Last Lawman (9781101611456) (4 page)

Mason chuckled at the remembered image from that hot, starry night along the creek that smelled as bad as the privy, and said, “Your only option, Clell, is to hang from the neck until you shit your pants and die. Besides, look at that crowd out there. You wouldn’t want me to go out and disappoint ’em with the news you’re bein’ hauled off to the territorial pen when they’ve been waitin’ over a month to watch you stretch hemp! Look at them kids laughin’ an’ cavortin’ and runnin’ around that gallows like they was waitin’ for the Fourth of July rodeo parade!”

Before Stanhope could retort, the office’s front door opened and a stocky figure stepped in, removing his black, bullet-crowned hat, his white clerical collar showing against his thick neck and the ropes of flesh sagging from his chin. “Good morning, Sheriff.”

Mason gave a cordial nod as he blew out another smoke plume. “Padre.”

Father H. Charles Connagher stood just inside the open door, holding his Bible in both hands before his prominent paunch, and raised his eyes to the cell block in the balcony over the main office. “I guess it’s about time for the…the, uh…execution.”

“We’ll be out in a minute, Father.” Mason dropped his boots to the floor and stubbed his cigarette out in a peach tin on his desk.

“Perhaps the prisoner would care to make a confession?”

Mason was about to tell the preacher to forget it when Stanhope said in an eerie little boy’s voice, “I’m awful scared, Father. Could you come up here please and hear my confession?”

Mason stood. “Go on outside, Father. We’ll be out in a minute. You can say a prayer over him before he drops.”

Connagher looked at Mason, the preacher’s eyes hidden by the twin reflections in his round-rimmed spectacles. His voice was soft, resonate, officious. “The prisoner has asked for a confession, Sheriff. It’s only right that I hear it.”

“All right, all right,” Mason said, giving an impatient wave. “Go on up and hear it.” Mason lifted his voice. “Finn?”

One of Mason’s two deputies, who’d been standing on guard just outside the office, stepped into the doorway, nearly filling it. Mark Finn was a big man who shaved only every three or four days. He was dressed like a cowhand, though he had an extra cartridge belt slanting across his broad chest. In his hands was a brass-cased Henry rifle.

“Ready, Dusty?” Finn said. “Want me to fetch him?”

“I want you to escort the preacher up to his cell while the pious Clell gives his confession.”

The reverend gave a patient smile. “Confessions are a private matter, Sheriff.”

“Not around here they ain’t.” Mason glanced at Finn and jerked his head to indicate Stanhope.

Finn shouldered his rifle and walked over to the stairs rising to the second-floor cell block. “Right this way, Father.”

“Hold on,” Mason said, extending his hand to Finn. “Rifle, Mark.”

The big deputy’s fleshy, unshaven face broke in a sheepish grin. “Whoops—forgot.” He handed his rifle over to Mason. The sheriff didn’t have a problem with the man approaching the cell with the Colt on his hip, but a rifle was too easy to snatch through the bars.

Finn started up the stairs with the preacher, and Mason leaned the deputy’s rifle against his desk. As the two were still clomping up the stairs, their footfalls echoing hollowly around the office, Mason rose and walked over to the window right of the door.

A few horsebackers rode along the street, men from area ranches in town on business, and there were a few farm supply wagons, as well. Most everyone else was on foot, some dressed in their Sunday best though this was only Wednesday, and gathered in jovial expectation around the gallows. A collie dog was following the hangman and giving him holy hell, tail up, while several in the surrounding crowd as well as the buxom blond whore, Trixie Tate, pointed out the barking dog to others, laughing.

For his part, LaForge ignored the dog that kept just out of kicking range and continued supervising the finishing touches being applied to his gallows.

Mason hooked his thumbs behind his cartridge belt and chuckled.

“Good lord—what’s going on here?” the preacher said behind and above him.

At the same time, there was a squeal of hinges. Mason spun and frowned up at the jail block atop the stairs, where Finn was opening the door of Clell Stanhope’s cell while the preacher stood to his left, scowling at Stanhope, who appeared to be moving toward the opening.

