.45-Caliber Widow Maker (2 page)

He wasn’t proud of his violent past. He didn’t want to be identified with it, nor for his future to be tainted by it. He was not his gun.

“I don’t blame you, son,” the older lawman said, lifting a feed sack from the long ears of the right mule. “Can’t say as I blame you one bit for refusing a job haulin’ these vipers to their grisly rewards across that blister on the devil’s ass known as the Mexicans. If Svenson an’ me weren’t married to the meanest, ugliest hags in the territory, who believe the best husbands are those with good-payin’ jobs that keep ’em out of the house for weeks at a time, we wouldn’t be doin’ it, neither!”

The oldster threw his head back, guffawing so loudly that a couple of dogs sniffing around the trash-strewn boardwalk on the other side of the street wheeled and barked with their hackles raised.

Movement drew Cuno’s attention back to the jail wagon.

One of the prisoners—a burly, hard-bodied gent with a broad face, wedge-shaped nose, and greasy, dark red hair tied in a queue with a strip of moose hide—knelt at the wagon’s rear end, pressing his groin up against the bars. Hands on his hips, he sort of twisted from side to side, sending a thick yellow piss stream into the street behind the wagon, drawing an arcing, wet line back and forth in the dust.

Chuckling, he turned his face toward the boardwalk to Cuno’s left, and a lusty smile dimpled his sun-browned cheeks. “Hello, ladies. How’re you two fine-lookin’ little fillies doin’ this afternoon?”

Cuno turned as two young women in summer-weight frocks and bonnets, both wearing white cotton gloves and with wicker shopping baskets looped over their forearms, mounted the boardwalk from the cross street, high-stepping toward Cuno and the marshals.

The pretty blonde in the red frock stopped abruptly, lower jaw hanging as she stared with disbelief at the jail wagon. Her friend, a chubby, round-faced brunette in a formfitting green number with white lace, cut her girlish chatter off to follow her friend’s horrified stare.

When her eyes found the prisoner, her pudgy cheeks and pug nose turned crimson.

The gent at the back of the wagon continued evacuating his bladder, grinning, winking, and gyrating his hips. He added a few grunts and sighs for effect, scrunching up his cheeks with devilish mocks and jeers.

The brunette gasped more quietly than her blonde friend. Clapping her free hand to her bosom, she stood frozen, staring with incredulous awe. The blonde inched forward. Glaring at the discourteous prisoner, then raking her gaze from Cuno and the marshals, as though including them all in her scathing condemnation, she jerked her friend around by the arm.

Together, casting horrified and castigating looks behind them—though the brunette looked more than a little fascinated, as well—they retraced their haughty steps back down the boardwalk and across the intersecting side street, until they’d disappeared amongst a handful of drummers and stockmen patronizing the next block.

“Goddamnit, Simms!” The younger marshal slammed his dope stick against the bars before the face of the redheaded prisoner, showering all four men with grease and evoking indignant grunts and curses. “How many times I gotta tell you to behave amongst civilized folk? You try that again, I’m gonna blow your noodle off with my Remy!”

Simms directed his dwindling piss stream toward the older marshal, who jumped back, red-faced with rage. All four of the prisoners laughed and hollered and rattled the chains of their handcuffs and leg irons. Even the half-breed suddenly sprang to life, whooping and clapping his hands madly, silver hoop ring glinting in the midday sun.

The dogs across the street were barking at the wagon again while warily backing off toward a trash-strewn alley between a harness shop and a feed store.

“Like I said, have a good one,” Cuno muttered with a dry chuckle as the older lawman joined the fray, ramming the butt of a double-barreled shotgun against the bars, fu tilely ordering his charges to stifle themselves.

Cuno wheeled and, letting the din drift off behind him, passed through the batwings and into the saloon. Cool shadows and the smell of beer, hard liquor, tobacco smoke, and sawdust washed over him—a refreshing reprieve from two days of blistering sun, trail dust, the ceaseless smell of scorched juniper and alkali, and the constant threat of blood-hungry Crows sporadically raiding up north.

As was part of the price you paid for being gun handy and having paved your back trail with dead men and enemies, Cuno paused just inside the batwings and took a quick but cautious gander.

