Wild to the Bone (12 page)

“Yeah, there was more than one shooter, and said shooters must have somehow fooled these men into believing they weren't trouble.”

“What about this fellow?” Raven asked, looking at Price.

Haskell nodded his head to indicate the wall across from the dead sheriff. “I'd say his killer was standin' about there. Near the window. They might've even been havin' a conversation before the killer pulled a gun. Took Price by surprise about the same time the shooter or shooters outside took the other two men by surprise.”

Bear paused to walk around behind Huston, whose right hand dangled down beyond the Colt jutting from the holster on his right hip. “Must have just started reaching for it before the killer drilled him that third eye he can't see out of.”

Raven made a face. “Stinks in here. How long do you think they've been dead?”

“Two, three days. The
grulla
must belong to one of them. He and the other horses must've hightailed it out of the corral. Maybe they were let out by whoever did the killin'.”

“Nice of the killers to turn the horses loose,” Raven said ironically. And then she said, “Oh!” as something
ping
ed loudly against the iron range, sparking.

A half a second later, the flat crack of a rifle sounded above the wind moaning under the eaves.

14

R
aven!” Bear shouted, lurching
toward the girl, whose hat dangled down her back as she dropped to her knees beside the table.

There was another loud thud as wood slivers spewed from the door casing. The rifle's crack followed a quarter-second later. Out in the yard, the horses whinnied and stumbled around, startled. Haskell wrapped an arm around Raven's shoulders and whipped her behind the cabin wall, left of the door.

“You all right?” he asked her.

“I'm all right!” she yelled, glancing down at the torn upper left sleeve of her blouse.

At the same time, another bullet hurled through the open door and chewed a divot of wood from the top of the table. Another bullet slammed into the range again, clanging and sparking.

“Son of a bitch!” Haskell grated out, edging a look around the left side of the door.

Smoke puffed near the dead federal lawman lying against the corral, and Bear jerked his head back behind the doorframe as a bullet slammed into the frame's opposite side, spitting more slivers in all directions.

Haskell twisted around to squat in the middle of the door opening, slammed the Winchester's butt to his right shoulder, and fired two quick shots at the figure hunkered down inside the corral, two feet to the right of the dead man.

Haskell's bullets hammered into one of the corral rails and puffed dirt in the corral. But they were enough to knock the dry-gulcher back with a start, lowering his own rifle. As Haskell pumped a fresh cartridge into the Yellowboy's action, the bushwhacker, who was dressed in a light tan hat, red plaid shirt, and batwing chaps, turned and ran back toward the lean-to on the corral's far side.

Haskell aimed carefully and fired two more rounds, purposely missing the fleeing dry-gulcher and hoping the bullets kicking up dirt at his spurred boots would run him to ground.

He was wrong.

The man jerked a sharp glance back over his right shoulder and then ran faster, scissoring his arms and legs. He darted around behind the lean-to, out of sight.

Haskell levered a fresh round and, raking out an angry curse—he hated nothing worse than a cowardly dry-gulching son of a bitch—heaved himself to his feet. He leaped across the porch and down the steps to hit the yard running. By the time he'd crouched through the corral fence and gained the lean-to, he saw the dry-gulcher hot-footing it into a crease between two buttes fifty yards behind the corral, on the other side of a wash lined with dusty, wind-jostled cottonwoods.

Haskell ran forward, ducked through the corral, and sprinted down the sandy slope and across the wash. He ran up the opposite side of the wash and into the mouth of the gap between the buttes, dropping behind a boulder near the rise on his left.

Down the crease but above the ground, smoke puffed.

The bullet slammed wickedly into the opposite side of the boulder shielding Bear, a wink before the rifle's ripping report was swallowed by the wind. Haskell dropped his head lower as the dry-gulcher's rifle spoke twice more, both bullets hammering the boulder, making it shake.

Haskell lifted his head.

