Trackdown (9781101619384) (24 page)

Tatum laughed and said, “That posse probably tried to slip past our boys in the dark. I reckon they found out that can’t be done. There’s enough starlight that they can see everything from the top of Castle Rock.”

Hannah untied Eden’s hands from the saddle horn and hauled her down from the horse. Eden didn’t put up a fight. She still refused to believe that Bill was dead, but this new outbreak of gunshots didn’t bode well.

Hannah prodded her in the back with the rifle barrel.

“Get in there,” the redhead ordered. “It’s been a long ride, and I’m tired, damn it. I want some shut-eye, and the sooner I got you trussed up like a pig on its way to market, the sooner I can get it!”

Bill held the flask to the wounded outlaw’s mouth and forced some whiskey between his lips. The man gagged and coughed, but he swallowed some of the fiery liquor, too, and it roused him from his stupor. He lifted his head and looked around, blinking bleary eyes against the glare from another torch made from dry brush.

His eyes widened as they fastened on the blade of the knife Bill held right in front of his face. Torchlight flickered red on the steel.

“That was my wife you sons of bitches carried off from Redemption,” Bill said.

The outlaw pressed his head back against the rock as if trying to get it farther away from the knife, but there was nowhere for him to go. He swallowed hard, licked his lips, but didn’t say anything. His gaze flicked from side to side. He seemed to be looking for some reason to hope, but if so, he didn’t find it in the grim expressions of the men gathered around him.

“What’s your name?” Bill asked softly. The hard planes of his face reflected the torchlight almost as much as the knife blade.

“M-my name?” the outlaw husked.

“That’s right.”

“It’s D-Dave. Dave Belton.” A moan escaped the man’s lips. “You shot the hell out of me! My legs are ruined.”

“Well, Dave, that won’t be the only thing ruined if you don’t tell me what I want to know.”

Bill lowered the knife away from Belton’s face. The man tried to look down and follow the blade’s motion, but Bill used his other hand to grip the outlaw’s chin and wrench his head back up.

“Better if you don’t look,” Bill told him. “That way maybe it won’t hurt as much when I start carvin’ on you.”

“Look, mister, I…I,” the prisoner babbled. “It wasn’t my idea to grab your wife! That was all Tatum’s doin’!”

“Tatum?”

“Caleb Tatum! He’s the boss of our bunch, plans all the jobs.”

“Why did he take my wife?”

“He said…he said she might come in handy.” As Bill’s expression hardened, the outlaw hurried on, “As a hostage, you know, in case a posse caught up to us! That’s all he ever said about doin’ with her, mister, I swear it!”

Overstreet said, “He’s a mite more talkative than I thought he might be, Marshal. I figured you’d have to cut at least one of his balls off to get him to talk. This ain’t much fun so far.”

“Oh, it’ll be fun,” Bill said with a smile. “Tell me, Dave…you know how to get to the hideout the rest of the bunch was headed for, don’t you?”

“I…I don’t,” the outlaw answered. “I really don’t.”

Still smiling, Bill said, “You’re lyin’ to me, Dave. I know it, you know it, and the rest of these fellas know it.”

“Now this is gonna be entertainin’,” Overstreet said.

“Josiah, come hold his head.”

Hartnett said, “Bill, I don’t know if I want—”

“I’ll do it,” Overstreet said. He stepped forward quickly and took hold of the outlaw’s chin, forcing his head back even more than Bill had. “Go ahead, Marshal. He can’t see what you’re about to do now.”

“All right.”

Belton whimpered, but tied up like he was, there was nothing he could do.

Bill unfastened the man’s trousers. A moment later, the prisoner gasped as he felt the touch of cold steel against his skin. Then he shrieked as that steel bit into flesh.

“I’ll tell you!” he screamed. “I’ll tell you how to get to the hideout!”

“You’ll do more than that,” Bill told him. “You’ll take us there, and you’ll show us the best way in.”

“I…I can’t! I can’t ride! I’m hurt!”

He screamed again as Bill moved the knife.

Overstreet’s eyes bugged out a little, too, as he watched.

“Wh-whatever you say!” the outlaw gasped. “I’ll help you, I swear! Just don’t do it, mister! Don’t do it!”

“That’s more like it,” Bill told him. He wiped the blade on the prisoner’s shirt and slid it back into its sheath. As he stood up, he looked at a couple of the possemen and added, “Keep an eye on him.”

He turned and walked out of the circle of light at the base of Castle Rock. As soon as he was sure the other men couldn’t see him, he lifted his hand. He could feel it trembling.

Hartnett followed him. He asked quietly, “Bill, are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Bill said. He clenched that trembling hand into a fist.

Overstreet came up to them and said, “You know, Bill, for a second there I thought you were really gonna cut his balls off. You just barely nicked his belly with that knife and he sure screamed like you were doin’ it, though.”

“I think that’s what Bill wanted him to think,” Hartnett said.

“Yeah,” Bill said. “That’s what I wanted him to think.”

He didn’t know if the other two men could hear the hollow note in his voice, but he certainly could.

Earlier, Bill had bound up the wounds in Dave Belton’s legs. Now he gave the man another drink of whiskey and some bacon one of the posse members had fried up before they
returned to Castle Rock. Belton was more interested in the liquor.

