And Kill Them All (6 page)

I glanced Boz's direction. The jailhouse door stood wide open between us. Noticed the near-headless corpse of Boston Teal was draped atop Rufus Cosner. Appeared the luckless Cosner had somehow got blasted straight to a sulfurous Hell 'bout half a second before he removed most of Boston's thick noggin with a single shot.

Boz had gone down, too. Sat with his back to the slug-peppered, cross-tie wall and worked at poking a handkerchief into a blood-gushing hole in his pants' leg. My partner didn't even look up when he said, “Reckon we got 'em all, Lucius?”

Ripped the bandanna from around my own neck. Shoved it against the leaker in my side. Pressed on the crude dressing and gasped for air. “You didn't even bother to glance my direction, Boz. Hell, I could be deader'n Julius Caesar for all you'd know.”

A strained chuckle came from my friend's direction. “Hell, boy, figure there ain't nobody livin' right now who's gonna have skill enough, or grit enough, to kill you in a straight-up pistol fight.”

“Well, you could be wrong about that, by God. Lord could've come and taken me as easy as them skunks lyin' yonder in the street. Or these two unfortunates splayed out here in the doorway for that matter. Shit, I could be just as dead as Andy Jackson right now.”

My friend tightened the crude bandage around his blood-soaked leg. Then, he leaned back against the wall and let out a tired, exasperated sigh.

“How bad you hurt?” I said.

“Oh, not too awful much. Been hurt worse. Been shot in lots worse places, too.”

“Well, not me. This is the first time for me, by God. Ain't never been shot before. Damnation. Hurts like burnin' perdition.”

Boz struggled to his feet, then hobbled over. He pulled my hand away from the wound, then poked around in the bloody hole. “Aw, hell, boy. She ain't near as bad as you think. 'Course she's gonna take some time healin'. Gonna pain you worse'n the dickens for a spell. Might even put you in bed for a few weeks. Maybe more. Festerates could well kill you. Otherwise, figure you'll heal.”

I shot a glance at his leg. “That don't look good.”

He flopped down next to me and swept a pained glance up and down Rio Seco's only street. “Oh, might not do any riding for a bit, that's for certain sure. Suppose we'd best scare up a sawbones, Lucius. Wouldn't want to go and bleed out 'fore we can get these holes plugged by someone with a bit more in the way of medical experience than I've got.”

Turned out as how the town's only pill pusher'd heard the commotion and came a-running. He had the pair of us cleaned up, sterilized, and stitched back together in a matter of minutes.

Bone popper couldn't do much of anything for them other boys though. First two blasts out of the box, from that big popper Boz carried, came near cutting Tyler, Manion, and Keller in half. Got to avow, though, they 'uz tough ole boys. The three of them went down blasting, in spite of being pretty much dead whilst doing it.

Once we got them on their backs, all our other shooting didn't really do much in the way of death-dealing damage. Except when it came to Irby Teal. Think me and Boz both might've put three or four each in the man. Literally shot him to pieces. Corpse leaked blood like we'd turned him into a human sieve. Could've read the
Fort Worth Ledger
through his bullet-riddled hide.

From all we could determine, Deputy Cosner had made good on his threat. He'd touched off a single round that splattered Boston Teal's pea-sized brain all over hell and yonder. Found a gory, fist-sized gob of the mess splattered across my back and shoulders. I was so preoccupied, though, I never even felt the man's skull filler when it hit me.

Me and Boz came to believe that Cosner must have figured that hiding behind Boston Teal was the safest place in town. Unfortunately the man couldn't have been more wrong. Somebody still managed to put one through his right eye, and another bored its way through the tip of his nose. Made a hell of a mess. But we did discover, later on, as how he'd lied about a wife and child. Man was simply possessed of henhouse ways.

Boz stood over Cosner's corpse, shook his head, and said, “Guess the poor boy wasn't as lucky as I figured.”

And so, that bloody session of gun smoke and quick death is how me and a leg-shot Randall Bozworth Tatum came to rent a half-assed horse ranch and cattle operation out in the Devils River country, south of Sonora. We were both injured badly enough that traveling didn't seem like a good idea at the time. Figured as how we'd just lay up in the shade and set to mending. You know, rest and recuperate for a spell before we headed on back to Fort Worth. Even made arrangements to send Cap'n Culpepper a telegraph message to let him know our plans. 'Course, he wasn't at all happy with the situation but did seem to understand.

Looking back on the whole dance, our plan seemed solid enough. But, as it turned out, that's when my bad dreams started. And, not long after, that's when me'n Boz got tangled up in one of the bloodiest, most awful messes of my entire ranger career.

Thermometer I got from the Baker Brothers Funeral Home in Domino says it's 105 in the shade right now. Thank God for lemons, ice, and sugar. Sitting here in the shade with a sweat-covered glass in my hand, just thinking on that whole grisly dance of uncommon horror and how we came to meet up with a beautiful little gal named Clementine Webb. Blood-soaked tale still has the power to send shivers charging up and down my ancient spine like a herd of longhorns stampeded by pitchfork lightning. Jesus, amazing how some memories have the capacity to make my aged blood run as cold as Rocky Mountain river water.

5

“DAMN IRBY TEAL FOR A GOOD SHOT.”

