Last Lawman (9781101611456) (2 page)

Spurr had welcomed Adams’s help, but he didn’t cotton
to younguns tracking experienced killers. Now, as young Potter continued to scream and curse and roll his guts out into his bloody hands, the federal lawman remembered why.

Spurr had told the kid to remain in the wash, but since there’d been no horses in the corral flanking the cabin, and they’d seen no signs of life around the place, Potter had insisted the shack was vacant. Against Spurr’s orders, he’d risen up out of the wash, calling Spurr an old woman, and walked toward the cabin, whistling.

That’s when the gang had thrown the shack’s shutters wide and opened up with their rifles.

Now, Hector Philpot showed his hatless head in the window, his left hand covering his left ear, holding a Spencer .56 in his other hand. “You got more sand than brains, old man! You’re one against five, and my gang’s just like me”—the long-faced outlaw flashed a silver-toothed grin—“
poison mean!
”

Spurr pumped a fresh shell into his Winchester’s chamber and fired. Philpot gave a taunting whoop and slid his head back behind the window frame as Spurr’s slug sliced the air where the sneering face had been a wink before. Inside the cabin, a bottle broke with a hollow bark of shattering glass.

Judging by the sound, the bottle had been at least half full. Spurr smiled.

“Shit!” yelled another outlaw with a raspy Texas twang—Nordecker Riley, most likely. “That there was our last bottle o’ red-eye!”

A rifle snaked out the window left of the door, and Spurr jerked his head back behind his covering boulder as the gun roared. The slug hammered the front of Spurr’s boulder with a crashing squeal, spraying rock dust and shards in all directions.

“Throw that old cannon of yours out here, Spurr!” shouted Philpot. “Then the hogleg. You don’t got a chance against us. If you don’t, the boy dies—understand?”

Hunkered low behind the boulder on the bank of the wash, Spurr chewed his lip as he held his cocked rifle straight up and down against his shoulder. He cast his blue-eyed gaze out from beneath the brim of his tan Stetson till he could see Kenny Potter lying about thirty yards out from the cabin. He was thirty yards to Spurr’s right, where the dry wash curved around to the south side of the cactus- and yucca-stippled yard.

A covered stone well lay within five yards of him.

“Kenny, crawl behind that well!” Spurr called. “Can you do that, son?”

The outlaws had stopped shooting. An eerie silence hovered over the yard blasted with brilliant mountain sunshine raining out of a cobalt sky. Kenny rolled onto his right shoulder, his deputy sheriff’s badge glinting on his brown wool vest, and lifted his hatless head. His curly auburn hair bounced around his ears and neck. The boy’s face was a mask of pain and horror.

He shook his head and clamped his hands tighter against his bloody side. “I can’t, goddamnit, Spurr. My insides is fallin’ out!”

Just then a rifle roared from a cabin window. Out of the corner of his left eye, Spurr saw the bright red-orange flash and the streak of powder smoke. Kenny screamed and jerked his head down, pressing his forehead against the sand and gravel as he moved one hand up from his belly to his left ear.

“That’s for my ear, Spurr!” Philpot shouted above the metallic rasp of a rifle’s cocking lever. “An ear for an ear. That’s fair, ain’t it?”

Spurr looked at Kenny. The young deputy was twisted around with his face in the dirt, shoulders jerking as he sobbed and clutched the far side of his shaggy head. A good-looking kid. The kind that no doubt drew many a young woman’s eye back home in Jicarilla.

But he’d be considerably less attractive without that ear, though the belly wound would likely be the end of him.

Rage burned through Spurr like a glowing war lance.

“Goddamnit, Philpot—he’s just a kid. Can’t you see he’s down?”

The only reply was ribald laughter and the loud rasp of another shell being jacked into Philpot’s .56.

Spurr snaked his rifle around the rock and cut loose with three more shots before return fire pushed him back behind cover. Several slugs spanged off the boulder. A few more blew up clumps of dirt and gravel around him. One large-caliber bullet tore up a yucca plant and hurled it back into the wash behind him.

