled hoarsely. “Did he stop there? Did you see him, Earl?”

“Didn’t see him run beyond it!” The man’s voice quivered as both sets of foot thuds grew louder. “Careful, Karl. The dry-gulching son of a
bitch
!”

Cuno was quickly thumbing cartridges from his belt into his Winchester’s loading gate. The men were within thirty yards and closing when a gun barked a hole through the privy’s back wall and whistled over Cuno’s Winchester barrel, two feet in front of him.

He pivoted, pressing his back to the wall and stretching his lips back from his teeth as two more bullets shredded the wood of the privy’s back wall, one blowing slivers three feet above his head and one within an inch or two of his shoulder.

Two more shots hammered in from the east flank, both over Cuno’s head.

“Hey, bushwhacker!” one of the men shouted. “You back there?”

Cuno bolted up and turned to the privy. He loudly racked a shell, leveled the Winchester’s barrel at the worn vertical boards, angling it slightly right, and fired four quick rounds. Amidst the cacophony of the Winchester’s blasts and the bullet-riddled wood and flying splinters, a man screamed.

Cuno did not quit shooting until he’d emptied the Winchester and there were nine of his own holes in the privy’s back wall—four on the right, five on the left.

Lowering the rifle and squinting against his own powder smoke wafting back from the wall to rise up around the corrugated tin roof, Cuno palmed his Colt. Rocking back the hammer, he moved quickly around the privy’s west side.

One man lay on his back about ten feet beyond, one boot propped on a rock. His head was turned to one side, his rifle resting beside him. His boots trembled as though from an electrical charge, and blood bubbled on his thick lips pooching out from a heavy, salt-and-pepper beard with a white, lightning-like slash across one cheek.

Kicking the man’s Winchester away, Cuno looked left.

The other rider was stumbling slowly back toward the line of widely spaced frame structures paralleling Alfred’s main street. His black duster buffeted around his thick legs and high-topped, mule-eared boots into which his checked pants were stuffed. His rifle—a Winchester Yellow Boy with a scrolled receiver and initialed rear stock—lay in his trail behind him, near a shabby black derby hat with a brown band.

The rifle was splattered with bright red blood drops.

The man’s boot toes began to drag along the ground. He stopped and dropped to his knees but kept his head up, facing the rear of the building before him.

He knelt there, unmoving, as Cuno walked up and swung wide around him, thumbing fresh shells into his Winchester’s breech.

The man, balling his big, sunburned cheeks, rolled his befuddled gaze to Cuno and studied him in moody silence for a time.

“Who’re you?” he said softly, knotting his thick sandy brows, as though trying to recall the name of a long-lost family member. He had muttonchop whiskers and an untrimmed goatee. In his right ear he wore a thin, gold ring.

“Cuno Massey. Who’re you?”

The man winced slightly and his pensive gaze strayed over Cuno’s right shoulder. “Karl Oldenberg.” With a heavy sigh, he sagged forward onto his hands and rolled onto his back. The entire front of his white shirt behind his deerskin vest was bloody.

“Crazy damn world,” he groaned. “Can’t trust nobody in it. Not never.”

The light left his eyes. He farted loudly, jerked, and lay still.

“No, you can’t never,” Cuno said.

Holding the Winchester out in front of him, he brushed a hand across his bullet-burned cheek and began tramping back toward the main street and the little pink house.

27

CUNO SWUNG WIDE of the little pink house and approached it from the backyard.

He stole slowly amongst the silk sheets and brightly colored women’s underclothes flapping and dancing on the wind from two clotheslines, closing on the back door. He ducked inside, his boots crunching wood slivers on the puncheon floor, and moved through the empty kitchen and down the hall toward the front of the house.

The place was as quiet as a sarcophagus, with only the sound of the wind buffeting curtains and rustling under the eaves. The air was thick with the rotten-egg smell of gun smoke.

When he’d passed a couple of open doors on both sides of the house, Cuno stopped at the doorway to the front parlor and raised the Winchester stock to his cheek.

Three figures sat before him, on the other side of the room, facing him, their backs to the wall. They made no offensive moves but merely sat looking at him dully through the powder smoke hanging in webs.

Behind Cuno, the floor squeaked. A bulky shadow moved on the wall to his right.

Cuno wheeled just as Fuego, starting from five feet behind him, lunged toward him. Cold steel flashed in his right fist, just above his waist—a long butcher knife with a pointed, razor-edged tip. The blade point was only four inches from Cuno’s belly before the blond freighter smashed the barrel of his Winchester against the half-breed’s hand.

Fuego screamed and whipped sideways, smashed the knife against the freshly papered wall but retained his grip on the wooden handle. Blue-green eyes on fire, wearing only his bandanna around the top of his bald head, the half-breed started bringing the knife back toward Cuno.

Spittle sprayed from his thick, chapped lips.

Cuno whipped his Winchester stock straight up in front of him. It slammed against the underside of Fuego’s chin with a solid smack and a crunch of breaking teeth. Fuego flew back against the wall. The knife clattered to the floor at his feet. The half-breed groaned. Cuno silenced it with a savage slash of the rifle barrel across the big man’s forehead.

Fuego hit the floor so hard that several jars fell from a kitchen shelf and shattered loudly.

Upstairs, a girl squealed.

Cuno wheeled back toward the parlor and snugged the Winchester to his shoulder, sliding it across the three men still sitting where they’d been sitting before, in the same positions. None had reached for a weapon.