Authors: Frank Leslie

The Killing Breed (8 page)

BOOK: The Killing Breed

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Faith didn’t know what they wanted. Maybe the horses. Maybe her. But she wasn’t letting them into the cabin.

“I can’t ask you in,” she said, shifting the rifle in her sweat-moist hands but keeping it low against her thighs. “My man’s taken ill. Has a fever. Might be catching. You can water your horses and rest right here on the porch. I’ll bring you out some coffee.”

“What?” the tall Mexican said, scowling beneath the brim of his worn leather slouch hat. “You gonna make us lap it up like stray dogs on the porch?”

Faith held the man’s indignant gaze. Squeezing the rifle in both hands, she turned and began slowly moving toward the half-open door behind her. As she glanced back at the strangers, the leader swung deliberately down from his saddle. The others leaped down from their own mounts then, too, the Mexican setting his jaws and snarling.

Heart hammering, Faith bolted over the cabin’s threshold, glancing back again as the group’s leader ducked under a hitch rail and strode quickly onto the porch, his cold steel eyes riveted on Faith. She grabbed the door handle, swung it closed, and, as the lead rider slammed himself against the other side with a loud, wooden thump, she slammed the locking bolt home.

“Goddamnit!” The man threw his body against the timbered door again, and the stout door shuddered in its frame, making cracking sounds. “Frank, run around back!”

Faith wheeled and, holding the rifle in one hand, ran between the kitchen and living room and into the back add-on. She rushed past her and Yakima’s bedroom just as, in the sashed window right off the back door, the bull-necked blond appeared sprinting around the cabin’s right rear corner. He’d lost his hat, and his broad, clean-shaven face was flushed, his lips bunched.

Faith screamed as she threw her shoulder up against the door just as the blond tripped the latch with a metallic rattle. Frank pushed the door open, laughing. Faith dropped the rifle, set her boots into the puncheons, and heaved the door back against its frame, then rammed the locking bolt home.

Frank punched the door and cursed. “Open the door, you bitch!”

A whomping thud sounded at the other end of the cabin. Faith wheeled, started back toward the front, stopped, scooped up her Winchester, and continued running. The front door shuddered in its frame as something large and heavy was thrown up against it. A shadow caught her right eye, and she turned to see the fleshy, small-eyed face of the older gent grinning through the kitchen window at her.

As the front door thundered in its frame once more, she held her rifle high in her shaking hands and screamed,
“What do you want?”

“You, Faith,” the leader said tightly, just loudly enough to be heard through the door and above the boot thuds and scrapes on the porch.

As another loud thud sounded against the front door, Faith gritted her teeth and pressed the Winchester’s butt to her shoulder. Another thundering
whomp
, and the door flew wide, splinters spraying out from the frame. The long-haired lead rider in the stovepipe hat flung a wood splinter aside and ducked through the door, striding to Faith quickly, his bristly cheeks flushed, his iron gray eyes grim and hard.

“Get out of my house!” she shouted.

She triggered the rifle, and the lead rider’s head jerked back and sideways as the bullet drew a red line across his cheek.

The slug tore into the door frame to the right of the tall, hollow-cheeked Mexican entering behind him. The man flinched, grabbing his leather hat and jerking a quick look at the smoking bullet hole in the door.

“Mierda! Puta bitch!”

Behind him, the goat-bearded kid laughed.

Faith lowered the rifle to rack a fresh shell, but she’d only ejected the spent one, which clattered to the floor around her boots, before the lead rider was on her. He jerked the rifle out of her hands and tossed it into the kitchen, where it barked off the food preparation counter and clattered onto the floor.

Faith flung a fist toward the lead rider’s cut cheek. The man grabbed it, jerked it down, and slammed the back of his other hand against Faith’s right cheekbone—a hard, eye-watering slap that threw her straight back and sprawling onto the floor in front of the door to the hall.

He stepped to one side and, scowling down at her, eyes spitting flames of barely restrained fury, jerked off his neckerchief and dabbed at his cheek. He pulled the cloth away to inspect the blood.

“That’s no way to treat guests, Miss Faith.”

The Mexican brushed past him toward Faith and reached for her arm. She jerked the arm away, scrambled to her feet, and ran stumbling down the hall. She could hear foot thuds and spur chinks behind her, the jeering laughter of the goat-bearded kid.

Faith turned into the bedroom and swung the door toward the frame. She got it only half closed before the Mexican stopped it with his boot, eyeing her darkly through the crack.

“Goddamnit!” Faith screamed, ramming the door once more against the man’s boot. “Get out of my house, you sons o’ bitches!”

The Mexican threw his shoulder against the door. Faith groaned and fell as the door flew wide, ricocheting off the wall behind it.

The half-breed closed on her, lips stretched back from his teeth, his black eyes roaming up and down her body with goatish lust.

Behind him, the older gent and the kid watched from the open doorway. The stocky blond moved up behind and between them, placing a hand on a shoulder of each, grinning.

“Hey, you better flip her a coin first, Chulo. Don’t wanna rile Temple.”