“Mark, what the hell are you doing?” Mason said. “I didn’t tell you to let him
out
!”

Stanhope rammed his shoulder against the door, and in a blur of motion, the outlaw leader grabbed the preacher around the neck and spun him around so that he faced the sheriff. The preacher made a face, gasping.

Sunlight glinted off something in Stanhope’s right hand, and Mason reached for the Colt Army .44 jutting from the holster tied to his right thigh.

“Mark, he’s got a gun!”

“Hold it, Mason!” Stanhope shouted, pressing his pistol’s barrel against the preacher’s right temple and loudly ratcheting the hammer back. “Skin that hogleg and the preacher’s as dead as Christ on the cross!”

Mason froze with his hand wrapped around the .44’s walnut grips. Finn laughed loudly, blue eyes flashing in the light from the windows. “I know he’s got a gun. Hell, I gave it to him!”

The deputy leaned forward over the balcony’s pine rail, roaring and slapping his thigh. He had his own Colt in his hand, and he was aiming it down at Mason. “Slide your popper out slow, Dusty, and we’ll let you and the preacher live.”

“We?” Mason stared in shock at the big deputy he’d known for at least two years and had come to trust like a brother. “What the hell happened to you, Mark?”

“Well, you see, Stanhope here pays a little more than you, Dusty. That’s really about all there is to it.”

Finn laughed again devilishly.

“You heard your boy, Sheriff,” Stanhope said, pressing his gun barrel hard against the preacher’s head. Connagher’s glasses were sagging low on his face, and his eyes were bright with sheer terror, lips stretched back from his teeth against the pain of the gun barrel grinding into his temple. “Toss that pistol over there by your desk and get your hands
up. You got two seconds, then I give this sky pilot a third eye!”

“Hold on, hold on. I don’t know how you figure you’re gonna make it through that crowd out yonder, but…” Mason slowly lifted his Colt from its holster with his thumb and index finger and tossed it onto the wooden floor by his desk. It skidded up against a filing cabinet.

“Oh, I’ll think of somethin’,” the leader of the Vultures said, his broad, dark face brightening with a psychotic grin beneath the bandanna wrapped around the top of his head. When he grinned, the wings of the vultures on his cheeks rose as though the carrion eaters were taking flight.

That Stanhope had one brown and one bright blue-gray eye did little to temper his crazy aspect. He hadn’t shaved since he’d been locked up, and he’d grown nearly a full beard. His hair was long, dark, and curly. Around his neck he wore a tight choker of vulture talons.

He brusquely pushed the preacher over to the top of the stairs. Connagher stumbled forward and nearly fell down the stairs before grabbing the rail with both hands.

Mason stretched his hands out and lurched forward. “Easy!”

Stanhope laughed, then crooked his right elbow around the preacher’s neck, jerking the man’s head back against Stanhope’s chest. His big arm hid nearly the preacher’s entire face. The priest gave a startled cry. Stanhope jerked Connagher’s head back and to one side sharply.

Mason’s knees turned to jelly when he heard the sharp crack.

Connagher flung his arms out to both sides, and they and his legs began quivering as though he’d been hit by lightning. Stanhope released the man. The preacher’s head wobbled, broken, on his shoulders.

Then his knees buckled and he went tumbling down the stairs to pile up at Mason’s feet.

The shock, horror, and rage that Sheriff Dusty Mason was feeling did not show on his face. He was good at holding his emotions close to his vest. Having been a lawman for the past ten years had taught him the value of remaining calm in any situation and to give away nothing to his opponents.

When he’d crouched over the dead preacher and then straightened his back to stare up the stairs at Clell Stanhope and Mark Finn, who were walking down toward him, keeping their cocked pistols aimed at his head, he merely said, “You had no call to do that, Clell.”

“How many times you think you can hang me, Mason?”

Stanhope dropped down the stairs to stand two feet in front of Mason, on the other side of the dead Connagher. He was a huge man, standing a good three inches over Mason’s rangy six feet, and he was grinning with one side of his mouth. Outside, Mason could hear the crowd getting louder, impatient for him to lead Stanhope outside and up onto the gallows.

