Desert of the Damned (15 page)

“Somethin’ about the bank,” Reifel grunted, hoping the man would hurry on outside.

But the man didn’t move. Out front someone shouted, “I’ll go in and find out,” and this one’s boots banged hollow echoes from the porch. The screen door opened. A man’s voice said, “Did that guy go on through?”

The man who had come down from the second floor said, “What guy? Through where?” and the one from outside with plain impatience growled savagely, “The one who just came in here — Curly Ben! The collar’s stripped off his shirt. He’s — ”

“Oh,
that
one! Straight down the hall and out the back — ”

Pounding boots obscured the rest of it as the man from outside tore hellity-larrup down the hall. The back door slammed. An increased sound of shouting clattered against the closed window and less noisily withdrew, blunted by the angles of adjacent building walls. An uneasy quiet gripped the lobby, the man beside the stairs remaining thoroughly still.

Reifel’s cheeks were stiff as pounded metal. Why had this guy lied for him? What was he up to? Why didn’t he say something?

He did.

Very sly and cool and confident he said, “If you’ve caught up on your reading let’s get down to brass tacks.”

Reifel placed the man now — knew him by the voice he wasn’t bothering to disguise. The man was Snake Frenston, Reifel’s former lieutenant. And, because he understood now why the man had steered pursuit away, Reifel knew that Frenston’s fist would be holding a leveled pistol.

He was right. It was.

“You know what the score is,” Frenston said, soft and easy. “I don’t care about Turner, but I want every nickel you lifted out of that cache.”

“S
O YOU’VE
joined the sucker bunch too, have you?”

“I been suckered once,” Frenston said, “but I won’t be again — ”

“You will if you think I plundered that cache.”

“We’ll see.” Frenston’s eyes were blue as smoky sage. “Stand up and unbuckle that shell belt.”

Reifel, leaning forward, got out of the chair and let the paper drop, the darkness of his cheeks, the heavy plowed-up gauntness of them, shifting with his thoughts. But of what use were thoughts against that leveled pistol? Frenston would fire at the first sign of trouble. He wouldn’t worry about gunplay fetching back that bunch who’d been trying to find Reifel. Long before they could get here he’d be through Reifel’s pockets, ready to turn Ben’s dead body over for the reward Breen’s duplicity had forced the law to offer.

With glance curling blackly around this man he could have broken with his two bare arms, Reifel unleashed his belt-end from its buckle and dismally heard his pistol thump the floor.

Frenston’s lip corners quirked. “I used to think you were tough — can y’imagine that, bucko?”

When Reifel didn’t answer he said: “Get up them stairs.”

Having no real choice Reifel climbed them. At the top he paused and a couple steps back of him Frenston’s voice ordered, “Third left, Fido. G’wan — wag yourself over there. Now knock on it, damn you.”

Reifel put bruised knuckles against the closed door. He was not too surprised, when it abruptly swung inward, to find Lamtrill’s daughter with her hand on the knob. He said, “You and the rabbits,” and she tore into him like a fishwife.

Her nails raked ribbons of flesh from his cheeks. When she drew back, panting, Frenston said, “Get some clothes on you, baby, an’ go fetch your old man.”

She didn’t bother to close the door. She picked her things off the floor and got herself into them while Reifel, feeling sick, bitterly glared at the carpet. When she was through she ran a comb through her hair, snatched up her riding crop and, looking like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, gathered up her skirts and swept regally past them.

When her high heels began striking sound from the stairs, Frenston said, “Inside, bucko,” and followed him watchfully, kicking the door shut. “Now get onto that bed — belly down.”

Reifel said, “By God, Frenston — ”

Frenston’s fist knocked him down. “Now get onto that bed — an’ I don’t mean tomorrow!”

With a terrible hatred shining out of his eyes Reifel dragged himself up and fell across the bed. “You want some more?” Frenston asked him and, when Reifel didn’t answer, “Get over on your belly or I’ll crack your damned head.”

Reifel finally made it. He looked, against that rumpled sheet, to be as weak as a kitten. But Frenston wasn’t minded to take any needless chances. “Pull out your pockets.”

Reifel heard the sharp intake of Frenston’s breath when that thick sheaf of banknotes unfolded on the bed. “Cross your arms behind your back,” Frenston ordered in a voice turned husky with excitement.

As though it took his last effort Reifel did as he was bidden but Frenston didn’t get careless enough to reach for that money. He went over to the door and shot the bolt against interruption. Then, warily moving around the bed, he tore a strip from the sheet folded back at its foot. Tore another and said: “Kick off them boots.”

