.45-Caliber Widow Maker (10 page)

“Back so soon? Where’s Bob?”

Shepherd turned back to the desk, from which the burly, bearlike growl had risen. Karl Oldenberg sat back in his chair, lower jaw slack. He was a heavy, thick-necked, raw-faced man in his early thirties, with long, stringy hair, muttonchop whiskers, and an untrimmed goatee and mustache.

Like Shepherd and everyone else Oldenberg associated with, he’d been an outlaw practically since birth. But since purchasing the Wick-Dip and becoming a pseudo-respectable businessman, he’d affected a black clawham mer coat over a dark red, linsey tunic with leather ties at the deep V-shaped cut down his broad, fleshy but muscular chest.

In spite of the muttonchops and goatee, he had an oddly boyish face, with a dimple showing through the goatee, and plump, dimpled cheeks. His close-set, light brown eyes were small, and they owned the perpetual belligerence of a schoolyard bully.

Now, however, he had the dreamy look the girls got when they were high on marijuana or opium, which the town’s Chinese butcher supplied in return for mattress dances.

“Sorry to say,” Shepherd said, sounding as though he had a cocklebur stuck in his throat, “that Bob ain’t with me. Fact, no one’s with me.”

Oldenberg still spoke in that slow, garbled growl, and his eyes still seemed to own an extra, thicker lens as he said, “What’d you do to your neck, Lyle?”

There was a soft, female grunt from somewhere below Shepherd’s boss and, aborting his attempt to answer the man’s last question, Lyle dropped his eyes below the desktop.

Between the desk’s two encased drawer stacks, half concealed by the room’s deep shadows and further obscured by the bright, sunlit windows, a plump, pink, female ass hovered about a foot above the floor, the long, straight fold between smooth, fleshy lobes angled downward.

Squinting his eyes and angling his head, Shepherd could see that the girl was on her hands and knees. Her ass was moving slightly as, up near Oldenberg’s chair and between his spread knees, her head bobbed as her mouth issued faint, crackling, sucking sounds, like the sounds a wheel hub makes when it’s getting greased.

Startled, Shepherd lifted his eyes quickly and, pretending he hadn’t seen the girl beneath the desk, said after several throat clearings and lip smacks, “Took a bullet, Boss. But I reckon I got off lucky. Pepper, McDonald, Faraday, Manover, ole Heck Dawson—they’ve all gone under.”

Shepherd winced as the bullet burn sent a pain spasm down his back and into his loins. He clamped the rag down harder on his neck.

“We had them two badge toters dead to rights. I mean, they was ours, and we was a frog whisker away from springin’ Bob and the boys. But some kid right handy with a Winchester slithered down the far side of the valley and took us all by surprise. The damn younker shot Manover and then he took out Pepper and McDonald, too, when the boys tried to storm the damn wagon. I took this here ricochet after Faraday done got his own wick blowed.”

Shepherd felt his gut clench as the eyes of his beefy boss regained more of their customary hardness as he stared across the room at his underling. Under the desk, the girl grunted anxiously, and the wet crackling sounds got louder. Her ass rose and fell sharply as she toiled in obvious futility.

Oldenberg lurched back in his swivel chair and, scowling and flushing, dropped his hands to his crotch, his arms jerking as he pushed the girl’s head away. “Esther, goddamnit, can’t you see I ain’t in the mood no more? Get on outta here, now!”

He shoved his chair back toward the window behind him and dropped in his seat a little as he kicked out with both feet. Esther gave a squeal, and Shepherd, still standing and holding the rag to his neck in front of the closed office door, saw the buck-naked whore twist around beneath the desk as she yowled and squealed against Oldenberg’s flailing boots.

“Go on, git!” The beefy saloon owner lashed out with his left boot once more, making his belt buckle jingle. But the girl had already scuttled out from under the desk, sobbing, her curly red hair flying about her head.

“I’m goin’! I’m goin’!”

Bare feet slapping the rough-cut floorboards, she sprinted toward the door, her pale, pear-shaped breasts jiggling. She didn’t so much as glance at Shepherd as she lunged for the doorknob, threw the door open, and ran into the hall, leaving the door standing wide behind her.

“Shut the goddamn door!”

Oldenberg’s deep voice boomed around the room like the echoes of crashing boulders. His heart leaping, Shepherd turned abruptly and slammed the door. When he turned back to the desk, his boss was stumbling to his feet as he wrestled his longhandles and jeans up his hips, his big, silver belt buckle clanking against the desk.

