Last Lawman (9781101611456) (27 page)

Now it was loaded and ready to go. Ready to assist her in rescuing her son.

She wasn’t sure where she was going. She let the horse pick its own way. The Vultures had to be close around here. She and Spurr must have nearly ridden right up on them earlier in the afternoon. That wouldn’t have bothered her even if it had gotten her killed. It would have been worth it for just one more look at Jim.

Nonsense, she thought now, turning her head to rub her cheek brusquely across her shoulder. If she died, Jim would die. She had to remain rational. And careful. If the Vultures caught her again, neither she nor Jim would have any chance at all.

She scoured the ground for tracks, and she saw a few but only irregularly and only where the starlight shone brightest on open ground. Swinging her head from right to left, she probed the dark, rolling land for lights—lights of a cabin or the lights of a cookfire.

Ahead lay a hogback ridge with a notch in the top. The trail that she was following—if it was a trail and if the horse wasn’t just following its nose—rose toward the notch. Upon reaching it, the horse breathing hard from the climb, she saw that she was on a low pass, with a field of boulders strewn along both sides of the trail, deadfall lying amongst the rocks like giant jackstraws that glowed eerily in the starlight.

Beyond the boulders, menacing black forest stretched toward high ridges.

Rocks rattled to her left. Erin drew back hard on the horse’s reins. “Whoa, boy,” she whispered. “Whoa!”

A shadow moved on a ledge about ten feet above the trail on her left. A man! Erin closed her hand over the revolver’s grips, slid the gun from her pants. A keening screech erupted. It filled her head, blurred her vision, rattled her eardrums painfully. Her heart leapt into her throat.

When the sound was abruptly clipped, she saw the silhouette of the bobcat against the stars as it took long, fluid strides up the side of the ridge to a cabin-sized boulder. It was outlined briefly against the sky, curling its long tail, before it dropped down the boulder’s opposite side and disappeared into the pines carpeting the long, steep slope rising toward a granite spire that shone pearl blue in the starlight.

Normally, running into a wildcat while riding alone in the middle of nowhere would have scared the hell out of Erin Wilde. Now, however, her heart slowed with relief that she hadn’t been caught in a trap set by the Vultures.

She booted the horse on down the ridge. At the bottom, she stopped the horse again suddenly, sniffing the air. There was the slight tang of wood smoke. The slight breeze was out of the north. She stared across a long, flat stretch of pale desert stippled with cedars and sage.

There were no lights but the arching stars. But since the breeze was from that direction, the smoke had to be coming from that direction, as well.

Tension tightened her shoulders. But eagerness made her breathing shallow. It took the pain from her twisted ankle. She turned the horse off the trail’s right side. She followed the scent of the wood smoke for half a mile, finding that the flatland wasn’t as flat as it had appeared.

Ahead lay a ravine bristling darkly with trees. It angled out of some chalky bluffs on the right. Probably a creek at the ravine’s bottom. Maybe a cabin. The occasional whiffs of wood smoke were growing stronger.

Erin followed a deer path down the side of the ravine and into the trees that started about halfway to the murkily forbidding bottom—twisted conifers and aspens. It was cooler down here. The air was humid, and she could smell the pungency of a slow-moving stream. As she’d expected, the creek twisted along the ravine’s bottom, glistening darkly through black, weblike branches.

There didn’t appear to be a cabin down here. Nor a camp. Maybe up the other side? She could tell from the smoke that the fire wasn’t far away.

Dismounting, Erin tied the horse to an aspen sapling along the stream’s muddy shore. The twisted ankle barked when she put weight on it, but she’d have to ignore it. She couldn’t ride the horse up out of the ravine without risking giving herself away.

Hobbling, chewing her cheek, keeping one hand on the handles of her pistol still wedged behind her belt, she crossed the stream and gingerly climbed the opposite bank. She continued to try to ignore the ankle, but she could feel it growing warmer, swelling. A nerve like an angry snake kept striking.