Amidst the din, Spurr heard the distinctive roar of Philpot’s Spencer. Kenny shrieked. As the gunfire died, Spurr edged another look around the rock to see Kenny arching his back and awkwardly reaching for his bloody left knee. The young man’s mouth formed a perfect
O
as he lifted his head and loosed a horrific scream.

The gunfire died.

Silence like a held breath descended.

Spurr could hear the boy sobbing against the ground as the blood ran out of him. The cries were like razor-edged daggers raked across every nerve in the old lawman’s big, sinewy body. He pushed his hat off his head, raked a hand down his patchy, light-brown beard streaked with gray, cursing under his breath. His weak ticker heaved like a foundering horse in his chest.

Part of him wanted to throw his guns down and walk out from behind the rock. But the experienced lawman in him knew that that wouldn’t save Kenny. It would only get them both killed. And Philpot would ride free, laughing, him and the rest of his wolves heading off to whore away the winter in Las Cruces.

“Kenny,” Spurr said, hearing the anguish in his own voice. “Hold on, son.”

Philpot called, “What do you say, Spurr? You gonna come out with your hands wide, or we gonna have to go on killin’ this poor pup…
slow
?”

Spurr raised the Winchester to his shoulder, keeping it low and back where no one from the cabin could see its dusty, octagonal, blue-steel barrel. He stared out over the sights at Kenny’s slumped, prone figure, the boy mewling now like a gut-shot coyote. His head lolled slowly from side to side, and he was digging the toes of his spurred boots into the gravel, as though feebly trying to push himself forward.

Spurr cleared the emotion from his throat as he pressed his cheek up against the Winchester’s worn walnut stock. “Ya done good, Kenny!” he shouted, though it came out cracked and shrill. “Ya done real good!”

The Winchester roared, bucking against Spurr’s brittle shoulder.

The old lawman sobbed and sniffed, a single tear rolling down his weathered face and tracking into his scraggly beard as he ejected the spent cartridge from the Winchester’s breech. It clinked off a rock behind him.

“You’d have made a damn good lawman one day,” he added tightly, not looking at the deputy’s spasming figure beyond the rifle’s smoking barrel, blood blossoming from the hole in his left temple.

“Jesus Christ, Spurr!” Philpot yelled from the cabin, chuckling in disbelief. “What’d you
do
?”

“I killed him,” Spurr said softly, weakly, ramming a fresh cartridge into the Winchester’s chamber, then brushing the tear from his cheek with the back of his gloved hand. “And now, if it’s the last thing I do, by thunder, I’m gonna kill you.”

Spurr pressed the back of his head against his covering boulder, his heart thudding heavily but slowly, skipping a beat now and then. He’d let the outlaws wonder for a few seconds what his next move would be, let them start wondering what theirs should be.

When enough time had passed that they were likely letting their guards down just a little, he turned sharply to his left and pressed his cheek tight against his Winchester’s stock. A target presented itself in a cabin window—the vague shape of a man’s hatted head as he stared toward Spurr. The old lawman saw the man’s eyes snap wide as Spurr’s Winchester spoke.

Before the man could jerk his head back behind the cabin wall, his right eye disappeared. Spurr caught a brief glimpse of red as the bullet hammered through the man’s head and out the back of his skull before Spurr pulled his own head and his rifle back behind the boulder. Sucking a sharp breath, the lawman pushed off the boulder and slid down the bank and into the sandy-bottomed wash.

Spurr had always worn high-topped moccasins instead of stockmen’s boots with spurs and jinglebobs—had started the practice just after he’d left his horse-trading family’s shotgun farm in western Kansas to hunt buffalo nigh on forty years ago—and he was especially glad to be wearing them now. The soft-soled, low-heeled moccasins fairly propelled him—as much as anything could propel his tired, broken-down carcass—down the gravelly wash. He was able to move quietly, and the willows and cottonwoods lining the wash hid him from view of the cabin.