A foot in front of Faith—so close she could smell the rancid sweetness of his breath and the leather of the thick vest beneath his deer-hide coat—the half-breed closed his lips, his eyes burrowing into hers. He leaned forward suddenly. Faith shrieked as his big, black-gloved hands closed on her buckskinmackinaw, and then he was jerking the coat up over her head.

Faith struggled against him to no avail—in a second he flung the coat across the room, set his gloved hands on her shirt, and tore her man’s gray shirt and undershirt down the middle, exposing her breasts.

“No!”

“Holy moly!” the kid howled from the doorway. “Look at those!”

“Jesus Christ,” growled the older gent, swaggering into the room like a bull into a pen full of heifers. “That’s too much woman for you, Chulo. You’d better let me take the green out of her first.”

“Yeah, you better whup the green out of her, Kooch!” the kid yelled.

Ignoring the men behind him, the Mexican reached down, grabbed Faith’s left arm painfully, and tossed her up onto the bed as though she weighed no more than a doll. She bounced off her back, her hair tearing loose from the ponytail and splaying across her face. The Mex ripped his grubby hat off his head, flung it across the room, and threw himself on top of her.

He pawed her breasts roughly and rammed his fetid mouth down on hers, using his full weight to press her into the corn shuck mattress.

Faith struggled, turning her head away from him, but the man overpowered her. Pawing her breasts with one hand, he held her head by her hair and kissed her harshly, shoving his tongue into her mouth and grinding his groin against hers.

The others whooped and yelled behind him, the kid dancing a jig and raking his spurs across the hard-packed floor.

When the Mexican finally removed his mouth from Faith’s, she sucked a deep breath, then spat his tobacco-sweet spit from her lips. He lowered his head to nuzzle and nibble her breasts. Weakly, angrily sobbing, she rammed her fists across his head and shoulders.

Suddenly, the others fell silent. A gun hammer clicked loudly.

Faith looked up. The Mexican froze with his rough cheek against her breast. A long pistol barrel was snugged against the Mexican’s ear. Faith followed the arm extending the gun up to the tattooed face of the long-haired leader hovering over the bed.

The leader gritted his teeth as he said tightly, “Chulo, what have I told you about the evils of unwed fornication?”

Chulo turned toward the man angrily. “Back off, Temple. The girl’s mine!”

The leader looked at Faith, blood beading along the bullet burn on his cheek. “Miss, do you want to lie with this man?”

Faith sucked a breath and lifted her head.
“No!”

The man called Temple grinned and said wryly, “ ‘Flee also youthful lusts: but follow righteousness, faith, charity, peace, with them that call on the Lord with a pure heart.’ Second Timothy, Chapter Two, Verse Twenty-two.”

“She’s a whore!” Chulo cried.

“Thornton don’t want her soiled. And I would say that lyin’ with the likes of your mangy Mexican ass would qualify as soilin’.”

“What about me?” the older gent said with an indignant air.

Still staring down his gun barrel at Chulo, Temple said, “Doubly so for you, Kooch.”

“Ah, shit, Temple—you ruin everything, you know that?”

Breathing hard, Faith stared up at the Mexican sprawled on top of her. Chulo’s eyes flicked to the gun aimed at his eye, then to the steel gray eyes of the man aiming it.

“Pull your horns in, Temple,” he growled. “I’m getting off your precious whore though I do not understand what good is a whore if we cannot have her.”

“Same here,” said the thick-necked, wild-eyed blond, staring down at Faith with crossed arms. He shook his head in amazement and chuckled without mirth. “Temple’d rather
kill
her than
have
her!”

Temple depressed his pistol’s hammer and straightened. Chulo glowered at Faith, cursing, as he climbed off her and stood beside the bed, straightening his shirt and adjusting his crotch with a dip of his knees. He cursed once more loudly, regarded Temple with exasperation, then turned on his heel. He pushed past the other men and stomped on out the door.

Temple stared down at Faith, a bizarre half smile on his thin lips and cold gray eyes. “‘Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts.’ Second Peter, Chapter Three, Verse Three.” His lips stretched, widening his grin as he turned to the other three men standing near the door and staring down at Faith hungrily. “Got that from my ma. There never was a more pious whore than Ma. No, sir.”

“Go to hell, Temple,” the older gent grumbled, dismissing the group’s God-fearing leader with an angry toss of his arm. He turned and stomped through the door, and the other two were close on his heels, tossing incredulous glances behind them.

Holding the flaps of her torn shirts over her breasts, blood glistening on the small cut on her right cheek, Faith sat up on the bed and regarded Temple angrily. “Thornton sent you?”

Temple glanced at her breasts, a faint flush rising in his ruddy, dusty cheeks behind the two- or three-day growth of wiry beard stubble. He flicked his inscrutable gray eyes back to her face, smiling that steely smile.

“Where’s the breed?”

“None of your business.”

His smile in place, Temple nodded.

“Pack a bag,” he ordered, giving his pistol an ostentatious twirl before dropping it into its sheath. “We got a long pull ahead.”

BOOK: The Killing Breed

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