She cursed it, cursed herself for the impatience that had led to the injured limb, and dropped to both knees three feet from the crest of the bank. As she edged a look over the top, she gasped and reflexively jerked her head back down.

She’d seen lights against the outline of a broad, low structure of some kind.

Her heart beat almost painfully in her throat, in her ears. Licking her lips, sliding the pistol out of her pants, and holding it firmly in her right hand, she lifted her head above the lip of the bank.

Indeed, a cabin sat about a hundred feet away, on a broad, flat area amongst the chalky buttes. It was built of stones and logs, with a slightly pitched brush roof. Starlight reflected off bits of other structures behind it, including a
corral in which horses milled, the starlight shining like dull sequins on the backs of a few. Only one was moving restlessly, trotting in circles, pale dust rising.

Erin could see four of the cabin’s windows from her vantage—two in the front, two in the right-side wall. The shutters were thrown wide against the cabin. The two windows in front were brightly lit. The nearest one in the sidewall was dimmer, the fourth one, near the shack’s rear, was dark.

Erin’s mother’s instinct told her that Jimmy was in that dark room. Probably locked inside. But she might be able to get to him through the window.

Patiently, she held her position for fifteen minutes, looking around carefully for any sign of patrolling Vultures. The only movement she saw besides the restless horse, however, were the shadows of men behind the cabin windows. Their voices emanated, chillingly familiar, on the cool, silent night.

Wincing at pain stabbing up from her ankle, Erin gained her feet and stole up out of the draw. She limped across the yard, holding her pistol down low in her right hand, where the starlight was less apt to find it. Someone inside the cabin laughed raucously, and there was a thudding sound, as though someone had slapped a table, followed by the chinking of gathered coins.

“If I find you been cheatin’, little brother, I’m gonna cut both your ears and your pecker off!” Clell Stanhope’s distinctive, mocking voice stopped Erin in her tracks. A chill swept her, lifting gooseflesh across the backs of her arms.

Fear gripped her. It was like an invisible hand shoving her back toward the ravine and her horse. Why not wait there for Spurr?

Because he likely wasn’t crazy enough to try what she intended—to slip into the cabin and pluck her son away from the Vultures at the risk of her own life. No, a rational person would not do what she must do. Only a mother would attempt what she was attempting.

Pushing forward against the unseen hand splayed across her chest, she limped ahead. Boots thumped loudly inside the cabin. The front door scraped open. Her heart pounding, Erin froze and dropped to both knees in the yard about fifty feet in front of the cabin, staring in horror at the shadow moving on the stone stoop that was propped on short, stone pylons.

Erin crouched low, pressing the pistol against her right knee. Her heart hammered like a piston as she watched the shadow stop at the front edge of the stoop, just over the two stone steps. A pin-sized light glowed beneath his hat. Smoke wafted in the darkness as he stood there at the edge of the stoop.

Erin gritted her teeth.

Had he seen her?

The man grunted. There was a soft rustling of cloth, another grunt. Then she saw a thin arc of reflected starlight, heard the wooden dribbling of the man’s urine against the ground.

Erin stared at the man, her eyes wide, silently willing him not to see her against the dark velvet of the ravine behind her. He peed for an excruciatingly long time, the stream giving out gradually, sporadically as the man grunted and pivoted his hips and bent his knees.

Finally, with one last grunt, he tucked himself back into his pants, turned, blew smoke into the darkness around his head, and clomped back inside the cabin from which the other men’s voices and the chinking of coins continued to issue.

Drawing a deep breath, Erin rose and continued to limp more quickly across the yard toward the side of the cabin. At the front corner, off the end of the stoop, she stopped. Two long, dark objects lay before her. She crouched down until she could see the face of Doc Plowright. Beside him lay Red Ryan. Neither man wore a hat. The fetor of blood was so strong that Erin slapped her free hand to her throat, suppressing a gag.

