Kill or Die (15 page)

Again, cracking like a rifle shot, the back of Brewster Ritter's hand crashed across Sam Flintlock's face. “Where is the money?”

Through split lips, Flintlock said, “Go to hell.”

Crack! Another slap rocked Flintlock's head back on his shoulders. He'd badly bitten his tongue and the raw iron taste of blood was in his mouth and his right eye was so swollen from repeated blows he couldn't see out of it.

“Go to hell,” Flintlock said, a feeble croak thick with blood and mucus.

“Stand him up,” Ritter said.

A pair of his grinning gunmen lifted Flintlock to his feet. Ritter drew back his fist and rammed a wicked right into Flintlock's belly. He gasped in pain and his bloody head fell on his chest, his mouth gaping like a stranded fish.

“Where is the money?” Ritter said.

“Go . . . to . . .” Flintlock lapsed into unconsciousness.

“Let him go,” Ritter said. The gunmen took their hands off him and Flintlock collapsed to the floor of the tent. “Connolly, are you sure you searched the cabin well?”

“I sure did, boss. It wasn't there,” Jed Connolly said.

Ritter kicked the unconscious form at his feet. “Damn him, he's hidden it somewhere in the swamp. Connolly, you and Wraith take him to an empty tent and stand guard. Tell me when he comes to and we'll start work on the woman. Maybe that will make him talk.”

The gunmen dragged Flintlock outside and Ritter said to Bonifaunt Toohy, “He's damned stubborn, that one.”

“He's tough,” Toohy said. “Tough as they come.”

“When he sees the woman getting hurt he'll talk fast enough,” Ritter said. “Once I recover the money I'll be in good with Cobb.”

“After you get the money what are you going to do with those two?” Toohy said.

“Hang them,” Ritter said. “We'll rig a gallows in the middle of the swamp and let them dangle until they rot. That will cow the swamp rats into submission, them that don't make a run for it.”

“The woman is beautiful,” Toohy said. “Seems a pity to destroy beauty like that.”

“Hell, I don't give a damn,” Ritter said. “I'd throw a rock through a Rembrandt if there was money in it.” He poured two whiskeys, handed one to Toohy, then said, “You know what this means, Bon? It means we've won. Flintlock was the ringleader and with him gone there's nobody else.” He clinked glasses. “When this is over and all the trees are cut you'll have enough money to keep yourself in whiskey and whores for the rest of your life. How does that set with you?”

“Just fine, boss,” Toohy said. “Just fine. And what about you? What will you do?”

“I don't know. I'll find something. Maybe I'll buy myself a schooner and get into the West African slave trade. They say taking just one cargo of savages to Arabia or the Jamaican rum plantations can make a man rich.”

Ritter stared at his cut and swollen knuckles and pouted. He poured whiskey from his glass over them and then wrapped a handkerchief around his hand. “The woman will be easier,” he said. “She won't hurt my hand as much. Go see if Flintlock has recovered consciousness. If he has, tell Connolly and Jake Wraith to bring him here. Then get the woman. She's in the engineer's tent.”

“Don't hurt her too much, boss,” Toohy said. “She's—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, she's as pretty as a field of bluebonnets. Whether or not she stays that way is up to Flintlock. By God, Toohy, I'll cut her real bad if I have to.”

 

 

“Yeah, he's awake and cussin' up a storm,” Jed Connolly said. He stood guard outside the tent.

“Take him to Ritter and I'll go get the woman,” Toohy said. He looked at the sky. “Why are there so many seagulls around, you figure?”

“They're flying inland,” Connolly said. “To feed in the swamp maybe?”

“Could be, or they're lighting a shuck ahead of a big storm.”

“Too early for that. The fall is when the storms blow up in the Gulf.”

“Yeah, I know. But it's strange all the same. There must be hundreds, thousands of them up there.” Toohy smiled. “Well, Ritter isn't paying us to watch birds. I'll go get the woman.”

 

 

The open tent flap slapped in the wind and Bonifaunt Toohy felt a surge of alarm. He hurried his step and looked inside. Leander Byng sprawled across his cot, his goggles askew on a face that still bore the terrified expression of his last moments. But his head was not on his body. It hung by rawhide strips from the ridgepole. The hilt of a dagger, bound in scarlet leather, stuck out of Byng's chest and fat blue swamp flies filled the tent with their buzzing.

There was no sign of Evangeline.

 

 

“Evangeline is a witch, you damned fool,” Sam Flintlock said though broken lips. “You can't hold her in a tent.”

Brewster Ritter drew his fist back for a punch, but he remembered the damage he'd already done to his hand from Flintlock's rocky chin and craggy cheekbones and thought better of it. “Hit him, Toohy,” he said.

