The Killing Breed (29 page)
Authors: Frank Leslie
Yakima stopped and looked around at the boulders and brush clumps, with junipers and potentilla growing out of the rocks and gravel. The shooting had stopped, and there was no sign of the shooter atop the slag heap before him, though several brass cartridge casings winked amongst the clay-colored rocks, where they’d been ejected from a rifle chamber.
Hair pricked along the back of his neck as he began moving forward across the slag, putting each moccasined foot down carefully. His heart thudded a warning that the bushwackers might have headed down to the cabin where he’d left Harms.
Suddenly, a chipmunk chattered raucously up the rocky slope on his right. Yakima dove forward as a rifle barked twice, the blue-red flashes showing against the black hole of the mine entrance. The slug cracked into the rocks off Yakima’s heels, making his ears ring.
He came up off his shoulder and, from his knees, fired up the slope toward the mine portal—two quick bursts that echoed like cannon blasts around the canyon.
A man yelped. Yakima saw the figure staggering at the edge of the mine portal. There was a clatter as the man’s rifle hit the ground. The man twisted sideways, dropped to his knees, and rolled down the slope toward Yakima.
The man piled up a few feet in front of Yakima’s boots—a young, pale, sharp-faced hombre with a thin spade beard and a few tufts of untrimmed down on his cheeks. He wore a fur coat and green trousers. His hat had fallen off, and his thin light brown hair was sweat-matted to his head.
Yakima remembered his face from the cabin and then again from the train.
Blood seeped from two holes in the chest of his ratty fox coat. He arched his back and kicked, balling his cheeks with pain.
“Ya . . . ya half-breed bastard!” the kid spat, breathing hard as he writhed around on the rocks, blood pumping faster from the holes in his chest. “How many lives you got, anyway?”
Yakima looked around cautiously. The chipmunk berated him from a gray deadfall farther off down the slope, standing on its back feet and wringing its tiny hands. Deciding no one else was here, Yakima crouched over the dying younker and set his rifle across his thighs.
“One more than you do, kid. Where’re the others?”
The kid cursed and groaned, kicking. Yakima held him still with the butt of his Winchester, and repeated his question.
“Gimme some water,” the kid cried.
“Where’re the others?”
The kid stretched his lips, his thin, mean face turning pale. “Went on to Thornton’s.”
He shaped a pained half smile as he ground his heels into the rocks. “Hell, they’re probably almost there by now. For all these miles you come, you’re gonna be too late to save that whore o’ yours.” He sucked another breath and stared mockingly up at Yakima. “Besides, she’s Temples’s whore now, any-ways!”
Yakima stood, stepped back, and aimed the Yellowboy from his hip. Seeing the round, black maw yawning at him, the kid gained a horrified expression.
“No!”
“No!”
The call was clipped by the Winchester’s bark. Yakima turned and walked away before the blood geysering from the kid’s ruined forehead could splash his jeans.
He glanced back at Faith, who rode a rented sorrel with one notched ear, her wrists and ankles once again tied to her saddle. As a giant fir pulled back off the trail’s right side, the roadhouse slid out into the dusk-dim clearing before her—the sprawling, two-story affair that had, indeed, been home to her for nearly two years.
Her gut tightened at the sight. The place was a shadow of its former self—it looked abandoned and moldering from neglect, in fact—but the horror she’d endured here flashed in her mind, turning her blood to ice. Automatically, she turned a hopeful look behind her.
Lowry Temple, still watching her, shook his head. “That crazy breed of yours is a good ways back, probably still swapping lead with Benny.”
“Shit,” said Kooch Manley, riding his dun to Faith’s right as they crossed the leaf-strewn yard toward the dark, ghostly roadhouse at the north edge of the clearing. “You think that kid’s gonna clean his clock? Pretty clear to me that’s one killin’, determined breed, and that kid, crafty as he is, ain’t no match.”
“So?” Temple stared past Faith at the older gunman, Temple’s stone-eyed face expressionless.
Manley laughed suddenly, as if getting a joke, their horses starting at a tumbleweed blowing across the yard before them. “I reckon I don’t have nothin’ against splittin’ that seventy-five hundred dollars just two ways!” He slapped his thigh. “I reckon it’s been a bit more adventurous journey than I throwed in for, and I reckon I’m due!”
As their horses drew to a halt before the roadhouse’s dilapidated front porch littered with leaves and tumbleweeds, bromegrass growing up between the cracks, the older gunman looked at Temple suspiciously. “But I hope you ain’t thinkin’ you’re gonna be eatin’ the whole pie yourself now, partner.”
The outlaw leader swung down from his saddle with a weary sigh. “Come on, Kooch. You know I ain’t a greedy man.” He glanced up at Faith sitting pale in her saddle, staring at the roadhouse’s windows, some of which were boarded up or cracked, opaque with dust and grime. “But I do follow through on a job—don’t I, honey?”
As Manley tended his own horse, Temple cut Faith’s ankles free, then reached up to free her hands from the apple. “Let’s go in and say hi to Mr. Thornton. He’s gonna be right thrilled to see you.”
She turned to him woodenly, her still features belying her thudding heart. “You don’t need to do this, Temple.”
