The Loner: The Bounty Killers (24 page)

The air inside the canyon was thick with smoke. The Kid ignored the way the stuff stung his eyes and the reek of it filled his nose. He blinked rapidly to clear his vision, and a bullet spanged off the rock beside him.

That shot had come from higher up. He jerked his head back and lifted his gaze to the canyon rim. The rifleman up there was on the move, trying to reach a spot where he would have a better angle at the defenders.

He should have been more patient and waited until he was there before attempting a shot. The Kid’s Winchester barked, and the slug clipped the man’s thigh.

That was enough to throw him off stride. He lost his balance and lurched toward the rim. Too close to the edge he toppled over the brink with a shriek, pinwheeling through the air for several hundred feet before he crashed into some rocks at the bottom with a bright crimson splash of blood.

Two and a half men out of the fight, The Kid thought. They were whittling down the odds.

But not fast enough. The rest of the attackers were only about fifty yards away.

Lace let out a yelp of pain. The Kid looked over at her in alarm and called, “Are you hit?”

She waved to show that she was all right. As she grimaced in pain, she pulled the poncho up and showed him a bloody patch on the right sleeve of her faded men’s shirt, about halfway between the elbow and shoulder. From the looks of it, a bullet had grazed her.

“Hurts like hell,” she told him, “but I can still use the arm, so nothing’s broken.”

He nodded and turned his attention back to the attackers. One of them burst out from behind a tree and tried to cover his advance by emptying a six-shooter as fast as he could.

But The Kid and Lace fired at the same time, the reports sounding like one, and both bullets ripped through the man and flung him off his feet.

Three and a half. Four if you counted the man with the busted leg who’d been left behind.

But that still left eight cold-blooded killers who were almost within spitting distance of the rocks.

Pretty soon it was going to be close quarters gun work, The Kid thought. During a brief lull, he drew his Colt and slid a cartridge into the usually empty sixth chamber in the cylinder. He was going to need a full wheel. He set the gun beside him on the rock where he could reach it easily. He did the same with the pearl-handled Colt he had taken from Pike back in Las Vegas, on that night that seemed like ages ago.

“Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”

That was Pike’s voice, and The Kid was somewhat surprised to hear the order. The attackers’ guns fell silent. He and Lace stopped shooting as well.

“Lace, if you’re still alive, listen to me,” Pike said into the hush that seemed to echo eerily after all the gun thunder that had filled the canyon for what seemed like hours though it had been only fifteen minutes or so. “Lace, you don’t have to die. Shoot Morgan right now. End this. If you don’t, you’ll never see your daughter again.”

“Damn you, Pike,” she said thickly. “Keep your dirty tongue off my little girl! Don’t you talk about her, you son of a bitch!”

“I’m just tryin’ to help you here, Lace,” Pike said in oily tones. “You and me, we go back a long way.”

“Too far,” Lace muttered. She raised her voice and said, “You think I believe you? I know you’ll kill me just as soon as you get the chance, Pike! You’re loco, and you always have been!”

“Is that your last word?”

“No, this is: go to hell!”

“Take ’em!” Pike roared even as Lace’s words echoed back from the canyon walls, and a storm of lead broke over the rocks where she and The Kid were crouched.

Chapter 32

The Kid rose up on his knees, knowing that the time for sharpshooting was over. It was going to be bloody slaughter, and devil take the hindmost.

He brought the rifle to his shoulder and swung the barrel from left to right, spraying out slugs as fast as he could work the Winchester’s lever. He was throwing lead and hoping it landed in the bodies of his enemies.

He felt bullets tug at his coat. A slug passed so close to his cheek it left a hot streak along the skin. The Winchester’s hammer clicked on empty. He flung the rifle aside and snatched up the two revolvers as he rose to his feet. The guns roared and bucked in his hands.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Lace doing the same. Guns filled both her hands, and thunder rolled from them as she fired, left, right, left, right.

The Kid couldn’t see much through the clouds of gunsmoke swirling around him, but he caught glimpses of men falling and blood welling from bullet-torn flesh. Then what felt like a blow from a giant hammer knocked his left leg out from under him, and he rolled out of control down the slab of rock.

He crashed to the hard ground at the base of the rock and landed on his belly. He’d managed to hold on to both guns, and tried to scramble to his feet, but his leg folded up underneath him and dumped him on his belly again. Crawling forward, guns up, pushing with his good leg he dragged himself along with his elbows.

