The Loner: The Bounty Killers (13 page)

But for some reason they had doubled back to Las Vegas and caught up with him there, just like McCall had trailed him to the spot where she had jumped him.

He couldn’t figure it all out, but he supposed it didn’t really matter. He was McCall’s prisoner.

He was sick and tired of being
somebody’s
prisoner.

“I wouldn’t have figured you for being friends with a cold-blooded bastard like Pike,” he said.

McCall’s eyes widened in surprise. “You know him?”

“We ran into each other in Las Vegas. He had ideas about that ten grand reward just like you do.”

“But you got away from him?”

“Yeah.”

She cursed and started heaping dirt on the flames to put out the fire.

“What are you doing?”

“You should have told me Pike was on your trail. I figured we had both given him the slip. You getting away from him like that will just make him more loco than ever. He’ll hunt you down and try to take you away from me.”

“I thought you used to be lovers.”

“I never said that!” McCall blew out her breath as she extinguished the last of the flames and darkness plunged over the camp. “But it’s true,” she went on quietly. “And if he finds out that I’ve got you and he doesn’t, he’s liable to kill us both . . . you for the bounty, and me for the sheer fun of it.”

“Do you still plan to take me all the way to Santa Fe?” The Kid asked her.

“That’s right. And we’re gonna get started right now!”

Chapter 17

As McCall was saddling the horses, she said, “You’d be wise not to give me any trouble from here on out, Morgan. If you cooperate, the worst I’ll do is take you to Santa Fe and turn you in . . . alive. Pike won’t go to that much bother.”

“You mean he’ll just kill me and be done with it,” The Kid said.

She paused and looked at him. “Isn’t that what I told you? If you doubt it, maybe I’ll just leave you tied to that tree and let Pike find you.”

The Kid shook his head. McCall was right. “I’ll cooperate . . . for now.”

She flashed a cold grin at him. “You’re not making any promises for down the road, is that it?”

“Something like that,” The Kid said.

“Yeah, well, right now I’ll settle for putting this part of the country behind us,” she said as she jerked a saddle cinch tight. She came over to him and pulled her knife from its sheath. “I have your word you won’t try to escape? Because I can knock you out and tie you belly down over your horse if you’d rather.”

The Kid took a deep breath and then nodded. “I give you my word,” he said. It was a bitter promise to make, but seemed like the best option.

McCall returned the nod and went around to the other side of the tree. The Kid felt the knife tug on the ropes as she cut them.

He pulled his arms back in front of him, grimacing as pain shot through the stiff muscles. His hands had gone partially numb. He rubbed them together to get feeling into them.

“You can ride that buckskin of yours,” she told him. “I’m taking Blackie.”

He laughed. “You named your horse Blackie? Your black horse?”

She turned sharply to glare at him. “You got a problem with that? I could still kill you and cut your head off, you know.”

“No, no problem,” The Kid said with a grin that he knew would annoy her. He went over to the buckskin and swung up into the saddle.

“Move out,” McCall told him as she mounted. “You’re leading the way.”

“You think I know where we’re going?”

“You know which way’s east. I want you in front of me so I can shoot you if I have to.”

The Kid shook his head and heeled the buckskin into motion. Riding at night was tricky, especially in rugged terrain, so he let the horse pick his own pace.

McCall rode to the left and a few feet behind him, leading the third horse. He turned his head and said to her, “There’s one thing I’m curious about.”

“What’s that?”

“How did you get loose when I went to find that horse you were riding? I didn’t tie you up as tight as I could, but you shouldn’t have been able to work your way free that quickly.”

“You’ve got Max to thank for that,” she said with a nod toward the big dog, who padded along beside them. “He chewed through that cord without much trouble when I told him to.”

The Kid grunted. “I didn’t figure on some damn trick dog.”

“You didn’t figure on a lot of things,” McCall said.

The Kid didn’t have a response for that, so he didn’t say anything. He couldn’t help but think, though, that he had never met a woman quite like the bounty hunter named McCall.