Having no such problems, Toohy draw back and slammed a straight right into Flintlock's face, a punishing blow that dropped him to the floor of the tent.

“She cut his head off and hung it in the tent?” Ritter said.

“Yeah, it was pretty bloody.”

“Could it have been the Indians?”

“Maybe. If they set enough store by the woman to rescue her.”

“Damn, I've lost my engineer,” Ritter said. “Do we have anybody else that can set up the steam saws and get them working?”

“Boss, you got lumberjacks, laborers, and hired guns. That's about it.”

“Then Mathias Cobb needs to find me a steam engineer.”

Flintlock groaned, tried to rise and Toohy kicked him back into place. “What about him?” he said.

“I need him to tell me where he stashed Cobb's money. I can't spill the beans to Cobb that we had his bank robber in chains and couldn't get the whereabouts of his ten thousand out of him.”

Ritter snapped his fingers. “Here's a lark! We'll drag him behind the steam launch and let the alligators question him. A few close shaves and he'll tell us, all right. What do you think, Toohy?”

“I've met men like Flintlock before. They'll face up to gun hands that are all horns and rattles and stare down an angry grizzly. But they'll hike up their skirts and run like your maiden aunt from a spider in the outhouse. So alligators could do the trick.”

Ritter grinned. “Then I'll get it organized.”

“There's only one problem,” Toohy said.

The little man frowned. “What the hell is it?”

“The only man who can operate that scow is the engineer, and he's dead.”

“Damn it all!” Ritter yelled. “And damn that engineer! All right, then we improvise. Tie his hands behind his back and haul him behind a rowboat.” He kicked Flintlock in the ribs. “You hear that? You're going to take a little swim with the alligators.”

“When do you want it done, boss?” Toohy said.

“He's too out of it today. Leave it until tomorrow morning at first light when he knows what's happening to him. Tie him to the cot and put a man on guard. Now drag him out of here. And Toohy, make sure the engineer is buried and don't forget his head. I knew it was a useless chucklehead the first time I set eyes on it.”

Sam Flintlock reckoned he couldn't place a dime on any part of his body that didn't hurt. He was so tightly bound hand and foot to a cot that he felt blood sticky on his wrists and when he clenched his fist his fingers felt grotesquely swollen. A white moth fluttered around the oil lamp that burned above the cot and he heard the night sounds of the swamp and the steady back-and-forth tromp, tromp, tromp, of the booted guard.

Flintlock had heard Ritter say he was gator bait, a thought that brought him little peace of mind. The trouble was he didn't know where the money was. Evangeline had taken it and hidden it somewhere and only she knew where.

“Sam, you'll get the money back when you're ready to return it to the bank and not before,” she'd said.

Easy for her to say . . . she wasn't about to become an alligator's lunch.

“Got yourself in another jam, huh, boy?” Barnabas sat at the foot of his coat, still wearing his top hat and goggles. “Getting et by a crocodile ain't no fun.”

“Alligator. Go away, Barnabas.”

“See that what I got in my hand? It's a steam pressure gauge only it ain't working real well. I'll have to figure out what's ailing it. Your face is a real mess, boy.”

“I reckon,” Flintlock said.

“Why did you use the old Hawken on them two characters instead of a perfectly good Winchester?”

“I don't know.”

“I do. It's because I raised up an idiot. I hear people coming so I got to go, Sam. I just dropped by to cheer you up some.”

Barnabas disappeared, leaving behind him the smell of engine oil.

Outside Flintlock heard a brief struggle and then a man made a terrible gurgle in his throat accompanied by the sound of gouging feet. Then silence. The tent flap opened.

Flintlock raised his head and a white skull stared back at him. The skull came closer and peered down at him. But this was no bony apparition but a flesh-and-blood man, his face painted in black and white, long tangled hair falling over his shoulders. Without a word the Indian, for that's what Flintlock deduced he was, cut the ropes from his wrists and ankles and with surprising gentleness helped him to a sitting position. “Can you walk?” the man said.

“Not fast and not far,” Flintlock said.

From outside a man's angry shout, then the slam of a rifle.

“Quickly. We must go,” the Indian said.

Two bodies lay outside the tent, the guard and a dead Indian. Flintlock saw shapes moving toward them in the darkness. Guns flared and bullets kicked up dirt around him. From somewhere to his left a bow twanged and he heard a man scream as the arrow hit. The Indian grabbed Flintlock's arm and dragged him toward the swamp.

“They're getting away! Stop them!” came Brewster Ritter's voice.

As his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom Flintlock saw three Indians, one of them bent over from the pain of a wound, head in the direction of the water. Bullets slapped into the swamp and he thought he saw a second Indian take a hit.

“Take.” The Indian let go of his arm and shoved a Colt at him. Flintlock recognized it as the General Grant. “Shoot,” the man said.

