.45-Caliber Desperado (12 page)

Camilla's fingers dug deeper into Cuno's arms. “There's plenty of willing girls in the camp yonder. Take your pick.”

“We don't want a whore.” Hatchet-faced H. D. spoke slowly, menacingly, showing large yellow teeth between his cracked, pink lips. “We want your girl. We seen you two, and we want her. Yeah, she'll do just fine.”

“Well, you can't have her. I do apologize.”

H. D. with the cocked gun hardened his jaws.

The other man slid a .36 Remington from its holster, and clicked the hammer back.

“Wait!” Camilla tried to move out from behind Cuno, but he pushed her back behind him.

“Come on outta there,
chiquita
. Or we'll shoot your boyfriend.”

“Who the hell are you?” Cuno said, keeping the girl behind him.

“The worst dream you ever had, she don't come willin' like. With me first. Off in the brush yonder while H.D. keeps you here.” The man with the cocked .36 grinned and slitted his eyes as he swung down from his horse, the other man following suit and stepping forward. They were both enjoying this—terrorizing two naked lovers fresh from the carnal throes. “Then it's H. D.'s turn. Then we're through, and you two can go about your business.”

H. D. laughed.

The other man stopped at the creek's edge. His eyes sparked between narrowed lids, and he slowly spread his lips back from his teeth, showing several gaps.

Cuno clenched his fists, felt a burning fill his head. “I'll kill you for this, you depraved sons o' bitches.”

Camilla caught him off guard and lurched around him. He grabbed for her. She jerked her arm away from him and waded toward the bank.

“It's all right, Cuno,” she said, her voice low and hard with fury as she kept her eyes on the two men watching her lustily. “If it will make these two dogs feel like men, to take a girl by force, then let's see how much man they really are!”

H. D. said, “I like her already!”

The other man grabbed Camilla's arm, pulled her up out of the water, and turned her into the trees and brush along the shore. Cuno strode forward.

“That's far enough, bucko,” H. D. said.

Cuno continued forward, fists clenched at his sides. The man with the gun backed up, flushing anxiously, keeping the gun aimed at Cuno's chest. Cuno came on up the bank, slipping a little in the mud and wet grass. He had to make a play. He wouldn't let them take Camilla. He'd stop them or die.

H. D. didn't want to shoot him. He wanted Cuno to hear what went on in the brush. He'd kill Cuno later. Sadist was the word for such men as him and his partner. They had the look and smell and armaments of bounty hunters. H. D. stepped back, keeping a good ten feet between him and Cuno, grinning.

Cuno followed Camilla's slender, brown back with his eyes. The other man was following her slowly, thumbs hooked behind his cartridge belts. Camilla glanced back at Cuno, her eyes wide and dark. The man behind her pushed her forward hard, and she stumbled, dropping to her knees with a sharp curse. The man laughed.

Cuno had just turned to the man in front of him when a rifle barked. There was a cracking thud and a grunt.

In the corner of his eye, Cuno saw the man following Camilla jerk his head as though he'd been socked in the ear. The man ahead of Cuno turned to look in his partner's direction, and Cuno bounded across the break between them. He grabbed the gun as H. D. swung his head back toward Cuno, and just then Cuno grabbed the gun in both his large hands and raised it.

H. D. jerked the trigger. The gun's roar was a miniature lance through Cuno's ears, making them ring. Holding the gun around H. D.'s hands, Cuno pushed the hachet-faced man straight back against a broad tree trunk.

H. D. cursed and spit like a riled bobcat, bunching his lips and trying to push the gun down and away from him and aim it at Cuno. He was strong. Cuno was stronger. H. D. sucked a breath through his teeth as Cuno pried one of the man's hands away from the back of the gun and clicked the hammer back. At the same time, using steady pressure, Cuno snugged the pistol's barrel up against the soft skin beneath H. D.'s chin.

He lifted his head, gritting his teeth, all the blood running out of his face. “Ah,
shit
!”

Cuno pulled down on H. D.'s trigger finger.

