The Black Widow (7 page)

‘
So they aren’t likely to
tip them off about any strangers around?’

Coburn shook his head. ‘Couldn’t say
that. A few dollars can grease a lot of palms. Wouldn’t trust none
of them. Though they warned me about the weather as well. Said that
they reckoned there was a whole lot more snow to come. And if it
does...’

Becky shook her head. ‘I don’t
understand. Why are you both pleased at the idea of more snow?
Won’t it harm us more than them, safe in their house?’

Herne
grinned, looking younger than she’d
seen him for an age. ‘We got our trail out, and either on foot or
with the horses, we can get out. But over that side, you already
seen how it catches most of the weather. So if their road out also
got blocked...’

‘
The blasting powder!
That’s what it’s for. Once their road is gone, they can’t get in or
out. We’ve got them!’

Herne
noticed the use of the word ‘we’ in
the girl’s enthusiasm, but made no comment. ‘It won’t be that easy,
Becky. Up here in the Sierras, you can often reckon to be shut in
by snow for three to four months. They’ll be provisioned up. But us
doing that’ll put a bit of pressure on them.’

Coburn took him up. ‘And the trail getting
blocked is going to bring some of them crawling out of their hole.
What we’re really aiming at, Becky, is helping to swing the odds a
mite more in our favor.’

Jed nodded. ‘The only way in that I
could see is the front door, and we don’t fancy that. But there may
be another way in.’

‘
I don’t understand. How
will you be able to find that out?’

Both men laughed and Coburn licking
his bloodless lips with relish. ‘Best way to find a way into the
house is to ask someone who lives there. And that’s what we aim to
do.’

In his high
turreted room, from the barred
window, Luke Stanwyck stared dreamily across the trees, and over
the blue water of the freezing lake, up the ridge opposite which
bristled with more sharp trees, out into the pale gray of the sky.
He ran his fingers softly over the stone sill, admiring its rough
texture, smiling to himself.

Ruth had given him an extra treat that
morning to make up for falling off that stupid sledge the previous
day. Luke half-closed his eyes, remembering the warmth of the rush
as the plunger went down on the new hypodermic needle. The strip of
linen tight round his upper arm to bring put the thin veins. The
almost sexual pleasure of the dissolved powder speeding through his
body.

He glanced down at the immaculate
whiteness of his satin shirt, marred a little on the left forearm
by a pearl of scarlet crusting into brown, where the injection had
bled. Luke touched it, picking at it with his long fingernail.
Hoping that his mother would be as generous for his birthday. That
would be a real present.

This morning, she had been so kind to him.
Helping him dress, actually heating up the silver spoon for him.
Resting her cheek on his inner thigh while he probed for the
blood-gorged vein with the delicate point of the needle. Her
fingers stroking him, absent-mindedly, as though she hadn’t
realized what she was doing. It had been so good.

The trees below his window were rooted
in darkness, with only the pale light of the snow visible among
them for a few yards. Nothing moved among them, though the rising
wind was stirring their tops blowing loose occasional splatters of
powdery snow.

It had been strange that morning. Under
the influence of his special medicine, Luke had sometimes seen
things that he afterwards realized weren’t really there at all. And
he guessed that the man must have been one. If there’d been a man
outside the window, then either the traps or the guards would have
caught him. Therefore there couldn’t have been a man at all. Last
time anyone had come close enough for Luke to see had been a few
months back. Maybe a year. Time was becoming harder for him to keep
hold of. It somehow slipped through his fingers like
sand.

Then it had been those two young
boys.

Mark had enjoyed them more than he
had. There had been times when he’d found the act pleasant, either
with boys or with girls, but the medicine gradually eroded his
interest, replacing carnal lusts with its own drives. He remembered
how angry Mama had been when she heard about the two boys from Lone
Pine. How Mark had found them with three of their guards, both
caught in traps within a hundred yards of each other. One had
actually lost his foot, all but for a few shreds of gristle and
tendon, and the other had been caught just below the
knee.

It wasn’t really what Mark had been
doing to them that upset Mama. More the risk that either of them
might have ever escaped. The Stanwycks weren’t loved in that part
of the Sierras.

Luke coughed, feeling the pain in his
chest. Wiped a few grains of dust from his fingers on to his
jacket, looking with vague disinterest at the gray smudge on the
white. The man he’d seen under the trees earlier vanished from his
blurred memory, along with so many other specters of his
past.

‘
Ten minutes?’

‘
Right.’

‘
Loaded and ready?’

‘
Whitey. You’re not dealing with
your punk gang of snot-nose kids now.’

‘
Sorry, Jed. It’s been a long
time since I worked with anyone I could trust.’

Although the irony of that passed the
albino by, Herne grinned ruefully at it. Maybe they could trust
each other now, but the moment Mark and Luke Stanwyck were dead,
that trust wouldn’t be worth a flying damn.

Coburn looked round, pausing, holding
his breath and listening to make sure there was nobody on the way.
But all they could hear was the whistle of the wind around the
peaks, sighing among the pines, bringing the first taste of the new
snows that the locals had prophesied.

On the one side the trail dropped near
three thousand feet sheer down a granite face, to another lake on
the far side of the hogback ridge. A bend in the road hid the bulk
of Mount Abora, a scant couple of hundred paces back.

Above the trail, thousands of tons of
bare rock hung over them, cutting them off from the sinking sun.
The trail had been cut along a narrow strip of a ledge between the
mountain and the precipice. Jed and Whitey reckoned that it
wouldn’t take a load of help to push the two together and close the
road for ever and a day.

‘
R
eady, Jed?’

‘
As I’ll ever be. Let her
go.’