Flintlock shoved a swollen finger the size of a sausage into the trigger guard as his battered, half-shut eyes reached into the darkness. He knew he couldn't score hits but there was no shortage of targets. A dozen men had spread out and, made wary by the arrow strike, were advancing slowly on him.

“Flintlock, give yourself up,” Ritter yelled. “Surrender and we won't harm you. We'll talk.”

“Go to hell, Ritter,” Flintlock said.

Fully aware of how it was going to hurt, he thumbed the Colt and fired. Moved to his left, fired again. His swollen hand was taking a beating, but he kept shooting as the Indian dragged him toward the swamp edge.

“Get into the canoe,” the man said.

The shapes in the distance had slowed to a walk, but the gunmen kept up a steady firing, shooting at shadows in the darkness.

Flintlock emptied his gun into the gloom and as far as he knew scored no hits. But Ritter's gunmen were coming close. A bullet tugged at Flintlock's sleeve and a moment later he heard a grunt of pain as the Indian who shoved him into the canoe took a bullet.

Two of the Indians seemed to have escaped wounds and they paddled quickly away from shore, bullets plopping around them into the flat water.

Flintlock heard Ritter yell, “Get into the boats!” And he prayed the skull-faced Indians heard that as well and would paddle faster.

Birds fluttered out of the cypress as the canoe slid through the water and several alligators, alarmed by the shooting, scampered onto an island. Felled trees impeded the progress of the paddlers and behind them Ritter's voice carried across the water, urging his men to row faster. But it was pitch dark out there in the bayou and the shooting stopped as Ritter's rowers sought to close the distance between them and the Indian canoe.

“They're gaining on us,” Flintlock said. He got no response and tried again. “I mean gaining on us fast.” But he might as well have been talking to five cigar-store Indians for all the reaction he got.

If he'd had cartridges for his Colt Flintlock reckoned he could make a fight of it, but he had none. And the Indians didn't seem to put much faith in their bows. “Well, we're done for,” he said. And as though to emphasize that point, a couple of Ritter's men cut loose. Their shots went wide but it was only a matter of a couple of minutes before they'd get the range.

Flintlock shook his head as the stoical Indians paddled at an almost leisurely pace, Ritter snapping at their heels. “It's curtains for all of us,” he said. And to his surprise the Indian sitting in front of him turned and grinned . . . like a skull.

 

 

O'Hara hoped this was going to work. If it didn't he was a dead man . . . they were all dead men.

The passage between the tree islands was narrow, about thirty feet, and it was so dark he couldn't see the opposite island where Evangeline waited, a derringer in her garter and no doubt a lump in her throat. She'd ten Atakapan warriors with her, two more than O'Hara had on his island. But one of his men was armed with Flintlock's Winchester and O'Hara hoped the Atakapan could hit what he aimed at. The shooting was closer now and O'Hara levered a round into his rifle and readied himself.

“You boys remember to shoot them arrows low,” he said. “I don't want any landing on the other island and puncturing our own men. Do you savvy that?”

Not one of the Indians looked like he understood a word and O'Hara could only shrug and hope for the best.

The Indian canoe emerged from the darkness, the paddlers moving faster now. O'Hara caught sight of Flintlock sitting in the stern, but in the gloom he couldn't tell if he was hurt or not.

Then the canoe was past and moments behind it Ritter's two boats, crammed with men, appeared in the channel. When she'd made this plan Evangeline said she'd fire one shot to open the ball and O'Hara waited for it . . . and waited . . .

Damn! What was keeping the woman? The two boats were in the middle of the channel . . .

The crack of Evangeline's derringer shattered the night like a rock through glass and a moment later arrows hissed like angry snakes. O'Hara worked his rifle and fired shot after shot into the boats. Beside him the Indian shot slowly and methodically. As arrows fell among them, two men fell from the boats and splashed into the water, then a third.

“Back! Back!” Ritter yelled.

The rowers needed no further encouragement and both boats began to quickly retreat. But Ritter's Texas draw fighters were not easy men to scare. They kept their heads and despite taking casualties from the arrow storm fired steadily into the islands. An Indian standing near O'Hara took a bullet in the chest and went down. A moment later another took a hit, cried out and staggered back out of the fight, his bow dropping from his hand.

Had Ritter had more sand his men might have prevailed, but the man panicked and screamed at the rowers to light a shuck back to the landing. The two rowboats backed away and were swallowed by the night. The Indians kept up a steady arrow deluge but as far as O'Hara could tell scored no more hits.

But the butcher's bill was high.

Two Indians had been killed and another wounded on Evangeline's island. O'Hara had one killed and one wounded, a young warrior who was not expected to live. The bodies of three of Ritter's men floated in the water, all of them dead.