The big mahogany bar and mirrored back bar ran along the right wall. A woman stood still as a statue behind it—a wizened scarecrow of indeterminate age but with a face cobwebbed with deep lines and pocked with moles and coffee-colored blemishes. Her brown hair, piled impeccably atop her head, owned not a strand of gray. Under a conservative purple dress buttoned to her wattled throat, she was skinny enough, as Cuno’s father used to say, that you could have stuffed her down a gun barrel and still been able to shoot.

Along the left wall stretching back into near darkness lay a good dozen or so tables, only two of which were occupied—the one nearest the front window to Cuno’s sharp left, almost flanking him, and one in the semi-shadows near the middle of the room, near a cold, black woodstove and the head of a grizzly snarling down from a square-hewn ceiling joist.

The two men near the window sat side by side on a plankboard bench, their backs to the wall. They were shabbily dressed hombres, with pistols on their hips beneath the table, a Winchester carbine leaning against the wall, within easy reach of the man on the right.

The one nearest the window was gazing out the fly-spotted glass while the man beside him, arms crossed on his chest, boots propped on a chair, regarded Cuno dully beneath a flat-brimmed, cream hat bearing a crow feather, a faint sneer curling his thin-mustached upper lip.

The one nearest the window turned to Cuno. They locked gazes for a stretched second.

Cuno slid his eyes toward the other gent, who sat so close to his friend that their shoulders nearly touched. The gent near the window looked at the gent beside him, gave an annoyed grunt, and nudged the other man with his shoulder. Flushing slightly, the man with the feathered hat slid a few inches down the bench from his friend, then resumed sneering through the shadows at Cuno.

Cuno sauntered toward the bar, quickly sizing up the three men at the other table—two playing cards while the third, with long, tawny hair curling over his shoulders, slumped down in his chair, arms around one drawn-up knee, his felt hat with a braided leather band tipped low over his eyes, as though he were dozing.

The cardplayers glanced at Cuno as he passed their table—both wearing dusters and dust-caked sombreros, one bearded, the other with a shaggy, gray-flecked mustache, bandoliers crisscrossed on his chest—then returned to their card game, speaking in hushed, desultory tones as they flopped down their cards and clinked coins together.

Several yards down the bar from the table, Cuno turned toward the mahogany and rested a boot on the brass foot rail. The old woman had been slowly swiveling her head toward him as he’d moved along the bar, her eyes expressionless.

Now, taking a deep drag from a long, black cigarillo, she said in a man-husky voice almost too low to be heard above the thud of hooves and creak of wagons outside, “If you’re here for cooch, my girls’re upstairs. But all mattress dances are paid for in advance, and go easy on the furniture. If you’re here for hooch, it’ll be twenty-five cents a shot, and I take no responsibility for sterility, insanity, or blindness.”

The woman’s eyes brightened slightly as she glowered at Cuno through a harsh black cloud of Mexican tobacco smoke. Her shoulders jerked as though from a slight ague. What sounded like the last faltering croaks of a near-dead chicken bubbled up from her scrawny chest.

After a few puzzled seconds, Cuno realized she was laughing.

2

“I’LL FORGO THE mattress dance this time through.”

Cuno eyed a plate of sliced beef, ham, and cheese, and another of crumbly wheat bread. Flies were making a meal of the moldy cheese, and the bread looked dry as hardpan. Still, after two days of beans and jerky, the complimentary bar fare made his stomach mewl with hunger.

“Just the suds and the fixin’s there, if they go with the suds.”

The old woman planted her cigarillo in a wooden ashtray carved in the shape of a bobcat paw. She grabbed a glass schooner off the back bar and pulled a frothy beer.

Scraping the foam head with a flat stick, she glanced at the two three-gallon jars flanking the meat and bread. Both were filled with murky brine rife with the smell of vinegar and spices. One contained eggs. The other held hog knuckles. The eggs were clustered atop what appeared a coiled sand rattler complete with head and tail. Razor-edged fangs showed between the half-open jaws.

“Don’t run from my pickles, neither.” She set the beer in front of Cuno, knocked ashes off her cigarillo, and stuck the long, black cylinder between her froggy lips. “Best in the territories.”

“What’s the snake add?”

“Secret I learned from my late Mexican husband. Claimed he cooked for General Santa Anna.” The spidery old barmaid drew another deep puff, batting her long eyelashes against the smoke curling up in front of her face. “That old rattler not only lends a certain sagey flavor, ole Paco claimed it enhanced a man’s virility.”