“You reckon I’ll ever walk again?” he asked.

“Damned if I know,” Bill told him. “I’ve got a bad leg, and I get around pretty good most of the time. I wouldn’t worry about it too much, considerin’ that you’re probably gonna hang.”

The outlaw shook his head.

“No, sir,” he said. “I robbed quite a few banks and held up a few stagecoaches, but I never killed anybody in my life. Maybe not for lack of tryin’ now and then, but the fact of the matter is, I never did. They can put me in prison, but I hadn’t ought to swing.”

“That’s for a judge and jury to decide. But if you help us out, like you said you would…well, I’d be more inclined to stand up in court and say that maybe you shouldn’t hang after all.”

“I’ll help you, but there’s something else you got to do for me.”

Bill smiled and said, “You’re not in very good shape to be dictating terms.”

“No, I mean it. When you fight it out with the gang, you’ve got to kill Caleb Tatum. It don’t really matter that much about any of the others, but Tatum’s got to die. Otherwise, he’ll know that I told you how to find the hideout, and he’ll come after me. If he thought somebody double-crossed him, he’d track ’em to hell and gone to settle the score with ’em.”

“Tatum’s the one who grabbed my wife, you said?”

“That’s right, Marshal.”

Bill shook his head.

“I can’t promise you I’ll kill him. I’m sworn to uphold the law.”

The prisoner heaved a sigh and said, “Well, it probably don’t matter all that much, anyway. Tatum won’t be taken alive.”

Bill talked with the man for a good hour, getting him to go over the route they would take into the badlands. According to Dave Belton, the gang’s hideout was in a bowl closed in by high, steep walls, and the only good way in or out was a
trail through the surrounding ridges that was only wide enough for one man on horseback at a time.

“They guard that trail around the clock,” Belton said. “There are always two men watchin’ it. But hell, one man with a good rifle and enough ammunition could hold off an army there.”

“That’s not the only way in, though, is it?” Bill guessed. “You said it was the only
good
way.”

Belton shrugged.

“A man could climb down the walls…if he could get to them. Problem is, there’s a ridge that runs through there and cuts off the bowl from this side and it’s too steep to climb just about everywhere.”

“Just about, you said,” Bill repeated.

The prisoner sighed and said, “Yeah. I reckon most of the fellas don’t even know about this, but one time Tatum and Lou Price and me were explorin’ around there…just passin’ time between jobs, you know…and we found a place where somebody, Indians most likely, had carved handholds and footholds into that stone wall. I’d sure hate to have to climb it, though. Not Tatum. He was loco enough to do it. When he didn’t come back, we circled around, went back to the hideout the usual way, and when we got there he was sittin’ there grinnin’. He’d come over the ridge and down the far side into the bowl. Said it wasn’t easy, but he’d proved it could be done.”

“Can you find that place in the dark?” Bill asked.

“I think so. It shouldn’t be too hard, and you can use torches to help find it. From inside the bowl, nobody can see what’s goin’ on out there.”

Bill thought about it for a second and then nodded.

“All right. But if you’re trying to trick us and send us into some sort of trap, you can be sure of one thing. I’ll have a man watching you all the time, and at the first sign of anything wrong, his only job will be to put a bullet in your head.”

“No tricks, Marshal,” Belton promised. “I give you my word on that. Shot up as bad as I am, I know my only chance to live is to go back and take what’s comin’ to me, even if that means prison.” He took another sip from the flask Bill had allowed him to keep. “I don’t understand what you’re
plannin’ to do, though. Even if you get a man inside the hideout, he’s still gonna be outnumbered.”

“You let me worry about that,” Bill said. He wasn’t going to reveal all the details of his plan to the outlaw, just in case something happened and the man got away somehow. As badly wounded as Belton was, the chances of that were mighty slim, but Bill didn’t want to run any unnecessary risks.

Not with Eden’s life probably depending on what happened between now and the time the sun came up in the morning.

It would have been just fine with Mordecai Flint if he had woken up to find that the events of the night before were nothing more than a grotesque nightmare.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, and the muttered cursing that came from the cell block as Mordecai stumbled into the office was proof of that.

Tom Gentry was awake.

For the moment, Mordecai ignored the prisoner. He went to the potbellied woodstove and got a fire burning so he could boil some coffee. He dumped the dregs from the previous day and got fresh grounds. He wanted the brew as strong as he could get it.

“Hey! Hey, out there!” Tom Gentry called from the cell block. “What the hell!”

“Yell all you want,” Mordecai muttered to himself. His arm hurt, and he was disgusted.

He had a strong hunch that things were going to get worse before they got better, too.

It didn’t take long for that to happen. The office door swung open, and Walter Shelton stalked into the room. The
man’s face was tight with cold fury, and he had a gun in his hand.

“Where is he?” Shelton demanded. “Where is that son of a bitch?”

Mordecai turned slowly from the stove and rested his hand on the butt of his own revolver, glad that he had buckled on his gun belt before he started fixing the coffee. He didn’t know if he could draw fast enough to stop a man who already had a gun in his hand, but he hoped that with the power of the law behind him, it wouldn’t come to that.