She kept them moving far into the night, explaining that if anyone had spotted the campfire, she wanted to be a long way from that location before they stopped to rest. When she finally called a halt, a faint tinge of gray in the eastern sky signaled dawn was only a few hours off.

McCall dismounted first and drew her gun. “All right, Morgan. Get down from that horse and put your hands behind you.”

“I need to tend to some personal business first,” The Kid said as he swung down from the buckskin.

“If you want to take a piss, there’s a bush right there that could use some watering.” McCall raised her Colt Lightning and pointed it at his head. “It’s short enough I can see you to shoot if you give me a good reason.”

“I promised to cooperate, remember?”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t much of a promise. For now, you said, and how the hell am I supposed to know how long that is?”

She had a point, he supposed. He stepped behind the bush and took care of the chore while she stood a few feet away aiming the gun at his head. The arrangement was a little awkward, but it was better than nothing, he told himself.

When he was finished, she said, “All right, hands behind your back.”

“You don’t need to tie me up.”

“I’ll rest a lot easier if I do.”

“How about this? I give you my word I won’t try to escape for the next twenty-four hours. That way you can get some sleep, too, while I stand guard.”

She laughed humorlessly. “I’m supposed to believe an hombre who’s wanted for breaking out of prison and murdering guards?”

“One of those charges is completely false, and as far as I knew until recently, the other one had been dropped because of extenuating circumstances.”

“Extenuating,” she repeated. “Where’d you learn a word like that?”

“You’d be surprised how much I know.”

“Maybe. But you don’t know how to do like you’re told. Now, about putting your hands behind your back . . .” She lifted the Lightning.

“Do you know where I was going when you caught up to me?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Not really.”

“I was going to Santa Fe. My lawyer’s there. That’s where I
want
to go. You’re not taking me there as much as we’re just riding together.”

“This gun says different. So does Max.”

The dog bared his teeth at The Kid at the sound of his name.

McCall went on, “He can knock you down and chew on you for a while if you don’t want to go along with what I say. After that I reckon you won’t be so quick to argue.”

The Kid put his hands behind his back, but not without muttering, “One of these days you won’t have that gun and that dog.”

“Yeah, you just keep telling yourself that,” McCall jeered.

She tied his hands, then helped him sit down at the base of a tree. After holstering the Lightning, she pulled her Winchester from its sheath and sat down where she could lean back against the trunk of another tree. She didn’t make a fire, and it was cold enough that their breath fogged in front of their faces.

As uncomfortable as The Kid was, he didn’t think he’d be able to sleep. But exhaustion trumped discomfort, and even though he was leaning against the rough bark of a pine trunk, he dozed off quickly.

When he woke up, he found he had slumped onto his side while he was sleeping. The sun was up, slanting its rays through the trees.

A few yards away, McCall was lying on her side, too, and appeared to be sound asleep. Her hat had come off, and her head was pillowed on one arm. The hard lines of her face had softened some as she relaxed. She wasn’t what anybody would call pretty, but as The Kid looked at her, he realized when she wasn’t trying to appear fierce and intimidating, her features had a certain attractiveness to them. The lines that a hard life had etched into her face also gave her character.

The Kid’s mouth tightened into a grim line as he told himself he shouldn’t be thinking such things about her, or about any woman. It hadn’t been long enough since he had buried his wife.

But it didn’t hurt anything to lie there and look at McCall. He wondered how she had wound up with a child living in Kansas City while she wandered the frontier trying to apprehend the worst of the badmen who were wanted by the law.

The sound of hoofbeats drifted to The Kid’s ears and caused him to jerk his head up as he listened intently. Several horses, he decided, and they weren’t far away.

McCall still slept soundly.

Softly, The Kid spoke to her. “McCall! McCall, wake up! Riders coming.”

She didn’t budge. In fact, her breathing seemed to be deeper and more regular than ever. She was settling in for a nice, long sleep.

The Kid muttered a curse and sat up. He pushed his back against the tree trunk and started wiggling his shoulders as he worked his way up. After a moment, he managed to get a foot underneath him and awkwardly pushed himself into a standing position.