Cuno released the man's head and stepped back, warm blood spashing his face, neck, and shoulders. H. D.'s knees buckled, and he dropped as though a trapdoor had been opened beneath him. He lay quivering on his side at the base of the trunk.

Cuno held the bloody gun in his hand and looked around. Mateo de Cava was striding toward him, his fringed deerskin leggings jostling about his slightly bowed legs, the spurs on his black boots trilling. His eyes were large, his black-bearded face expressionless. Camilla looked down at the man her brother had shot. She cursed and gave him a savage kick with her bare foot, then turned to Mateo.

“Cover your eyes, fool! I'm naked!”

Mateo flashed a relieved smile. “I see that, my beautiful sister.” He turned to Cuno, standing naked and bloody and holding the bloody gun in his clenched fist, his broad chest rising and falling heavily with rage. He wanted to kill the man slumped and quivering at his bare feet again and again.

No matter how foul he was, a man could only die once. It didn't seem fair.

Mateo came over and stood near Cuno, staring down at the dead man whose limbs were finally settling. “H. D. Harold.” His voice was low, grim. He walked past Camilla, who was pulling on her clothes, and stopped over the man he'd shot with his carbine. He'd apparently come alone, as Cuno saw no one else around. “Dwight Tevis,” he said, prodding the other man's black leather holster with his boot toe. A tarnished, silver star had been sewn into it. “Used to be a lawman. Took the star with him when he quit to start on a more lucrative career.”

“Bounty hunter?” Cuno was looking around, wondering if there were any more man hunters where these two had come from.

Mateo sighed and shouldered his Winchester, looking around. “This pair of carrion-eating lobos have been following us for two days.”

Cuno looked at the outlaw leader. He didn't care that he was still naked and wearing a pint of blood and brain matter on his face and shoulders. Prison had a way of hardening your spleen and stripping away your modesty. “You knew.”

Now he felt foolish for not only letting these men sneak up on him while he and Camilla were rutting but for not knowing they'd been sniffing his and the gang's trail for days.

“Why didn't you say something?” Camilla asked her brother. She scowled at Mateo as she pulled her blouse on over a threadbare camisole.

Mateo spoke in Spanish, purposely excluding Cuno to let the young freighter know he still had much to prove if he was to be considered a bona fide member of the gang. He said something along the lines of: “I told those who needed to know. Since there were only two, we were not worried.”

In English, he said, “But from the window of the whorehouse, I saw them riding down here.” His voice was cool and teeming with disapproval. “If you're going to ask for my sister's hand in holy matrimony,
mi
gringo amigo, you're gonna have to prove you can protect her. And that you're not dumber than a cartload of stove wood.”

He swung around and began taking long, rolling strides—the Spanish cock of the walk—back toward the brothel, his spurs trilling. When he was gone, Cuno turned to Camilla. He didn't know what to say so he brushed past her and into the creek.

She turned her head, following him with her eyes. “What's wrong?”

Cuno waded into the creek and began angrily splashing water up to wash his head and shoulders. “Your brother's right. I damn near got you killed.”

“It wasn't your fault. I should have heard them coming myself. We were preoccupied.”

“None of the other men in the gang have women riding with them. Now I reckon I know why.”

She swung around to face him squarely, planted her fists on her hips. “Well, you don't have much choice, do you?”

Cuno turned to look at her over his shoulder. Her brown face was dappled with golden sunshine tumbling through the leaves. He splashed more water onto his chest, walked up the bank, and stood over her.

His heart felt swollen, tender. He'd known such harrowing loneliness even before prison that he couldn't conceive of being without this girl who apparently loved him to her own detriment.

Slowly, she lifted her hands to the hard, swollen slabs of his chest. He leaned down and kissed her.

“No, I reckon I don't have much choice.”

“Do you wish you did?”

He shook his head. “But I need to work on this desperado stuff. Up to now, I've been the one doin' the hunting, not the one bein' hunted.”

“We could leave—you and I. We could head south together.”

“Leave the gang?”

“Sure. Neither of us really belongs with Mateo. I did at one time, back in Mejico, after our father died and I had no one else. But I could give up this crazy bandito life . . . if you wanted.”