The ambusher was running at a slant up the side of the bluff on Haskell's right, about forty yards down the crease. Puffs of dust rose behind his scissoring boots and his spurs winking in the washed-out sunlight. A green
bandana
flopped around his neck.

Haskell slammed his Winchester to his shoulder, shouting, “Stop or take it in the back, you son of a bitch!”

The ambusher stopped. He swung around awkwardly, falling back against the slope and raising his rifle. Haskell wasn't about to let him get off another shot.

The Winchester fired twice. The ambusher jerked back against the slope. His hands opened, and his rifle dropped to the slope and slid down toward the crease. The ambusher leaned out away from the bluff, losing his sand-colored hat. He fell forward to hit the slope on his face and belly and then rolled wildly, flopping his arms and legs, to the bottom of the crease.

He piled up in a nest of Spanish bayonet and rocks and lay there, unmoving.

Haskell ejected his last, smoking cartridge casing. It clinked off a rock behind him. Seating another shell in the chamber, he looked around carefully for another shooter. Spying no one else, he walked down the crease, the wind blowing down the cut from ahead and raking his hat off his head. It flopped down his back, hanging by the braided thong.

He stopped over the bushwhacker's body, and grimaced. The shooter was not much more than a kid. A lanky kid with sandy-red hair, a pug nose, and a slight scar, like that from a cow's hoof, beneath his lower lip. His hazel, half-open eyes stared accusingly up at Haskell. His upper lip was curled back a little, showing a chipped, discolored front tooth.

Both of Haskell's shots had struck the kid in the chest, and his red plaid shirt glistened from the heavy, dark red blood covering the upper part of it.

Footsteps sounded behind him. Haskell wheeled to see his partner walking down the crease, a Winchester carbine in her hands.

“You ever get tired of sneaking up on me?”

“Nope,” she said snootily as she approached.

She stopped to stand beside Haskell, staring down at the shooter. Haskell cursed and sat on a rock. He leaned the rifle against the rock by his side and ran his hands through his hair in frustration.

Raven turned to him, frowning. “He shot at us, Bear. Damn near blew my head off. He didn't give you a chance to learn how young he was.”

“Ah, Christ, I know that.” Haskell felt sick inside, his guts tied in a knot. He didn't like killing anyone, but kids least of all. Even when they'd gotten the drop on him. “But you weren't the one who shot him, now, were you?”

“No, I wasn't,” she allowed. “But the real question is, why was he shooting at us? And the most likely answer is that he had something to do with killing those three lawmen at the station.”

Haskell stared down at the kid. Visions of old battlefields flashed behind his eyes—fields awash with blood and the torn and dismembered bodies of men even younger than the one who lay before him now. But his partner was right. Just because the shooter was young, probably not more than sixteen, didn't mean he wasn't a killer.

That reminded Bear of the bullets the kid had hammered at the cabin. He looked at Raven, saw a light smear of blood along the tear in her right sleeve. “How's your arm?”

On one knee, searching the kid's pockets, she shook her head. “Just a scratch.” She turned to Bear and held up a flat brown leather wallet and a scrap of paper. “This is all that was on him.”

She looked into the wallet. “Two paper dollars and a few coins.” Setting the wallet on her knee, she opened the folded slip of paper and stared down at it. “And a receipt from Duke Shirley's Mercantile Company in Spotted Horse.”

“Nothing with his name on it?”

“Nothing.”

Haskell rose and handed his rifle to Raven. “All right, then. Someone in Spotted Horse likely knows him. Let's get them lawmen in the ground before the mountain lions get 'em, and then we'll haul the kid into town.”

B
ear found a couple
of shovels in the barn, and he and Raven spent the better part of two hours digging three graves behind the cabin.

He saw no point in hauling the moldering bodies into Spotted Horse and stinking the place up. None of the citizens would appreciate that. The dead deputy Marshals certainly couldn't be shipped all the way home to Denver. The sheriff had probably come from Gillette, but fifty or sixty miles in the summer heat was still a long way to freight a body that had already been dead for two days, possibly three.