His legs were stiff from sleeping on the ground. He stumbled over to McCall and nudged her shoulder with a booted foot. “Wake up, damn it!” he said to her in an urgent whisper.

She woke up, all right. She sat bolt upright, snatched the Winchester from the ground beside her, and rammed the barrel into The Kid’s belly, causing him to double over in pain.

As The Kid tried not to retch, McCall scrambled backward on her butt and trained the rifle on him. “What the hell are you trying to do?” she demanded in a loud voice.

The Kid hissed through his teeth at her, hoping she would understand that he meant for her to keep it down. “Riders coming,” he croaked out.

McCall lifted her head and listened. An expression of alarm flashed across her face. She had heard the horses, too.

She leaped to her feet and drew her knife. “I’m gonna cut you loose,” she said as she stepped behind The Kid. “We’ve got to keep our horses quiet and hope those men, whoever they are, pass us by. I can count on your word not to try to escape?”

“You can,” The Kid told her.

She slashed the ropes around his wrists. He massaged them, then stepped over to the buckskin and put a hand on the horse’s muzzle. McCall did the same with the other two horses and told the dog, “Quiet, Max.”

Max stood with his tail up and the hair on the back of his neck bristling, but he didn’t make a sound.

The hoofbeats grew louder. The riders probably weren’t more than fifty yards away. The Kid heard the low mutter of men’s voices, but they were too far away for him to make out any of the words or recognize the voices.

That early in the morning there wasn’t much breeze. With any luck, the strangers’ horses wouldn’t scent the four animals in the makeshift camp. The Kid and McCall waited in tense silence.

The hoofbeats began to recede as the riders passed the camp and were going on without discovering it. The Kid and McCall stood motionless until the sound of the horses faded away completely.

McCall heaved a sigh and said, “They’re out of earshot now.”

“Could you tell if they were Pike and his men?”

She shook her head. “No, I never could hear them well enough for that.”

“If they were, they’re ahead of us now. If we keep going east, we’re liable to come up behind them.”

McCall nodded and said, “I know. That’s why we’re going to cut south for a while and then head east again.”

“You know, sooner or later we’ll have to find out just how much you trust me.”

She frowned at him and asked, “What do you mean by that?”

“If we run into Pike, there’ll be trouble, you said.”

“Yeah, you can count on that.”

“When that time comes . . . you’re going to have to give me a gun. Two of us will have a better chance against five killers.”

“Those still aren’t good odds.” McCall grunted. “But I’ll have to admit, they’re better than five to one. Still, I might be a damn fool to put a gun in your hand.”

“I guess if it happens, we’ll find out,” The Kid said.

“
When
. I know Pike. Since you got away from him in Las Vegas, he’ll feel like he’s been cheated, and won’t stop looking for you until he finds you. Not with ten grand at stake.” McCall shoved the Winchester in its saddle boot. “So it’s not a matter of
if
we have to fight for our lives, Morgan. It’s a matter of
when
.”

Chapter 18

They cut south for the next couple days, hitting the Verde River and following it southeast as it cut around the Mogollon Rim. The Kid had a vague memory of his father telling him about some range war he had been involved with in the area, but he didn’t recall any of the details.

It was the long way around and would add days to their journey to Santa Fe, but McCall was convinced it would help them avoid Pronto Pike . . . if, in fact, Pike and his bunch of bounty killers were on their trail.

“Pike must be hell on wheels to make you as nervous as he does,” The Kid commented as he and McCall rode along with the rim looming to their left. Max padded alongside them.

“There’s a big difference between being careful and being ner vous,” she said. “Don’t forget, I rode with Pike for a good long time. I know what sort of man he is. He likes killing people, Morgan. He just makes sure that everybody he kills is wanted by the law. That way he doesn’t wind up at the end of a hang rope himself.”

“I saw enough of him in Las Vegas to know that you’re probably right.”

“You can bet a hat that I am,” McCall said. “Why, one time I saw Pike—”

Whatever she was going to say about Pike went unfinished as half a dozen gunshots rang out. They weren’t too far away, and the sound traveled clearly in the thin air.