Whitey tugged out a box of lucifers
from the inside pocket of his heavy jacket, stooping over the white
tail of fuse that protruded from a crevice in the rock. A crevice
that they’d carefully packed with the contents of the box of
blasting powder from the general store.

‘
Wish we’d got some of
that new dynamite I seen up in the Yukon,’ said Coburn, cursing as
the rising wind blew out his lucifer for the second time. ‘Easy as
falling off a chair. Like candles, and all it needs is a spark to
set it all off. Uses nitro. Ah, there!’

The match finally caught the fast fuse,
and a glowing worm of red fire spluttered towards the blackness of
the hole. Coburn came scampering across the trail, towards the
house, reaching up for a hand from Herne to help him up to their
vantage point behind a tumbled group of massive rocks. His boots
slipped in the snow and ice and he nearly fell back down on the
trail, but Jed had him safe and he panted to his place, picking up
his Winchester and levering a round into the breech.

‘
Here we go, brother,’ he
grinned. ‘The old team on the road again.’

The fuse vanished inside the crack in the
rock, its hissing inaudible at that distance. Both men crouched
down behind their cover, waiting for the explosion. Herne hugged
his long Sharps. Whitey had offered him one of the Winchesters from
the young dead boys at the old camp, but Jed had shaken his head,
refusing the offer.

‘
I know this gun better than
any. I’ll guarantee to kill my man and still have time to reload
and pick off another.’

‘
But this ain’t the best
kind of fighting for that buffalo cannon. You want to keep it for
the plains. I seen you hit a man at nigh a half mile.’

‘
Old Reliable here can do better
than that Why, I recall the time that...’

Coburn held up his hand.
‘’
Nother
time, Jed. I make it about time for her to... Jesus H.
Christ!!’

The amount had been about right. Maybe
even more than they needed. The explosion wasn’t all that loud,
muffled by the rocks, but its effect was infinitely spectacular.
Flame and smoke spurted from the crevice, followed by a fraction of
a moment of absolute quiet.

Herne
held his breath, knowing that this
one had to work. If it failed, then the men in Mount Abora would be
alerted to no purpose.

It didn’t fail.

With majestic slowness, like watching a
big bull elephant brain-shot, the side of the mountain began to
slide, undercut by the explosion. Rumbling down with violence that
made the boulders where the two men hid shake, showering a fountain
of splinters and dust high in the air. The cloud of dust swept
across the trail, and for a while it was impossible to see what the
effect had been.

As it slowly cleared they both stood up,
leaning on top of the rocks around them, brushing gray dust from
their hair and clothes. And looked at the trail.

Or looked at where the trail had been.
Like a primeval monster attacking a weaker creature, the slide had
taken a massive bite from the road, cutting it quite in two,
pushing most of it over the three thousand foot drop, where they
could still hear the hollow rumbling of mighty stones cascading
into the lake. The rest of the slide lay dormant across the trail,
severing it, blocking it.

Take a whole pile of your dynamite to
shift a way through that,’ commented Herne quietly, flicking back
the hammer of the Sharps.

Coburn didn’t answer, simply sitting
there, readying his Winchester and laying the fully-loaded Colt at
its side.

So far, the plan had gone exactly as
they’d anticipated. Leaving Becky with the horses, the two men had
sneaked their way through the snowfall, using it to cover them up
through the trees, and past the flank of Mount Abora, until they
were past the main gates and along by the trail. That was the most
dangerous part. If anyone had come along there they’d have been
trapped between them and the guns of the men at the
house.

Now all they could do was wait and see
how many of the private army of gunmen came looking after the pall
of smoke and dust of the explosion. They hoped for around three.
Many more would be difficult and fewer would make the exercise less
effective.

‘
Here they come. Stupid bastards
are coming out on horses.’

Herne
nodded. He’d heard the whinny from
away round the bend, and the chink of steel shoes on frozen stone.
By coming that way the guards were going to make an ambush that
much easier.

The men from the house must have
thought that it was just an earth-slip, probably not hearing the
original noise of the blasting-powder. So they rode easy, and
careless. Six of them.

They reined up almost as soon as they were
in sight of the mound of fallen rocks, and Herne was glad to be
with a partner who was a professional. A man who wouldn’t blow the
whole thing by opening fire too soon, scaring the others
off.

‘
Come on you brainless
sons of bitches. Come and look at what me and Jed got ready for
you. Come on. That’s it boys. All the way up.’

Whitey kept up the whispering as the six
men heeled their horses forwards, past the two men on their ledge,
to examine the extent of the damage. It was immediately obvious to
anyone that the trail was wiped off the face of the earth, and that
it was an impossible task to replace it, short of using a force of
laborers. Two of them dismounted, walking over to the tangled mass
of stone, clearly suspicious that maybe this hadn’t happened
naturally.

Herne
shifted his aim from one of the men,
knowing that the first shots would almost certainly spook the
horses and leave anyone on foot helpless. The group was about sixty
yards away, all looking towards the fall, with one of them edging
his horse close to the edge of the drop to look at where the rocks
had fallen.

‘
He’s mine,’ whispered Herne,
drawing a bead on the center of the man’s back. Never try for those
pretty shots at the head. That had been the advice of Wyatt Earp.
Good advice. The first thing to do was hit your man, and it didn’t
matter that much, most times, where you hit him. Put him down and
you had time to choose your second shot.

He noticed that Coburn was lining up his
sights on the man far to the side of the others. Right again. The
ones in center were bunched and would find it that much harder to
control their bucking mounts and get away.

‘
Three... Two... One...
Now!’

The two shots boomed out as
one.