Stanhope jerked his pistol to one side. “Get those hands raised. And step back, Mason.”

Vaguely surprised that he was still alive, Mason raised his hands to his shoulders and stepped away from Stanhope and Finn, who’d followed the leader of the Vultures down the stairs.

“Keep your gun on him, Mark,” Stanhope ordered as he crossed the room to where his gun belt and hat and his long, dirty cream duster hung from pegs in the wall near Mason’s desk. His sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun hung there, as well—a mean little weapon with a hand-carved stock. “And cuff his hands behind his back.”

As the outlaw strapped his black, two-gun rig around his waist, Finn kept his eyes and gun on Mason while reaching around behind his own thick body and removing a set of handcuffs from the back of his cartridge belt. “What’re we gonna do with him? We let him live, he’ll follow us.”

He tossed the cuffs to Mason. “Put ’em on, Dusty. Nice an’ tight.”

Stanhope said, “You mean, he’ll follow us like him…and you…followed us before?”

“Sure.” Finn frowned as he glanced at the outlaw, who was making sure both his Peacemakers showed brass. “I was part o’ the posse, but that was before I threw in with you, Clell.” The big deputy laughed nervously. “You can’t fault me for that. I was just doin’ my job!”

“Nope. Can’t fault you at all.” Stanhope dropped his shotgun’s lanyard over his neck, letting the popper hang down over his belly, and set his hat on his head. It was an opera hat sort of like that which the hangman, LaForge, wore. Only Stanhope’s wasn’t as tall, and it was a sun-faded, brassy brown, with what Mason assumed was a vulture plume poking up from the braided rawhide band. He wore it snugged down over the red bandanna.

“Whatever he paid you, Mark,” Mason said, a grim smile curving his mouth beneath his thick mustache as he snaked
his hands around behind his back and cuffed himself. “It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t
near
enough.”

“Shut up.” Clell drilled Mason with his weird brown-and-gray gaze, then spun the cylinder of his second Colt and poked it into the holster he wore for the cross draw on his left hip. To Finn, he barked, “Let’s go—get him outside!”

Finn prodded Mason out the door with his pistol barrel, and the lawman walked out onto the street, his heart thudding in his chest. With the cuffs, he was defenseless, but he’d had no choice but to put them on. His only hope was that he could signal his only other deputy, Regus Bone, before Stanhope and Finn got the drop on him.

As the two walked out of the sheriff’s office behind him, his own pale blue eyes searched the crowd milling around the gallows. No one had yet seen him and the other two emerge from the office, though it looked as though LaForge and his gallows were ready.

The tall, gray-haired executioner, who looked like a vulture himself dressed in his black suit with clawhammer coat and tails, was standing in front of the platform, hands behind his back, looking up at the single rope shunting a little in the hot, dry breeze. He wore a devilishly proud smile on his face.

Mason saw Regus Bone at the same time Bone saw him. The middle-aged deputy was standing where Mason had expected he’d be—near Trixie Tate, a beer in his hand. He held the butt of his double-barreled shotgun in the crook of his other arm. Catching Mason’s eye, his bug-eyed face acquired a sheepish cast, and he quickly polished off his beer, gave the glass to the whore, then hitched his wash-worn, checked wool trousers higher on his lean hips and began walking around the front of the gallows toward Mason. He obviously hadn’t yet seen anything odd in the fact that Stanhope was not only clad in trail duds and that he and Finn were flanking Mason, holding pistols on him.
Or maybe he hadn’t yet seen them or recognized Stanhope in his opera hat and duster.

Mason glowered at the slouch-shouldered deputy, grinding his teeth in a silent, desperate plea that Bone make eye contact with him and get the message that trouble was boiling over for both of them.

But as the older deputy approached the sheriff’s office, he kept his shotgun in the crook of his arm and didn’t even lift his eyes from the street.

When Bone ran the back of his right hand across his mouth, likely wiping the remains of the beer away, the words fairly burst from Mason’s lungs. “Goddamnit, Bone—
shoot
these sons o’ bitches!”