Last Lawman (9781101611456) (12 page)

She sobbed from the pain and the burning and the utter fury and disappointment of not having been able to kill the man who’d killed her son so pointlessly. So offhandedly, as though he’d merely been swatting a pesky fly.

Stanhope gave a patient sigh as he swung down from the grulla’s back. He glanced around at the others, his gaze holding on the only Mexican in his gang. “Santos, you keepin’ careful watch on our back trail?”

“
Si, si, jefe.
No one back there. If I didn’t know better, I’d say we had all of Wyoming to ourselves.”

“No one’s gonna come after us after what we done to that posse up in Willow City,” said the black-clad Magpie Quint.

Doc Plowright nodded at Erin sobbing on the ground near a patch of Spanish bayonet. “What’s that all about? You figurin’ on turnin’ her over to us finally, Boss? About time. She’s a real lulu.”

“Not yet. You fellas rest your horses in that shade over
yonder.” Stanhope glanced toward a small copse of box elders and cottonwoods offering thin shade about seventy yards off the trail’s south side. Then he turned toward a lone cottonwood another fifty yards to the north. “Me an’ the mercantile lady are gonna go over to that cottonwood and have us another go round.”

“No,” Erin said, feeling a shudder wrack her. She looked up at Stanhope. “Please…no. Just kill me.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t kill a looker like you,” Stanhope said. “Now, Miss Trixie Tate—I might kill her.”

Erin followed the gang leader’s hard, sneering gaze toward the blond whore riding behind Red Ryan. “She ain’t as good-lookin’ as you, and besides, when you’ve banged one whore you’ve banged ’em all.”

Trixie Tate, who was sporting one black eye, shrank back a little behind the big redhead with the red beard and soiled tan sombrero.

Former deputy sheriff of Willow City, Mark Finn, spoke up. “No point in killin’ Trixie, Clell. Hell, she takes the edge off all this hard ridin’.” The big, fleshy-faced, potbellied man grinned at the woman, who looked away from him in disgust. “At least, she did for me last night.”

“I don’t think she likes you, Mark,” Clell said. “And to tell you the truth, I don’t, either.”

Finn looked exasperated, hurt. “Huh? After how I helped you out in Willow Springs?”

“You’re a turncoat, Mark.” Clell raised the double-bore shotgun hanging from the lanyard around his neck. “I wouldn’t trust you as far as I could throw you and your fat ass uphill in a steep wind.”

“Oh, now, Clell,” Finn said, raising his hands to his thick shoulders, palms out. “You can’t do me like that! “Why…”

The popper thundered. The ten-gauge buck blew Finn straight off his saddle, as though he’d been lassoed from behind. He hit the ground with a loud thud and a heavy groan, blood pumping from the pumpkin-sized hole in his
chest and frayed shirt. His horse whinnied and pranced off the side of the trail.

Finn groaned again, tried to stand, and collapsed, dead.

The Vultures all stared down at him stonily. Trixie Tate stared at Stanhope’s shotgun. Gray smoke curled from the left barrel.

Composing herself as well as she could in her tattered dress, she batted her lashes and manufactured an alluring expression. “Oh, you wouldn’t want to kill me, Clell,” she said, shuttling her gaze from the smoking cannon to Erin, sprawled in the dust and staring in awe at the dead deputy. “All she’ll do is lay there. Me…now, I know how to please a man.” She glanced around at the seven other sweaty, dusty, sunburned riders. “Just ask any of your partners here.”

Clell’s scrawny brother, Lester, who had a ferret face and a thin, patchy beard, grinned. “She ain’t bad, Clell. Why don’t you give her a try while I teach the mercantile lady a thing or two about pleasin’ fellas like ourselves.” He rose up in his saddle a little and cupped his crotch.

“Go ahead—shoot her,” said Trixie Tate, staring around Red Ryan at Erin still half lying in the trail, now silent and staring somewhere off beyond Stanhope, resigning herself to the further abuse she knew she was about to endure. “That woman’s trouble. She’ll hold us up. Now, me—I’m
easy
! I’m
fun
to have around. Finn had that much right!”