When he’d run thirty yards, his wizened lungs heaving in his chest, his heart tattooing a manic rhythm against his breastbone, he followed a game path up the bank. It was only about a six-foot climb, and not a steep one, but Spurr had to pause at the top and bend forward, placing a hand on his knee, to catch his breath. His chest felt as though a hundred little black spiders were crawling around in it. A trap was sinking its steel jaws into his heart. His temples throbbed.

Letting his rifle hang down in his right hand, he stretched his lips back from his teeth. “Come on, goddamnit. Don’t give out on me now, ticker. One more job to do. Just one more.”

He pressed his left hand against his chest and straightened, sucking a deep draught of air. The trap loosened its jaws a little, and the ground stopped pitching around him.

“All right. That wasn’t so damn hard now, was it?”

He looked toward the cabin, hidden from view by willows and a couple of wagon-sized boulders that had been spit out by whatever river had carved this canyon a million years ago. Good. He ran forward, dropped down into another wash, and followed it north along the west side of the cabin.

Philpot’s gang was shouting now, though Spurr couldn’t make out what they were saying. He was breathing too hard, though his moccasins moved along nearly soundlessly. He’d traded an old Sioux woman up in Dakota a bag of Arbuckles and a Schofield .44 for the pair he currently wore. He’d have
to look her up—Little Crow Feather was her name—when he was up that way again, as the old woman knew her salt.

If he ever made it out of here, that was.

As the dry wash’s right bank lowered, the cabin appeared about fifty yards away. Spurr dropped to his knees, crabbed over to the bank, and peered over it. One of the outlaw gang had left the cabin and was now crouched behind an overturned handcart about twenty feet in front of it, a rifle in his hands. The men were shouting back and forth, but Spurr still couldn’t make out what they were saying, though it was obvious they were looking for him.

He gave a grim smile. He had them confused. Maybe a little scared. Spurr wasn’t half the lawman he once was—at least not physically—but if he could still make as ring-tailed a crew as Philpot’s streak their drawers, maybe he still had a year or two left in him.

He lowered his head and ran crouching along the wash. When he was north of the cabin, he followed a right-forking branch of the wash into a broader draw that ran generally northeast to southwest and skirted the knobby escarpment. He couldn’t see the cabin because of the six-foot-high right bank and screening brush, but it was probably about fifty yards away.

The outlaws had stopped shouting. That was a good sign. It meant they had no idea what Spurr was up to, and they were growing more and more nervous about that.

Spurr strode around a bend in the wash. Something moved ahead of him, and he stopped, crouching and raising the Winchester. He removed his thumb from the hammer. Ahead was a string of horses tied to a long picket rope threaded through some cedars growing along the draw’s bottom. Spurr moved forward until he could see all five of the mounts—two paints, a brown-and-white pinto, an Appaloosa, and a Morgan-cross. They were all saddled and ready to ride, though their bits were slipped and their latigo straps hung free beneath their bellies.

Buckets of water had been set out for the small remuda. The Appaloosa and the Morgan were snorting up whatever oats remained of a recent feeding. The pinto had lifted its head high and was staring toward Spurr, the sunlight glinting in its soft brown eyes. Its ears were slightly back, and its nostrils were working like a miniature bellows.

The air around the remuda smelled richly of horses and cedars.

The Morgan jerked its own head up as Spurr approached. The Appaloosa whinnied shrilly and lurched back against the bridle reins tied to the picket line, kicking a pile of fresh apples and causing the picket rope to bow and squawk.

“Easy, easy,” Spurr rasped, sucking air through his open mouth as he moved out in front of the horses.

They were real beauties. Fiery-eyed. All five built for bottom as well as speed. Philpot knew horses. The old lawman would give him that.

That and a bullet.

Chuckling to himself, Spurr pulled his bowie knife out of the sheath sewn into his right moccasin, and quickly went down the picket line, cutting the horses free.

The horses backed away, rearing, from the picket line and the crusty old stranger whose smell they were not familiar with. Their manes buffeted in the hot, dry breeze. Sand-colored dust lifted.

“All right—move your mangy asses!” Spurr shouted, throwing his arms up high above his head.