His little mean pig eyes burned into Shepherd’s quivering chest. His long, stringy hair continued dancing about his cheeks as he wrestled with his pants. “Now, let me get this straight—you’re all that’s left of the six I sent out?”

Shepherd dipped his chin and swallowed down the large, dry knot in his throat. “I reckon that’s right, Boss. Pepper had his girl with him, and she mighta made it. I don’t know . . .”

“Goddamnit!”

“I apologize, Boss, but . . .”

“You were bushwhacked?”

“By some big, towheaded fella. Built like a boxer or wrestler. Blond-headed. Come runnin’ down that mountain in deerskins, slingin’ lead every which way. We’d sent ole Manover to flank the old marshal, and the blond-headed fella—”

“So Bob, Simms, and Blackburn are still in the jail wagon?”

Shepherd drew a deep breath. “That does seem to be the sum total of it, Boss. I knew I couldn’t do much with this here neck of mine, so I hurried back fast as I could. Knew you’d want to put a new posse together, go after that wagon.”

Oldenberg grunted as, with his pants finally up, he leaned forward to buckle his belt and stare under his bushy brows at Shepherd. “I don’t suppose you got close enough to the wagon to find out where Bob and the others hid the strongbox?”

Shepherd sighed again and wagged his head sadly. “’Fraid not, Boss. Sorry about that. Ain’t likely any o’ them fellas woulda told us, anyway.” He tried a laugh but it came out sounding more like the squawk of a rusty hinge. “They prob’ly woulda figured—”

“Woulda figured, being the suspicious sons o’ bitches they are, that if they told us where the strongbox was before we sprung ’em, we wouldn’t spring ’em.” Oldenberg shook his head. “If ya can’t trust members of your own group, who can you trust?”

Eyes snapping like Mexican firecrackers, Oldenberg walked out stiffly from behind his desk, which had little on it but a lamp, a pen, a corked stone jug, a shot glass, and one leather-bound account book. “Goddamnit, Lyle. I thought I was sendin’ two of my best men. How in the hell did Pepper and McDonald let this happen, anyways?”

Before Shepherd could open his mouth to respond, Oldenberg said through gritted teeth, his eyes shiny with unfettered emotion, “You realize what’ll happen if that goddamn jail wagon makes it Crow Feather?”

“I reckon . . . I reckon . . .”

“You reckon right. They’ll hang those bastards without my ever learnin’ where they hid the strongbox holding the most money we ever took down in a single job in this country, Canada, or Mexico.”

“Want I should pull a posse together, round up some o’ the fellas from the ranch?”

“Why don’t you do that.”

“Would it . . . would it be all right if I got a drink and had my neck sewed first? I don’t know how much blood a man holds to begin with, but I think I mighta lost a good half of mine.”

Oldenberg studied the underling, his fleshy, whiskery face menacingly inscrutable. Slowly, he dipped his head. “Sure, you just git yourself a drink. Sit down an’ enjoy it. Hell, sit down and enjoy half a bottle while the pill roller sews you up. Maybe you’ll want a girl, too?”

Shephered swallowed. His heart was pounding like the hooves of a dozen Cheyenne war ponies. He chuckled again though this time it sounded more like a sob. “Nah. I’ll just have a drink and get my neck sewed. Then I’ll fetch the boys from the ranch. The whole damn crew.”

Clamping the bloody rag firmly against his neck, he turned slowly toward the door, keeping his eyes fixed on Oldenberg who stood in front of his desk, arms crossed on his broad chest.

When Shepherd had turned full around, he reached for the doorknob. His back crawled as though with a thousand scuttling spiders, and the hair along the back of his neck pricked straight up beneath his collar. Behind him, Oldenberg was horrifically silent.

Gritting his teeth, Lyle turned the doorknob. He wanted nothing more than to bound into the hall as quickly as the mangy, yellow cur had bolted toward Shepherd’s ankle not fifteen minutes ago, but belly-churning fear and dread had turned his muscles as hard as new saddle leather.

He watched his hand wrap around the knob, turn it.

The door opened, squawking and brushing the top of a swollen floorboard. Before the door had cleared the threshold, a low, nearly silent grunt sounded behind him. At the same time, there was a soft snick and a rustle of heavy cloth.

Shepherd did not turn his head to see the Arkansas toothpick, which his boss had just shucked from the hard leather sheath dangling down his back, leave Oldenberg’s flicking wrist to tumble through the air, end over head, and make a beeline for Shepherd’s back.

