.45-Caliber Deathtrap (12 page)

“Ha!” Cannady ran the end of the hay stalk between the girl's full lips. “They're kinda sorta like
us
! But not quite. They'd like to be just
half
as ornery and mean as—”

“Aubrey, goddamn your hide, girl!” It was the tall prospector, stumbling through the reclining men toward Cannady and Aubrey. He clutched a rusty, long-barreled shotgun in both hands across his chest. “What the hell you think you're doin' out here? Didn't you hear me callin' you?”

Cannady snapped his head at him, the tattoo under his milky eye turning bright green against the crimson planes of his savage face. “Light a shuck, old man. Can't you see I'm talkin' to your daughter?”

“Filth!” Llewellyn shouted. “Pure filth. An' I won't put up with you carryin' on with my whore of a daughter on my own property!”

“I told you to light a shuck, you old bastard,” Cannady raked out through gritted teeth. His expression softened, his lips curling a mirthless grin. “Me and your daughter are discussin' our future together.”

“Future, hell!” The old man stepped back and lowered the shotgun. “I'm warnin' you, Cannady!”

“I ain't gonna warn
you
!” Cannady had slid his .45 from its holster. He extended the pistol casually in his right hand, thumbing the hammer back and leveling the barrel at the prospector's gut.

Aubrey cast a horrified glance at Cannady. “Wait! No!”

The Remington leapt in Cannady's hand, the resolute crack echoing flatly. Llewellyn's shirt puffed and smoked. The man, who had begun cocking the single-bore's hammer, stumbled back as if punched. His eyes snapped wide, and the shotgun sagged in his hands.

“Papa!” Aubrey screamed, dropping the whiskey bottle and lurching forward.

Cannady grabbed the girl by the back of her dress, pulled her against him. “Get down here and spread your legs, bitch!”

She flailed her hands toward her father as Cannady grabbed her around the waist. “Let me go!”

Several of the men chuckled. One of the horses, whose head stall was held by Brown, gave a frightened whinny.

“Jesus, Cannady!” mockingly exclaimed Ned Crockett. “That ain't no way to treat our host!”

As Llewellyn dropped the shotgun and fell to his knees, the cabin door creaked open. The head of the oldest girl poked out. Her voice was tentative. “Papa?”

Llewellyn fell face-forward in the dirt.

“Papa!” screamed the prospector's oldest, bolting out of the cabin and running toward her father. The other girl came out as well, following her sister with halting footsteps, a terrified light in her young eyes.

While Cannady wrestled Aubrey down to his blanket roll, tearing at her dress, El Lobo tripped the oldest daughter. She sprawled in the dust beside her father. The Indian, Young Knife, gave a whoop and threw himself atop the screaming girl.

Several of the other men began stalking toward the cabin, ten yards in front of which the youngest girl had stopped to regard them owl-eyed. Cannady slapped Aubrey hard across her face and ripped her corset open. As the girl sagged back across his saddle, his eyes glistened down at the two firm, pale mounds of nipple-tipped flesh jutting up at him.

He gave another pull at the dress, the wash-worn fabric ripping away from her bare legs.

Cannady howled. Kneeling between the girl's spread legs, he began unbuckling his cartridge belt. Someone grabbed his shirt from behind, gave it a couple of irritating tugs.

“Cannady, look!”

He glanced at Germany Sale standing behind him. The big, red-bearded man was staring back along the trail, where a dozen or so blazing torches jounced toward the cabin yard, growing larger and larger in the darkness.

Cannady's hands froze on his belt buckle as he stared at the crowd moving toward him.

“Well, I'll be damned,” Cannady said, wistful. “Looks like we got comp'ny.”

HEARING THE SINGLE
gunshot from the direction of Llewellyn's cabin, the nine torch-bearing prospectors from the plundered camp stopped on the trail as a group.

They stared toward the bonfire stabbing its six-foot flames at the stars—an orange, ragged glow in the pitch-black night.

The creek gushed through the rocks on their left—a steady, liquid whoosh punctuated by the hollow chugs of the riffle over Dan's Trough on the far side of the cut. Their wind-battered torches roared like dragons' breath, rife with the stench of tar and coal oil.

Behind the men, their own and the other prospector families had finally stopped reassembling their camp to build a few small supper fires. They'd have to resume the cleanup the next day—thanks to the renegades who'd thrashed tents and board shacks and strewn the families' meager belongings out of sheer wickedness.

One man was dead. Two more wounded.

As if life wasn't hard enough.

“Did ye hear that?” said Chet Hurley, turning toward his tent mate, Junior Duffy. They'd been tent mates before their tent had been knocked down and torn to shreds, that is. “Pistol shot.”

“Think I'm deaf?” grunted Duffy.

The group stood frozen, holding their old-model rifles in their sweat-slick hands. Only one man—Dwight Pearson—had a new Winchester repeater. Johnny Reinhold had an old, brass-framed Confederate pistol, heavy as a clothes iron, which he backed up with a rock pick in his other hand, the long ash handle wound with rawhide.