She winked as that croaking laugh rumbled up from her sparrow’s chest again and she tapped more ashes off her cigarillo. “I don’t guarantee any such thing, but I’ll tell you this. Ole Paco was a virile son of a bitch till the day he died with a cancer the size of a coffee mug hanging off his neck.”

Cuno sipped the frothy beer, warm but somehow still refreshing and instantly tempering the windburn and sunburn that gnawed not only his face but every inch of hide on his hard, muscular frame.

“No offense to Paco, and I ain’t braggin’, neither, but I believe I’ll pass on the eggs,” he said, setting the glass atop the bar and moving down toward the meat and cheese. “But I’d build a sandwich.”

“Build you a big one.”

The old woman ran an admiring gaze over Cuno’s taut, brawny frame. Fully half of his twenty-two years had been devoted to back-and-bellying freight in and out of cabin-sized, iron-shod Murphy wagons and maneuvering four-mule and six-mule hitches across cold, steep mountains and windy plains.

Those years had ridged, sculpted, and swelled his chest and arms, broadened his shoulders, hammered his flat belly to the texture of sun-cured rawhide. They’d bulged out the thighs and calves of his scarred deerhide breeches, drew his fair skin taut across high-boned, tapering cheeks, a dimpled chin, and anvil jaws, and spoked the deep-tanned flesh around clear, lake-blue eyes.

His rope-burned hands were large and red as fresh-carved roasts. During long freight runs manipulating the long rein ribbons trailing out to belligerent teams, his forearms, as round and corded as cedar fence posts, often pitched and flexed until they tore out the sleeves of his buckskin tunics and work shirts.

His yellow-blond hair, perpetually sun-bleached, hung down from his tan, flat-brimmed, low-crowned plainsman, brushing his shoulders.

“Looks like you could hold all that food and more,” the old woman observed through swirling, webbing tobacco smoke. “I got plenty. Don’t get many through these days, since the gold pinched out. Bet you could use your ashes hauled. Want me to call Carlotta? She’s the only girl I got that could handle a young man of your size and obvious vigor.” That cryptic laugh again. “Mamie’s prettier, but I fear you’d snap her back!”

“This’ll do me,” Cuno said, patting a thick sandwich together, then taking a long sip of the beer.

The old woman grumbled her cryptic disapproval and drifted down the bar in a cloud of wafting, nose-wrinkling smoke to a dime novel open at the other end of the mahogany.

Cuno leaned forward, elbows on the bar, and went to serious work on the sandwich and beer, thoroughly enjoying both in spite of the beer’s warmth and the dry bread and moldy cheese. He’d nearly devoured half the sandwich when one of the cardplayers flanking him growled, “Girl, get on up there and get me a sandwich before that big rannie devours the whole damn mess. A couple more whiskeys, too.”

Chewing, Cuno peered into the back bar mirror. The long-haired man sitting with the cardplayers, hugging a knee to his chest, lifted his head suddenly. The flat hat brim fell back to reveal the pretty, oval face of a scowling girl.

“Get your own goddamn food,” the girl said.

The two cardplayers stared across the table at each other. Suddenly, the man who’d given the order threw his left arm out from his side.

There was a sharp crack as the back of his hand smacked the girl’s right cheek. Head whipping sideways, tawny hair flying, and hat tumbling off her head, she and her chair went over backward and hit the floor with a raucous thud and a slap of bare hands against floor puncheons.

The girl scrambled to her feet in a rage, throwing her chair aside. “Goddamn you, Pepper!”

Teeth gritted and eyes slitted, she lunged at the man, right fist extended, a steel blade flashing in the wan light from the window. Pepper loosed a high-pitched laugh as, twisting around in his chair, he grabbed both the girl’s wrists and jerked her down to her knees.

The knife clattered onto the floor.

The girl cursed as she fought against the man’s grip holding her down in front of him. Her crimson cheeks bunched with pain as Pepper crouched over her and drove her toward the floor. The man on the other side of the table held his cards, waiting to resume play, and laughed.

“Now, Miss Johnnie,” Pepper said, “you gonna do what I tell you, or do I have to snap these pretty little wrists for you? I could. I could snap these wrists like a sparrow’s
neck
!”