So Haskell and Raven merely removed the men's weapons and all other personal valuables, stowing them in their saddlebags, laid the men in their graves, and covered them with dirt, gravel, and rocks.

It was a nasty job, and about all Haskell could say about the wind was that even as hot as it was, it helped to disperse the stench.

When they were through with the grisly burial, Haskell strapped the dead kid over the
grulla
's saddle, and he and Raven mounted up and headed back out to the main trail. It was still mid-afternoon, so by the time they reined up beside the wooden sign announcing Spotted Horse an hour later, it was still relatively early.

The wind was still blowing, obscuring their view of the little town lying in the broad hollow before them. Through the blowing grit, Spotted Horse looked like a small, shabby place—a short, broad length of main street sheathed in false-fronted business buildings, with small cabins, shanties, other living quarters, privies, stock pens, and barns squatting at both sides and ends of the business district, arranged seemingly willy-nilly.

Low, sandy buttes ringed the town, and a dry wash ran in a long curve along its northern and eastern edge.

As Bear and Raven walked their horses into Spotted Horse's ragged outskirts, off-key piano music reached Bear's ears. It was swirled and occasionally drowned by the howling wind.

A black-and-white spotted dog came out from beneath the porch of a log shack on the right side of the street and barked at the horses before turning tail and slinking back to the hollow beneath the porch, out of the wind.

As he and Raven gained the town's heart, which appeared to be only about two blocks long, Haskell looked around. The street was broad. It was lined on the right by about six business buildings, including a large, sprawling mercantile painted spruce green. “DUKE SHIRLEY'S MERCANTILE COMPANY” was painted in large letters across the second story, above the sloping, shake-shingled porch roof.

A saloon called the Spotted Horse Watering Trough sat just beyond the mercantile. On the left side of the street were a bathhouse, a Chinese laundry, a drugstore, a grocery store, and a town marshal's office. Beyond the marshal's office was a livery barn. Beyond that, the street became a trail again, rising and falling across the rolling, windy prairie, foreshortening toward pale buttes sitting along the horizon like an old man's worn-down teeth.

The marshal's office was a squat stone structure with a wooden front stoop badly in need of fresh paint. Long pine planks extended from the porch steps and into the street, forming a ramp of sorts all the way across the street to the porch of the Spotted Horse Watering Trough. It was from the saloon, Haskell could now tell, that the off-key piano music was emanating, as though someone very angry or tired or both were trying to hammer out “The Rose of Allendale” against their will.

Haskell was angling his buckskin, trailing the
grulla
and the dead bushwhacking kid, toward the jailhouse when a loud
crack
rose from inside the place.

“Holy shit!” Haskell said, jerking back on the buckskin's reins and clawing his LeMat from the holster on his right thigh. He frowned at the jailhouse, half expecting to see some owlhoot who'd somehow freed himself from a jail cell come running through the front door, shooting.

Bear glanced at Raven, who had her own pistol in her right hand and was scowling at the marshal's office while also trying to steady her fiddle-footing
pinto
. Just then, the front door opened, and a big man in a wheelchair came rolling out onto the stoop. He rolled the chair with one hand. In the other hand, he held a fat, bloody rat nearly the size of a jackrabbit up by its tail.

He wheeled himself out to the edge of the porch steps, down one side of which was a plank-board ramp for his chair, and tossed the rat into the street. It landed with a
plop
, its dun-colored hair rippling in the wind.

“Goddamn rats!” he bellowed. Haskell saw that he had a brown bottle wedged between the chair and his right hip. Between his legs was an old Walker Colt pistol. He looked at Haskell and Raven and said, “The whole goddamn place is crawlin' with 'em. Sometimes when I'm takin' a nap, I dream the goddamn things is nibblin' on my
toes
!”