Finally, Bill Anderson, standing at the group's rear, chuffed impatiently. Carrying his double-bore Greener in his right hand, his torch in the other, he pushed his way to the front of the group. In spite of his injured leg, sprained neck, two black eyes, and a variety of cuts and bruises over his entire body—all incurred when the gang leader had dragged him behind his horse—Anderson bulled between Hurley and Duffy and limped ahead along the trail, striding toward Llewellyn's cabin.

“What'd you expect 'em to be carryin', you damn fairies—feather dusters?”

“Come on,” said Finn McGraw, the stocky man standing behind Hurley. The gang had pulled his tent down on top of him while he'd been napping, and a bloody bandage covered his left ear, which had nearly been sliced off by his chimney pipe. “Those sons o' bitches can't get by with what they did to our camp. And them throwin' down in Llewellyn's yard, rubbin' our noses in it!”

“I never did care for Llewellyn,” said Magpie Henderson, the newest man in the group, who was also married to the prettiest girl in the camp. “He's got airs, preferrin' to live alone and all…”

“It ain't about Llewellyn or his daughters,” said Reinhold, bulling ahead of the group and following in Anderson's footsteps. “They shot my brother!”

As Reinhold's shadow moved off toward Anderson, whose vague, limping silhouette flickered against the distant fire in Llewellyn's yard, the other group members glanced at each other, their expressions hovering somewhere between rage and terror.

They swallowed, wiped sweat from their faces, renewed their grips on their weapons and their torches, and resumed their trek up the trail toward the cabin.

Anderson was the first one in the yard. He stopped at the edge of the firelight, looking around at the saddles, bags, and other gear cast willy-nilly around the fire.

The fire itself had burned down to half the size it had been when Anderson and the others had left their own camp. Around it, the hard-packed yard was deserted. The only sounds were the fire, the chickens clucking around their pen, and the horses blowing and stomping inside the corral on the other side of the barn.

Anderson tossed his torch into the fire, gripped his shotgun in both hands across his chest, and glowered into the shunting shadows. Scuff marks and two parallel furrows, like those of a dragged body, curved around the cabin's left wall.

Footsteps rose behind him as the others gathered to either side, breathing hard, their tension almost palpable.

“Where are they?” Reinhold said, a faint trill in his voice.

“Their gear's here,” said Hurley, moving forward to kick a saddlebag while casting his gaze about the yard.

“It's a trap.” Finn McGraw held his rifle straight out from his belly, sliding the barrel this way and that as he sidestepped around the fire. “Someone check the cabin. We'll cover you.”

“I'll do it,” grunted Anderson, limping around the fire toward the cabin's front door.

The other men strode slowly behind him, stepping wide of the fire. They'd all tossed their torches into the flames and, all except for Johnny Reinhold, held their weapons in two hands. Reinhold held his old Spiller & Burr revolver in his right hand, the pick straight up in his left.

Anderson was fifteen feet from the door when the latch clicked. The door opened a foot, closed again with a resounding slam. A half second later, it opened two feet and a naked girl bolted out, running and screaming,
“Noooo!”

Anderson hunched his shoulders and leveled his shotgun, freezing as the girl ran toward him, her red face crumpled with horror. “Help me!”

A man's voice raked through the gap in the cabin door. “God
damnit
!”

Anderson pressed his index finger against his two-bore's left trigger, but stopped short of squeezing. If he'd fired the barn blaster, he'd surely have cut the blonde—Llewellyn's middle girl—in two. She ran around behind him, sobbing, “They shot Poppa and they're gonna kill us too!”

Anderson glowered with annoyance as the girl gripped his shirt, as if trying to position him between her and the hard cases.

“Stop that now, damnit, gir—!”

He clipped the sentence as a man stepped out of the cabin holding a long-barreled revolver in one hand. He held the other hand to his mouth, his lips closed over the knuckle of that index finger.

He was a broad-shouldered hombre with a weathered Stetson shading one good eye, the right one appearing strangely pale. A small red-and-green tattoo of some sort had been scratched into his right cheek, just above his thin, black beard.

“Bitch bit me!” he protested.

The other prospectors froze behind Anderson, who could hear their frightened grunts and breathless exclamations to his right and left flanks.

The tattooed gent looked over Anderson's right shoulder, his face pinched with anger as he shook his pistol straight out at the end of his arm. “You'll pay for that, you fucking
whore
!”

The girl clutched Anderson's shirt, pinching some skin along with it, cowering, shifting her weight from one bare foot to the other. “Please don't let him kill me!”

Another man had stepped out beside the first—slightly shorter and dressed in a black frock and whipcord trousers. A tan duster hung to his calves, both sides pulled back from a fancy brace of silver-plated pistols.

“What the hell happened, Cannady?”

“Shut up, Case!” Cannady barked, glaring at the girl hidden behind Anderson. “Bitch bit me and lit out. It was so dark, I couldn't see a thing.”

Ignoring Cannady, the man called Case raised up on his boot toes and, sweeping his deep-set eyes across the small crowd gathered before him, grinned. He'd left both pistols in their holsters and appeared in no hurry to remove them.