Two men ran past the rock. The Kid yelled, “Hey!” and they wheeled toward him, their Colts swinging into line.

The Kid’s guns roared first. Traveling at an upward angle, the slugs caught the men just above their belts and bored up through their guts. As they doubled over in agony, their fingers clenched on triggers, but the slugs blasted harmlessly into the ground at their feet as they collapsed.

The Kid rolled against the rock and braced his shoulders on it. He got his good leg under him and shoved, sliding up the rock until he was in a roughly upright position, balanced on his right leg.

He couldn’t see Lace. Smoke and dust clogged the air and half blinded him. The gunfire had stopped, but the echoes were still bouncing back and forth between the canyon walls.

A red haze filled The Kid’s vision. As he tried to blink it away, he realized that blood was dripping into his eyes from a cut on his forehead.

Out of that gory haze, a dark figure loomed. “Lace . . .” The Kid whispered.

“Afraid not, Morgan,” Pronto Pike said. Clad in black and red, he looked like Satan himself stepping out of the fires of hell. “Lace is dead,” he said, “and you’re about to be.”

The Kid lifted his guns and squeezed the triggers. The hammers fell on empty chambers.

Pike laughed as he lifted his Colt and took deliberate aim at The Kid’s head.

The shape came out of the smoke behind Pike and crashed into his back, knocking his arm up just as he pulled the trigger. The bullet smacked into the rock several feet above The Kid’s head.

Lace wrapped her arm around Pike’s neck and drove him forward. They fell, and Pike’s gun hand struck a rock, jarring the revolver out of his grip. It skittered away.

The two of them rolled over, wrestling desperately. The Kid saw that Lace’s poncho was gone, and her shirt was covered with blood. Somehow, she clung to life even though she’d been riddled with bullets.

The Kid gritted his teeth and hobbled toward the gun Pike had dropped, forcing his wounded leg to hold him up. Ignoring the hot flood of blood down it he focused all his attention on the gun.

Lace was too weak to put up much of a fight. Pike threw her off, slammed a fist across her face, and rammed his knee into her belly. He hit her again and again, driving her head against the hard ground.

The Kid reached for the gun, knowing that if he lost his balance and fell, he’d never be able to get up again.

Pike reached out, caught up a rock almost the size of a man’s head, and lifted it as he straddled Lace’s limp form. “Now you’ll die and stay dead!” he growled as he raised the rock above his head, poised to crush her skull and smash the life out of her.

“Pike,” The Kid said.

Pike looked up, found himself staring down the barrel of his own gun from a distance of about a foot.

The Kid pulled the trigger.

The shot blew Pike backward off Lace. The rock sailed out of his hands and thudded to the ground. The spray of blood and brains that exploded out the back of Pike’s head settled on it like droplets of crimson rain. The bounty hunter lay on his back, staring sightlessly at the sky with the bullet hole in the center of his forehead looking like a third, red-rimmed eye.

The Kid dropped the gun. His strength and his balance deserted him at last, and he fell beside Lace, close enough that he could stretch out his arm and put it around her. He pulled himself closer to her and called her name. “Lace! Lace, can you hear me?”

Her eyelids fluttered open. “K-Kid?” she whispered.

“Don’t you die!” he told her between clenched teeth. “Damn it, don’t you die! You’ve got a little girl waiting for you to come home to her!”

The tip of Lace’s tongue came out and swiped over lips covered with a paste of dust and blood. “Conrad,” she husked. “Conrad, you . . . you gotta promise me . . . you’ll see that she . . . that she’s taken care of.”

“You’ll take care of her,” he urged.

“You got to . . . promise me . . .”

“I promise,” Conrad Browning whispered. “I give you my word.”

“You’re a . . . good man . . . Conrad . . . and so’s . . . The Kid . . .”

“No!” he howled, pulling her even closer. “No!” He was still shouting Lace’s name and holding her limp form when Chester Blount and the posse of sheriff’s deputies and U.S. marshals from Phoenix found them five minutes later.

“I figure the Alamo must’ve looked like that, or the Little Big Horn,” Blount said an hour later as one of the marshals who had plenty of experience at patching up wounds wrapped a bandage around the bullet hole in Conrad’s thigh. He had cleaned the wound with a liberal application of whiskey and proclaimed that Conrad would live . . . probably.