Cuno studied her, but half his thoughts were elsewhere. He looked off toward the brothel. Mateo was halfway between him and the camp, the late light gilding his black-clad shoulders. A low din of drunken revelry rose on the breeze, emanating from the brothel.

The bandito leader had saved Cuno's and Camilla's lives. In this new world he'd suddenly found himself in—the world of a fugitive—there was safety in numbers.

“What else do we have?” he asked Camilla.

She lifted her hands from his chest, brushed her fingertips across his cheeks. She closed her eyes very lightly, rose onto the toes of her boots, and kissed him gently. “Each other,” she whispered.

TO DISTRACT HIMSELF from the young Murphy girl he'd recently drilled while saving Mason's worthless hide, Spurr was thinking about a whore he knew, known simply as Abilene from up Wyoming way, and whom when drunk he often considered marrying, though he wasn't drunk now, and there was no question that what had just screeched past his face and over his horse's head, abruptly snuffing all thoughts of Abilene and her buxom, raspy-voiced allure, was a bullet.

Likely a large-caliber bullet. It hammered the ground to his right and ahead about six feet with a heavy
whump!
and twangy
yip!
that echoed across the broad bowl he and the other lawmen were crossing, on the trail of the Mateo de Cava gang.

The thunder of the heavy gun reached Spurr's old ears a half second later, and it drowned the ricochet's echo.

“What in god's name?” cried Sheriff McQueen, jerking back on his horse's reins and whipping his head toward the low hill from which the shot had been fired.

“Everyone down!” Spurr shouted, reaching for his Winchester. “Take cover!”

When he had the Winchester out of its scabbard, he dropped clumsily out of his saddle. The roan shied from the bark of another shot before the old marshal had gotten his left boot clear, and the movement tripped him up and threw him. He hit the ground on his left shoulder and hip and sucked a breath as his old bones seemed to clank together like rocks in an ore car. The padding between his rickety joints had long since turned to scrap leather torn and bleached by a thousand suns and winds.

“Goddamn you, Cochise!” he cried, rising heavily and groaning with the effort.

“Spurr, for chrissakes!” Sheriff Dusty Mason admonished, shaking his head.

The sheriff was already off his strawberry, of course, and on one knee behind a rock that didn't offer much cover at all. He cast a quick, disgusted look at the older man just now raising his own rifle to his shoulder, then snugged his cheek up against his own rifle's rear stock, and triggered a return shot toward the hill from which the large-caliber bullets had been fired. Spurr followed the younger lawman's gaze but saw nothing but medium-sized boulders strewn about the top of the knoll.

“Where is the pot-shootin' son of a bitch?”

“In them rocks up there! Can't you see?”

Spurr ignored the insult and triggered three quick rounds, vaguely proud of himself for landing the shots where he'd wanted them, watching dust and stone slivers puff from the rocks. But he saw no sign of the shooter. If he was up there, he'd dropped back down out of sight.

“Jason!” someone cried behind him.

As he ejected a spent cartridge from his brass-framed Winchester, he glanced back to see McQueen and his two deputies still sitting their fiddle-footing horses. One of the young deputies was flopping back in his saddle, blood bibbing on his pin-striped shirt near where one suspender climbed his shoulder. He held his reins high, and his eyes were wide and white-ringed, lips bunched. He looked like he was about to go under water and was holding his breath for it.

His hat was gone. Beside him, Sheriff McQueen's mouth gaped. Blood from the deputy's shoulder and chest had splashed across McQueen's own left arm, and his sun-leathery cheek above his silver mustache was splattered, as well. Blood continued to well from the young deputy's chest.

“McQueen!” Spurr shouted. “Get that man the hell out of here! We'll cover you!”

As McQueen reached stiffly out to grab the reins of the wounded deputy's sorrel, Spurr and Mason pelted the rocks topping the knoll with .44 slugs, kicking up dust and bits of sage and yucca. When the sheriff and his two deputies had galloped out of sight, heading toward three cone-shaped bluffs in the western distance, Spurr raised his left hand. Mason held fire.