Somehow, Anderson took vague comfort in that…in spite of the girl cowering behind him, pinching his bruised back. The shock of the two renegades' abrupt appearance had caused him to lower his shotgun's barrel, and for some reason the gun suddenly weighed a ton.

“Hidy, gents!” Case said in greeting. “How y'all doin' this evenin'?” In the dark cabin behind him, another girl sobbed. He turned sharply. “You shut up in there! Don't wanna have to tell you again.”

The sobbing stopped abruptly, as if a hand had been clapped across the girl's open mouth.

Annoyed by the blonde behind him using him as a shield, Anderson turned around, grabbed her bare arm, and gave her a shove. “Get away!”

The girl fell in the dirt, crying, her full breasts jiggling.

Anderson swung back, raising the shotgun slightly, narrowing his eyes at the two men on the cabin's porch. “Where's the rest of you sons o' bitches?”

He'd remembered the face of the man who'd dragged him—the tattooed face of the man standing left of the handsome, black-clad hard case. Anderson's bowels burned with fury.

He'd blow his kneecaps off, kill him slow!

“They're just over there,” said Cannady, canting his head toward Anderson's left.

“Shee-it!” Anderson recognized the voice of Lloyd Talbot, heard the scuffs as the other prospectors jerked to the right.

On the east side of the cabin, at the edge of the yard, just under a dozen hard cases stood facing Anderson and the other prospectors. Their eyes glistened coldy in the fire's dying light. None of the renegades held a pistol or a rifle, but their hands hung down over their holsters, like coiled snakes ready to strike.

The only one smiling was the black man, his black hat tipped over his eyes, pink lips curled back from two rows of chipped, marble teeth. He made no sound, but his heavy shoulders jerked with silent laughter.

“Sure enough,” said Cannady with glee, as if introducing old friends whom the prospectors hadn't seen in a while. “There's old Ned and Whinnie and Lobo, and the big ole cowpoke Crocodile Burdette. And then there's grinnin' Brown and Germany Sale, and…ah, hell…those names don't mean nothin' to you, do they?”

“Nah,” said the handsome gent standing beside Cannady. “They's just the names o' the men's gonna kill you—that's all.”

Anderson swallowed, squeezed his shotgun so tight he felt as though blood were about to surge out from under his fingernails. Behind him, the others shuffled their feet and swallowed loudly. Anderson thought he could hear their hearts pounding, but then, he couldn't hear much of anything above the thunder of his own.

“You…you had no right to do what ye done!” he heard himself say, as if his own voice were speaking of its own accord from the bottom of a deep well.

“Yes, we did,” said Cannady with a reasonable smile.

“Sure we did,” said the handsome gent beside him.

Both replies took Anderson aback. He glanced behind, was relieved to see the others still back there, shuttling glances between the two groups of renegades.

Anderson turned back to Cannady, cocked his head to one side. “How's that?”

The handsome gent tipped his chin up, chuckling. “'Cause we
could
!”

Cannady looked pleasantly surprised at the handsome man's response. “Yeah.” He laughed. “Yeah, that's it. We had every right to do what we done…'cause we
felt
like it!”

Anderson stared at him, the prospector's blood boiling. He gritted his teeth so hard he could hear his molars crack.

“Bastards!”
He raised the shotgun and fired, the boom echoing above the pounding of his own heart.

He watched in disbelief as the pellets blew a tub-sized hole in the cabin door, where the two renegades had been standing before. Seeing him raise the shotgun, they'd leapt to either side. The handsome man clawed iron so fast that his gloved hand was a blur above his black, silver-trimmed holster.

Anderson saw flames blossom before the handsome gent's right hip. The prospector felt merely a heavy, wet sensation in his chest as he thumbed back the shotgun's second hammer. But when he began aiming the two-bore toward the cabin, he realized he was in trouble.

The gun suddenly weighed even more than before.

It sagged in his arms as, hearing gun blasts and seeing smoke rising before him left and right, he glanced down. Blood frothed like a fountain from his chest, gushing down his denim shirt and over his belly to his crotch.

Muffled screams rose behind Anderson as he dropped the shotgun and, legs turning to water, dropped to his knees.

He sagged onto his hip and elbow, turned his head slowly to his right. On her knees, the naked blonde had opened her mouth and eyes wide. While Anderson could hear little but the blasts of gunfire, he knew she was screaming, holding her hands out before her as if to shield herself from the bullets.

It didn't do any good. She'd already taken one through her left breast, an inch above the nipple.

And now, as Anderson watched, his vision dimming as his own life ebbed, several more bullets plunked into her chest and face, spraying blood and throwing her straight back away from Anderson, her hair, arms, and legs windmilling before she hit the ground on her back.

Beyond her, most of Anderson's compatriots were down, rolling, awash in blood, and screaming.

Only Finn McGraw stood, arms and legs bloody, firing his old Zuave carbine toward the right. Aiming the old Confederate rifle like the good Reb sharpshooter he'd been.

Anderson didn't know what happened after that. His head sagged back against the ground. His eyes rolled into his head. His torn heart stopped.