As the words penetrated Erin’s consciousness, she turned her bewildered gaze to the blonde. Trixie Tate looked away quickly, flushing a little, sheepish, then manufactured another of her desperate, truckling smiles at Stanhope.

“Git goin’, fellas,” Stanhope said. “I’ll be the one teachin’ the purty mercantiler her man-pleasin’ lessons till further notice.” Holding his horse’s reins, he walked over and jerked Erin up by an arm. “Let’s go, purty lady,” he grumbled, grabbing her wrist and leading both her and the grulla off toward the cottonwood.

Stanhope walked too fast, faster than Erin could manage
in her beaten and battered condition, tripping over the torn hem of her dress. When she fell, Stanhope dragged her, and she fought desperately to regain her footing only to fall again and to have Stanhope drag her as he kept up his long, merciless stride.

When they got to the cottonwood, he dropped the grulla’s reins, and threw Erin down in the shade. She tried desperately to get away from him, even managed to crawl several yards away on her hands and bare knees, but he dragged her back to the tree by her hair.

He held her down with one foot as he tossed away his gun belt and shotgun and dropped his trousers and underwear to his knees. He jerked her dress up around her waist, spread her knees wide with his hands, and took her savagely and brutally, grunting like a goat and staring with cold taunting into her eyes—just as he had the night before. Those mismatched eyes were demon’s eyes riding above the black vultures tattooed on his cheeks.

Halfway through, she stopped fighting and just lay there, staring up through the fluttering leaves of the cottonwood at a lone, white cloud hovering low in the deep blue sky. When he finished grunting and stood and pulled his pants and balbriggans up, strapped his gun belt around his waist, and dropped the shotgun back down over his head, he said, “Try somethin’ like that again—goin’ fer a gun or tryin’ to flee—I’ll do this again before I throw you to the others. I’ll make Lester go last. When he’s done, he’ll likely gut you and leave you to die screaming while the buzzards pick at your eyes.”

Erin stared up at him. She felt as hollow and dried up as an old gourd. She wanted only to die, to be released of this physical torment from which there appeared no other escape, and to join Jim and his father in heaven. “You will anyway,” she said, closing her knees.

“Maybe,” Stanhope said, pulling her dress down and then jerking her to her feet once more. “Maybe not.” He squeezed
her chin and thrust his big, ugly face up close to hers, jutting his lower jaw. “You’re too damn purty to kill before I’ve wrung you dry.”

“I’ll do it again,” she said, staring back at him. “First chance I get.”

“Fair enough.”

Chuckling, Stanhope pushed her ahead of him and his horse, heading back toward where his gang milled around the blond whore, who was down on her knees amongst them.

Stanhope threw Erin up onto the back of his horse as though she weighed little more than a sack of flour. When he’d climbed aboard the horse himself, he glanced over his shoulder at her, grinned, and slid his Colt from its holster. He held it up in front of her face, taunting her, then wedged it somewhere in front of him, likely behind his belt buckle.

Out of her reach.

She didn’t care. She didn’t have the energy to try to kill him again so soon after her first attempt had gone awry and he’d taught her another lesson. She was sore deep in her womb. Fatigue lay heavy in every fiber of her being.

Still, behind the pain and fatigue, rage smoldered like the ominous, unseen heat that remained in the wake of a deadly wildfire. Threatening a blowup and an even worse firestorm than that which had come before.

The gang rode out across the mesa and then down a switchback trail along its western side. Erin leaned forward against the broad, sweaty, smelly back of the man who’d
killed her son and raped her and beat her, and she fell not so much asleep as into a semi-awake trance.

She was only vaguely aware of the rugged country sliding around her. She was more aware of her half-waking dream of somehow slitting Stanhope’s throat from ear to ear with a sharp knife as he stared up at her, screaming, pleading for his life, and squealing his regret over taking that of her boy.

The waking dream caused her upper lip to curl slightly as her head bounced against Stanhope’s back. It was a very faint hope buried deep in her soul, but a hope just the same—similar to that heat festering beneath the forest-like duff of her nearly unbearable torment, threatening a blowup.