But Shepherd heard the hornet-like whistle and, knowing it was coming, froze in his tracks and squeezed his eyes closed.

The seven inches of razor-edged steel plunged hilt-deep in Shepherd’s back, between his shoulder blades, just left of his spine.

Shepherd screamed and flew forward against the door, which his weight, in turn, slammed back into the frame with a bark of wood and a click of the latching bolt. He sagged against the door, groaning against the blistering sting of the blade embedded in his back and tickling his heart.

Cheek pressed against the wood, he dropped the rag and clawed with both hands at the solid door panel, as if to scratch his way through the wood and into the hall to freedom.

But he hung there, quivering like a bug on a pin, as Oldenberg’s boots clomped across the floor behind him.

The burly, long-haired outlaw leader shucked his toothpick from Shepherd’s back with his left hand and leaned close to Shepherd’s quickly blanching face.

“On second thought,” he rasped in the underling’s ear, “I’ll take care of it myself, Lyle. If there’s one thing I’ve learned here this afternoon, it’s never send a boy to do a man’s work. You shoulda stayed with them fellas, kept fighting. They’d’ve done the same for you, you unforgivable wretch!”

He wiped the blood from the savage-looking blade on Shepherd’s hat, then grabbed the man by his collar and yanked him brusquely back into the room. Shepherd hit the floor with a pinched sob drowned by a heavy thud.

Oldenberg spat on Shepherd’s soon-to-be carcass as he went out, leaving the door open behind him, and clomped down the stairs.

The last words Shepherd heard, lying there belly up on the floor with his blood pooling all around him, were: “Betty, tell Dewey to fetch that mangy carcass out of my office, will you?”

“You mean Lyle?”

“That’s the one.”

Betty laughed her squealing, chortling laugh. Her laughter stopped abruptly. “Hey, did you see my bar rag?”

9

IT WAS GROWING dark by the time Cuno had buried the younger marshal, Chuck Svenson, in the hard, rocky soil away from the camp. Sweaty and exhausted from the hard labor, he tended his own horse and the mules, rubbing them down with dry grass, swabbing their ears and nostrils, and picketing them all together in deep grama along the box canyon’s back wall.

He found several pounds of salt pork in one of the burlap bags on the wagon. When he had some of the pork and a pot of beans cooking over his glowing, popping cookfire, he scrounged around in the sleeping Bill Landers’s pockets until he came up with a ring of three rusty keys.

After some fumbling to determine which key fit the cage’s padlock, he opened the back of the jail wagon to let the shackled and manacled prisoners out to tend nature and to scrub their dusty, sweaty faces in the stream a ways down canyon from the pool.

“How ’bout you take off these cuffs and leg irons?” Blackburn said when he and the others had all worked their way out of the wagon, trailing the four-foot lengths of chain connecting their ankles.

When Cuno said nothing but merely stood back, aiming his .45 at the group from a good fifteen feet away, Blackburn flushed and held out his cuffed wrists. “Come on, junior. I wanna shit the way a man was meant to shit—
alone.
Get it?”

Cuno narrowed an eye and thumbed back the Colt’s hammer with a dry click that sounded inordinately loud in the green evening silence. “If you don’t shut up and hurry along into the grass, mister, you’re gonna be shit outta luck.”

Simms chuckled. Colorado Bob snorted. Blackburn cursed and hardened his jaws, but he clomped and clanked along with the others into the high brush away from the stream.

Cuno’s peppering the jail wagon with hot lead had had the magical effect of turning the prisoners, for the most part, sullen and pensive rather than loud and belligerent. Blackburn’s mini-tirade was the last spoken about the chains.

The four prisoners contented themselves with giving Cuno hard looks as, finishing their ablutions and fumbling their trousers back up to their hips, they clanked down to the creek to wash and drink before Cuno hazed them all back into the jail wagon.

Rather, three of the prisoners contented themselves with hard looks and muttered curses. The bald, one-eared half-breed—Fuego—continued to smile mildly, almost serenely, as he wandered along with the others in a dreamlike trance, regarding Cuno occasionally as though he had a secret he couldn’t quite bring himself to share.

Cuno had to admit the man’s attempt at putting him on edge was successful. The blond freighter kept the man in front of him and in total view at all times. The marshals had probably frisked each prisoner thoroughly—likely strip-searched them, in fact—but Cuno had the feeling Fuego was concealing a weapon of some kind.