She dragged her injured ankle around the dead men—how had they gotten here?—and continued limping down the side of the cabin. She stopped suddenly, turned sharply right, hearing a soft gasp escape her throat.

Crouching down along the side of the cabin, she stared into the ambient light and shadows around the corral and what appeared a small stable. She’d heard something. None of the horses was moving now. Nothing moved around the stable or, as far as she could tell, around the buttes jutting pale as flour behind and around it.

She could have sworn she’d heard something—a man’s low whisper.

She remained crouched there for five minutes, trying to listen above the slow, hard thudding of her heart in her ears. Finally, convinced that what she’d heard had only been in her mind, she rose slightly and stole down the side of the cabin to the second window.

Its shutters were closed. She could have sworn they’d been open a few minutes ago. It was too dark back here to have seen clearly.

Erin lifted her head, tried to peer between the boards in the window’s left shutter. She thought she saw a slight movement through the crack. Eager ancticipation made her groan, and she said in a loud whisper through the crack, “Jim? Is that you, Jim? Oh, Jim—it’s your mother!”

Both shutters burst outward, slamming against her head and throwing her backward. Two large hands jutted from the opening, and grabbed her shirt. She stared, awestruck, at two tattooed vultures pushing toward her beneath two dark, glistening eyes. Stanhope’s lips spread to show white teeth inside his beard as he guffawed loudly.

“I reckon you didn’t get your fill of us—eh, little ma?”

Erin screamed. She tried to bring her pistol up but realized that she’d dropped it when Stanhope had grabbed her. She tried to fight free of his iron grip, feeling her shirt slip down off her shoulder, and saw in the periphery of her vision
three men strolling toward her from various points in the yard, all holding rifles down low by their sides.

Stanhope had posted pickets, after all. They must have seen her and were waiting for their rabbit to walk back into their lair.

The Vultures’ leader’s sawed-off shotgun hung from his stout neck, dancing against his chest.

She gave another agonized scream, kicking and fighting wildly, as a loudly laughing Clell Stanhope pulled her through the window and into the cabin.

A harrowing scream cut the night.

A woman’s scream. By its pitch and duration, it seemed to express all the sadness and horror in the earth and the cosmos. It echoed shrilly for a long time, leeching into the old lawman’s brittle bones.

“Whoa!” Spurr jerked back on Cochise’s reins. He’d left the spare horse with Nordegaard.

He looked around, trying to pick the original scream out of its echoes. Blood pumped in him. Fear. Sorrow that the scream conveyed was a heavy weight against the back of his neck, a cloying smell.

It had come from the north. Spurr reined Cochise off the trail he’d followed from the Nordegaard cabin, having to take his time so as not to lose it in the darkness. He booted Cochise into a dangerous gallop across a sage- and cedar-stippled flat, swerving around the shrubs and occasional boulders. At times he could see beneath him by starlight the tracks of shod hooves.

The hooves of Erin’s horse.

He reined up at the edge of a deep, inky-black ravine. Looking around, he saw where Erin had dropped down from the tableland and into the cut. Anxiety clawed at the old lawman. Urgency. She could be dying while he debated his course of action.

He made a conscious effort to calm himself, slow his thinking. If he rode down there at a breakneck pace, he could not only kill Cochise but risk riding into the Vultures’ trap and getting himself killed without being able to do a thing for Erin.

He slid his rifle from its boot and heaved himself out of the leather. He dropped the reins, patted Cochise’s sweat-lathered neck. “Stay here, boy.”

Slowly, he followed a game trail down the steep slope, taking mincing steps so he wouldn’t slip on occasional patches of gravel. At times, he could barely see his feet. With his free hand, he reached out and grabbed small tree trunks and branches to break his momentum. All the while, he looked around, expecting to see the flicker of a campfire but there was nothing except darkness nearly as dense as that of a well bottom.