The ride seemed everlasting.

The gang stopped a few times to rest their horses, but mostly they continued heading straight west—walking, trotting, galloping. Walking, trotting, galloping. Stopping for another short time, passing a bottle around, laughing and cajoling each other, then climbing back into the leather and walking, trotting, and galloping their horses by turns. Saving them for the long pull they still had ahead of them.

Erin gritted her teeth and endured, her dream of Stanhope’s death the only thing keeping her soul even halfway intact.

The sun dropped. Cool darkness came, a relief from the searing sun.

Erin lifted her head when she felt Stanhope’s grulla slowing. Lights lay ahead, sort of shifting back and forth along the wagon trail they were on. Then she made out a log ranch portal adorned with elk antlers and a board across the top into which
WAYLON HUMPHREYS BOX BAR B RANCH—COOL SPRING CREEK
had been burned.

Stanhope and Erin passed beneath the portal and rode on into the ranch yard. The gang followed, hooves drumming. There were a couple of barns and several corrals and small log buildings whose windows were dark. The main
house sat on a small rise, lamplight glowing behind most of its sashed, first-floor windows.

It was a small ranch, Erin saw. The buildings, including what appeared to be the main house, were crude, mud-chinked log affairs. There was no bunkhouse. She could smell wood smoke and the smell of cattle and pine resin from the dark forest that pushed up all around the buildings. There was the faint murmur of a creek, though she couldn’t see the stream for the darkness relieved by only the sparkling starlight.

Erin’s heart squeezed, and she felt her lips pinch together as she looked around at the crude but homey place. It was the kind of place that she and Jim’s father, Daniel, had once wanted for themselves. But then Dan’s father had died and passed the mercantile on to them, and they’d had no choice but to stay in town and try to give the business a go.

But they’d still hoped of one day having their own little ranch—a shotgun ranch—somewhere out in the piney foothills of the Big Horns, where the creeks ran cool and clear, and the nights smelled like wine.

Stanhope reined the gulla in before the main house. There was no porch, just a Z-frame door banded with iron. A hide-bottom chair sat to the right of the door, between it and a wooden washstand on which a rusty tin basin sat. A hand brush and a small, cracked mirror hung from nails over the stand. A rain barrel stood left of the stand, half-covered with a wooden lid.

A shadow moved in one of the windows. The curtain over the window opened slightly and a face appeared. After a few seconds, the curtain slid back in place, and the door opened with a wooden scrape. A tall, slightly bent man in an underwear shirt and suspenders came out, stooping beneath the door’s low frame. He held a shotgun in his right hand.

Erin saw the curtain in the window part again. Another,
narrower face appeared in it, silhouetted against the lamplight in the room behind the person looking out.

“Help you fellas?” asked the man with the shotgun.

Neither Stanhope nor any of the gang said anything for a time. Erin could hear the revolting, liquid sound of Stanhope moving tobacco around in his mouth before he leaned out to his right and spat into the dirt. Wiping his lips with the back of his left hand, he drawled, “This your place?”

“That’s right. Mine and my boy’s.”

“You be Humphreys?”

“That’s right. Who’re you?”

“The man that’s gonna kill you and your boy and bed down in your place for the night.”

Humphreys stared up at Stanhope. Erin could see the lamplight from the windows flanking him glittering in his eyes. He looked uncertain, beetling his heavy brows, not sure if the ugly stranger before him was funning with him or not.

As tired and hopeless as she felt, Erin’s heart leapt in her chest. “Oh, god,” she moaned. “No.
No!
”

She raised a fist and hammered it against Stanhope’s back. Too late. She heard the blast of his shotgun, saw the flash reflect off the cabin and the wide-open eyes of the man standing before the grulla. Erin rammed her fist again between Stanhope’s shoulder blades to little effect. The killer laughed and crouched and the shotgun thundered one more time, the grulla skitter-hopping beneath him. The echo of the shot off the cabin was like a punch to Erin’s face.

“Oh, god!” Erin cried when she heard the thump of a heavy body hitting the ground.