Blount went on, “Bodies a-layin’ ever’where and the ground awash with blood. Lord, what a battle that must’a been!”

“It was bad enough,” Conrad said, looking toward the blanket-covered form lying under a pine tree nearby, with the big dog sitting beside her. The marshal had spent most of his time trying to save Lace. “Were they all dead?”

“Dead as could be,” the old-timer confirmed with a nod. “Except for Guthrie, and I ain’t sure he’s ever gonna be the same. He’s plumb loco.”

The members of the posse had found Spud Guthrie still in the little space between the rocks where The Kid had put him. Chips in the stone and splashes of color showed where numerous bullets had struck the rocks. Guthrie himself, however, was untouched.

But sitting there helplessly as hot lead flew around him for minutes that must have seemed like hours had done something to his mind. So far all he had done was stare straight ahead, wide-eyed, and hadn’t made a sound. The Kid thought Guthrie had gone mad and might never recover.

He wondered if it was a fitting punishment for a man whose pride and arrogance had set so much killing in motion. But he was no longer in the business of punishing anyone, so it was none of his affair, he told himself.

The marshal finished tying off the bandage around his leg. “There you go, Mr. Browning,” he said as he straightened. “You’ll be able to walk on it a little, but I wouldn’t go runnin’ around if I was you. It’ll heal a lot better and a lot quicker if you’ll stay off it as much as you can.”

“You’re welcome to stay here for a while,” Blount offered. “I ain’t got a cabin no more, but I can pitch a couple o’ tents here in the canyon and we’ll be mighty comfortable. The fresh air’ll do you good, I’m thinkin’.”

Conrad nodded. “I’m obliged for that, Mr. Blount. I may just take you up on it.”

Blount glanced toward the figure under the pine tree. “I kinda had a hunch you might.”

The marshal said, “I hope you’ll stop by Phoenix when you’re well enough to travel and say hello to the governor. The way he set the telegraph wires to burnin’ when he heard you were in trouble tells me he sets a lot of store by you, Mr. Browning. He had the county sheriff and the chief marshal in Denver hoppin’, tryin’ to get help for you.”

“If you see him, tell him how grateful I am,” Conrad said. “But yes, I’ll be sure and tell him myself, too.”

None of the lawmen who had galloped back to Dos Caballos Canyon with Blount had any idea that Conrad Browning, friend of the territorial governor, was also Kid Morgan, a wanted fugitive with a ten grand bounty on his head in New Mexico. Blount had kept his mouth shut about that, showing keen wisdom.

The old-timer caught a moment alone with Conrad and said quietly, “If you still want a half interest in Dos Caballos, Kid, you don’t have to pay for it. I’ll give it to you, free and clear, for what you done.”

Conrad shook his head and waved away the offer. “I only suggested that in case it ever came down to having to fight Guthrie in court. It would have given me some legal standing. Now there’s no need for it.”

“No, I don’t reckon there is,” Blount agreed. “I don’t know what’ll happen to the Rafter G now that Guthrie’s gone loco, but I reckon the canyon’s safe from now on.”

Conrad hoped that turned out to be the case. He said as much, then added, “If it ever turns out otherwise, you just get in touch with me through my lawyers.”

“I’ll sure do it,” Blount promised. He grinned. “Now, you better go tend to the rest o’ your business. I see somebody stirrin’ around.”

It was true, Conrad saw as he limped toward the pine tree, using a borrowed Winchester as a makeshift crutch. Lace’s eyes were open, and her head turned toward him as he approached.

He tried to kneel beside her but sat on the ground instead. Her hand moved on the blanket that covered her heavily bandaged body. He took hold of it, entwining his fingers with hers.

“Kid?” she whispered. “Conrad?”

“One and the same,” he told her.

“You’re . . . alive?”

“Yeah. So are you, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“But . . . I got shot so many times . . .”

“Four, to be exact. But the marshal who patched you up doesn’t think any of the slugs hit anything
too
vital. That’s the way he put it. You’ll probably be laid up for weeks, and your bounty hunting career is over, more than likely, but you’ll live to see your daughter again.”

He squeezed her hand, and weakly, she squeezed back.