“Hell with you,” Reifel muttered.

Frenston moved again, dropping his weight across Reifel’s legs, securely pinning him against the bed. “How you feelin’ now, bucko?” He drove his down-chopping gun barrel against Reifel’s right shoulderblade, then cracked it against his left. Reifel gagged. His shape went limp and Frenston chuckled.

Laying down his gun he swiftly bound Reifel’s wrists. “I ought to bash your damn head in,” he snarled, getting up then. He slid the gun back into his holster, bent over and reached for Ben’s nearest boot. He got it, too — though not quite the way he’d expected.

Reifel’s flexing knee brought that spurred bootheel up in a jingling arc. The flashing rowel caught Frenston flush on the jaw and ripped his face open from chin to eyebrows. A strangled scream burst out of him and he went over backwards, flopping around on the floor like a crippled snake.

Reifel flung himself over and managed to get off the bed. It was sheer torture, his pounded shoulderblades feeling like a mule had trampled him, but he dared not wait lest Frenston’s racket trap him here.

He slammed an uncaring boot against the side of Frenston’s head and, when the man’s outcries ceased, hurried over to the window above the street and smashed the glass out. Backing up to it then he sawed his lashed wrists against the jagged shards, ignoring the pain, until he had his arms free.

He scooped his money off the bed, snatched Frenston’s pistol from its leather, whirled across to the door and pulled back the bolt. He was that way, forward leaning, with his hand upon the knob, when a rush of booted feet hit the bottom of the stairs.

With his eyes like polished ebony Reifel knew one moment of frantic desperation. It was too late to go out the window — men on the street would have heard Frenston’s uproar and would start throwing lead the moment they sighted him. In another few moments that crowd on the stairs would be into the hall and it would be all over. Reaching deep into his reserves for the strength to do it he bent down, got Frenston around the waist, heaved the man’s inert shape to an agonized shoulder and, with a hard wrench of muscles, came erect.

He pulled open the door, the racket on the stairs sounding ominously close, and staggered into the hall. The shadowy stairwell was black with men. “This what you’re lookin’ for?” Reifel grated, and flung Frenston into them with all his strength.

He didn’t wait to see what effect this had on them but, swapping ends like a cat, dived into a room across the hall. This room had no window. Its light came from a glassed box in the ceiling and, springing onto a chair, he pushed the trap up and hauled himself after it. He might be swapping the witch for the devil, but it was neck meat or nothing and he pulled himself through, shoving the trap closed behind him.

The roof was flat but he was concealed from those below by the high false front of its street side. The roof of the bakery, to the left, was a full story below him, but the building to the right was the same height as this one. It was four feet away across the width of the alley and, without pausing to see if there were men looking up, Reifel made the jump, running swiftly to the skylight and throwing open its waterproofed hatch.

With his head over the opening he saw a storeroom below him filled with the accumulated odds and ends of years. There were planks and storm windows and a pile of smashed flowerpots, six spools of barbed wire and a ten-foot-high stack of dilapidated scenery. Without looking any farther Reifel dropped to the floor. Picking his way with care through the mounds of dusty junk he came to the door, quietly depressing its old-fashioned thumb latch. The mechanism worked, he even heard the hasp lifted on the panel’s farther side, but the door didn’t budge.

He remained like this a long moment, considering it, understanding it was secured by a padlock which he couldn’t get at. He could of course shoot the door open but he was loath to make any more noise than he had to. He swore in exasperation when he saw that even the bolts to the hinges were on the door’s farther side.

He stepped off a bit and picked up one of the planks, a four-by-eight about six feet long. He hated the noise this was going to make but saw no help for it if he would get himself out. He found a place on the door where dry rot had set in and brought the end of his plank hard against it sharply. Under the shock of that blow the ancient wood ripped apart from top to bottom, the half on the hinges slamming back with a clatter. Dropping the plank, he went through with gun lifted but there was nothing to shoot.

He was on a balcony-like overhang, with a guard rail around it, which was not only empty but covered with bat droppings. Rusty iron stairs led steeply down into darkness and these he took slowly, step by cautiously planted step, listening intently for the first hint of danger. It seemed too absurd to hope he had not been heard.

When he reached the next landing that hope looked a lot less forlorn. A short row of numbered doors confronted him in the light of the match he held cupped in left palm. He took the first door by its knob and pulled it open, wrinkling his nose at the smell of musty clothing. If this same kind of windowless six-by-eight cubbyhole was behind each one of these other doors it seemed fairly certain he was standing before the dressing rooms of the abandoned old opera house.