“Why, sure I do. I made an agreement.” Brusquely, Temple pulled Faith out of the saddle and set her down before him. “When a man agrees to something, he follows through.”
“Otherwise, he can’t expect to get no work elsewhere,” Manley said, shucking his rifle from his saddle boot. “Ain’t that right, Temple?”
“Quit your caterwaulin’, Kooch. I wanna deliver this little trollop and get the hell outta here.” Temple grabbed a handful of Faith’s hair and pulled her head back painfully, running a gloved thumb across her smooth, pale neck. He gritted his teeth as he gazed into her face. “Can’t say as I’m gonna regret comin’ to the end of this trail. It most definitely is the
final
end for you,
honey
!”
final
end for you,
honey
!”
Faith gritted her own teeth against the man’s firm grip on her hair. “Why don’t you stop your caterwaulin’ and get on with it, then, Temple?”
Temple chuckled, grabbed her arm, and shoved her toward the porch. As Faith stumbled forward, she cast another glance back along the trail.
Yakima had come after her. Somehow, he’d followed. But the odds were stacked against them both, she realized now, as dread filled her belly like hot, rancid soup.
Somehow, she’d always known they were. The short life they’d lived in Arizona had been a dream.
Even if Yakima survived the latest ambush Temple had sprung on him, he’d be too late to save her. A luckless life was luckless to the end, and it put a hex on all who became entangled in it. Faith’s past, wearing the mask of Bill Thornton, was about to finish her.
She moved up the porch steps behind Manley, Temple falling into step a safe distance behind her. He didn’t have to worry, she thought. She was ready to end the charade. Her life had really ended here, after all.
One thing was for sure, though. Thornton would join her on the road to where all condemned souls journeyed.
Manley pushed through the door and stepped between the tied-back batwings. “Thornton?” the bounty hunter called, his voice echoing around him.
Faith moved in behind him, and her breath caught at the tawdriness of the place. The inside was as bad as the outside. At one time, Thornton’s had been one of the best-kept establishments in the northern Front Range, with miners, freighters, and drovers riding from a hundred miles away to partake of the luxurious furnishings, fine liquor and beer, and gifted doxies.
Now the place was dark as a cave. Its musty air was rife with the smell of putrefying flesh and mouse droppings. Dust streaked the floor and tables and the long, mahogany bar running along the room’s broad right wall. Bullet holes remained in the walls, ceiling, and bar from the night when Yakima had shot his way out of the place, after saving Faith from the four men who’d trapped her in her room with knives.
“Thornton!” Temple called toward the stairs at the broad saloon hall’s far end. “It’s Temple! We got your girl!”
Silence. The wind howled outside, blown dust ticking against the walls and windows. Then the ceiling creaked, as though someone were fumbling around in one of the rooms above the bar.
Temple turned to Manley. “Stay down here, Kooch. Keep an eye on the front.” He grabbed Faith’s left arm, squeezing hard. “I’ll go up and deliver the package.”
“I still say it’s a damn shame you haven’t let us partake of them goods,” Manley said behind Temple and Faith, his words shattering the sepulchral silence. Faith could feel the man’s heated gaze on her. “A girl built like that was put here for a reason.”
Wincing against Temple’s firm grip on her arm, Faith climbed the carpeted stairs. Revisiting this place, she thought, looking around at the dusty paintings, tintypes, and bracket lamps on the papered walls, was like revisiting a world she’d dreamed in another life. She had to remind herself it was real.
The place looked not only shabbier, but smaller. And it wasn’t only the dust, the darkness, the peeling wallpaper, and the smell of sickness that made it look grim. It was her memories of the place. Memories from a time when this had been what she’d settled for.
Moving down the second-story hall, Temple’s spurs trilling softly behind her, she saw a long oval shape on the floor in front of her, lying against the base of the left wall. Frowning, she approached the figure slowly, and gasped.
A person lying there. An Indian girl. She lay in a twisted, naked pile, her head resting on her left arm, which was flung out behind her on the sour-smelling runner. Her glassy brown eyes stared at the ceiling over Faith’s shoulder. Her right knee was bent modestly over her other leg.
Her brown skin was a mass of bruises and blood-crusted cuts. Her cheeks and lips were smashed, and congealed blood had pooled thickly beneath her head. The whites of her eyes were a dark, grisly red.
Behind and above Faith, Temple chuckled. “Thornton must be practicin’ up.” He reached down and jerked Faith to her feet. “Come on, whore.”
Faith stumbled off down the hall, Temple yelling behind her, “Thornton—you here? Brought the Christmas goose, Thornton!” Temple laughed. “She’s primed for pluckin’!”
A muffled cough sounded. Thornton’s unmistakable voice rattled, “In here!”
Temple grabbed Faith’s arm, jerked her up before Thornton’s office door on the right side of the hall. The wood plaque on the door, which she remembered well, read OFFICE. KNOCK FIRST!
Temple grinned at Faith and, leaning in front of her, turned the doorknob without knocking. He shoved the door inward. “Home again, home again, jiggidy-jig!”
Chapter 24
Temple shoved Faith into the office.
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