Just to make sure, he pulled open another door and in the feeble glow of his nearly burnt match saw clothes and gear strewn all over the place. Match expired, he was about to push the door to when a sudden weird notion put a mighty peculiar feeling in the bottom of his stomach. He was probably crazy as hell but he couldn’t think why any playacting chick would have wanted to wear chaps or tote a forty-pound saddle. He struck a fresh match and the raveling flame showed clothes for a female so dadgummed old they were just about ready to fall off their hangers. But that slick fork center-fire saddle on the floor had been used no later than sometime yesterday; same way with those chaps.

It came over Ben Reifel like a bucket of cold water how extremely unhealthy it could be to be found here by the owner of that saddle. Breen? It could be. Or one of Breen’s men.

He backed away from the room into the cavernous shadows of this behind-the-stage runway. Cowtown theaters were generally built to a pattern and it was dollars to doughnuts there would be a side exit someplace handy to these dressing rooms. There was. He saw it just as his match went out.

With stealthy haste he found its knob and turned it with an infinite care, right hand still filled with Frenston’s gun. This knob had recently known some oil for it turned without protest, the door opening softly. But almost at once Reifel stopped its swing, held rigid by the guarded pitch of near voices.

Not ten feet away, in the deepening gloom of approaching night, a group of four men had their heads together. Nate Lamtrill was talking, his outraged voice thick with anger. “Of course I can weather it! What beats me is why the hell you didn’t catch him — ”

“We’ll get him, all right. He’s in one of these buildings. I’ve got twenty men with Winchesters — ”

Reifel’s skin went cold and began to crawl. His hands started trembling and his mind was in such turmoil he almost missed the banker’s words. “You had better get him, Crawford,” Lamtrill said, “if you know what’s good for you.”

Crawford!
Lamtrill called the man Crawford but the man’s voice was Breen’s — Reifel would have known that saturnine cadence to the ends of the earth. He had to fight back the leaping urge to pull trigger. With an extreme reluctance he dragged his sights off the man, ashamed of his squeamishness and not understanding it. Here — so close he could almost touch him — was the brass-collar dog in Lamtrill’s drive for empire. “Crawford” Lamtrill had called him, and Crawford was the name of Devil Iron’s range boss; and, by Mossman’s figuring, this was also Kid Badger, merciless leader of the region’s roughest wild bunch.

Reifel, put upon too many times, half lifted Frenston’s gun again. He felt an overpowering tendency to do the thing of which he had been accused and become the killer the reward bills called him. The skin pulled tight across his cheeks, the bones of his face stood out like castings as he lined his sights on this man who had framed him — who even now was coolly assuring Nate Lamtrill that Curly Ben hadn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of getting clear.

To hit back with an insensate revenge, to drop this double-dealing twister in his tracks and go out in a blaze of gunfire, exerted a tremendous appeal to Ben’s enraged senses. He could rationalize this brutal instinct and almost make himself believe that murdering Breen and this range-hungry banker was the thing to do — almost, but not quite. For a part of his mind was remembering Mossman, was hearing Burt Mossman’s voice say with conviction:
“Two wrongs
never make a right. They never have and they never will. Life can be damn cruel, mister, and nobody knows this better than me; but right-minded men will back the law, knowing if they don’t we might as well all be beasts howling through a desert of the damned”

Ben Reifel lowered the muzzle of his gun. He had been a long while in that kind of desert and was matured enough now to know that Mossman was right. Lamtrill was a wolf and Bo Breen was his jackal but if enough people stood foursquare behind the law…. Reifel couldn’t quite believe the world’s ills were that simple but he was willing to admit he wasn’t smart enough to judge.

He drew back, pulling the door shut; and the door’s hinges wailed like a banshee. There was one singing instant of breathless silence and then Breen’s challenge struck the night with a roar.

Reifel whirled, bitterly swearing, and tore across the ink-black murk of the dusty stage, missing the steps leading off its north side and crashing headlong into the building’s outside wall. He lay there stunned for a moment, his throbbing heart fluttering wildly. He got a shaking knee under him and clawed himself upright; and not till then did he realize he had lost Frenston’s gun. Sick and desperate he crouched there waiting for discovery.

But no hand touched that squealing door which had betrayed his presence. Breen and Nate Lamtrill were too smart for that. They weren’t inviting hot lead; their business was throwing it and in a matter of moments they would have this place sewed up, covered from every angle by the bleach-eyed crew who took their orders without question. If Ben was going to get out he had to get out quick.

His groping hands found the door.

He flung it wide, went diving through, seeing the waiting shapes too late. A down-slogging gun barrel stretched him prone three feet from the door.