NOW, ME AND Boz had hoped to get far enough away from civilization to forget about doing any ranger work for a spell. But, to my dismay, we hadn't been living on the Devils River ranch much more than a few weeks when the realization thundered down on me that no hope existed of ever escaping the everyday events of my blood-soaked past.

See, when the oft avoided blackness of sleep descended, the power of dreams could, once again, bring my bygone experiences, with blood and thunder, to vivid, brutal, frightening life. Always the dreams. Nightmares to be more precise.

Looking back on it, I'm convinced that having Irby Teal plug me, in that Rio Seco dustup, was what precipitated the whole life-and-death dance that followed. Have always felt there's nothing like getting shot to put a man in touch with his own mortality. In truth, I've come to realize that I had never suffered from such a crisis of conscience before that period. Or afterward, come to think on it.

For reasons that are still unclear to me, the most compelling of the nocturnal reveries concerning my short but turbulent ranger career invariably involved the lingering, stomach-churning stench given off by slaughtered men. The acrid fragrance released by roiling clouds of spent, death-dealing gunpowder lingered in my sleep-leadened nose. The bilious odor of spilled blood hovered over my bed, along with the reek of puke, urine, and human waste. The bitter, coppery taste that swelled on the back of a man's throat and always accompanied the putrid aroma of sudden death came along for the ride as well.

Then there was the accompanying noise. The blistering roar from pistols, rifles, and shotguns when they sent the certainty of eternal damnation echoing through my quiescent brain. The entire ball of wax often seemed masked in a cacophonous, chilling cloak draped across the narrow shoulders of that insatiable, bony-fingered, skull-faced Thief of Souls.

But even worse than those skin-pimpling horrors were the agonized, screeching cries and whimpers of wounded and dying men. The nerve-grating screams of injured, wild-eyed, panicked horses. My nighttime apparitions rolled themselves into a calamitous tumult brought on by a litany of misty and confused visions of gore, thunder, and violent death, that I came to feel sure had not yet occurred but would present themselves soon.

There was no denying it, those blood-spattered nightmares seemed genuine beyond human understanding. So authentically sharp, clear, and saturated in the colors of departing mortality. Even the piercing, gut-wrenching burn of being shot felt real. The hornet-like sting of the massive, red-hot slug as it entered the fleshy part of my side caused me to groan in my half consciousness and squirm atop twisted bedding. And for way longer than necessary, I relived the events that had transpired outside Marshal Jacob Cobb's office each time my head hit the pillow and I closed my eyes.

Top of everything else, it was doubled-up summertime in Texas and hotter'n a burning mesquite stump. During the day everything with legs spent most of its time looking for any spot not deep-fried by the sun. Even the coming of darkest night brought almost nothing in the way of much-needed respite. 'Course, as I've said before, I didn't mind the heat back then.

But early on one particular morning, the unrelenting, elevated temperature snapped me awake coated in the damp sheen of an icy sweat. Seemed as though every square inch of my aching body was slick with clammy flesh. Groggy from being snatched out of my dreadful nightly tossings and turnings, I rolled onto one side.

Propped on an elbow, I hacked out a croupy cough, then wheezed as though being strangled by some evil, unseen spirit. Damn the nightmares. Ugly, confused visions possessed the uncommon power to give me a case of the waking willies. Or maybe it wasn't the dreams this particular time. Something else, possibly.

“Sweet Jesus, have mercy,” I grumbled and cast a heavy-lidded gaze at the open doorway and out onto the veranda.

Fuzzy-headed from the night's short, dank siesta, I swung aching legs around and came to a stoop-shouldered, humped-over sitting position. Clawed at a spot on my throat, beneath a stubble-covered chin. It felt as though my mouth had somehow been filled with a wad of flour glue laced with a handful of straw.

My narrow, coffin-like cot—a wood-frame and leather-strapped contraption—appeared as though it had been specifically designed by hell-bred demons to torment the unsuspecting user. This medieval torture contrivance was topped by a lumpy, cotton-ticking bag stuffed with brittle corn shucks. The sack crackled and crunched with my slightest move.

“My God, but this is a right sorry mattress,” I mumbled to the empty room.

Used a fist to poke at a particularly rocklike, irritating bulge near the spot that one unthinking leg usually sought out. The entire less-than-comfortable apparatus groaned, creaked, rustled, and complained as I shifted from one spot to another.

With considerably more conviction, I growled, “Damnation.” Then set to rubbing my lower back. Yawned. Pawed at one sleep-matted eye with the back of a clenched fist. Picked at something wayward on my lower lip. Puckered and tried several times to spit the offending article away.

Pushing off the wobbly bed, I went to work getting completely erect. My saddle-abused spine creaked into place, one bony vertebrae at a time. Kind of like a carpenter's folding, metal-jointed ruler. Felt as if I was being stabbed with heated ice picks, when all those grating bones snapped and ground their way to the spots where each belonged. 'Course that set me to wondering what daily life would be like when I actually went and got old.

I wobbled a bit on sluggish legs. And, in the manner an ancient, solitary, battle-scarred grizzly, awakening in his hidden den, I stretched, shook all over, then snarled to warn off any wayward intruders.

Swaying in the near dark of the advancing morn, I ran shaky fingertips over the thumb-sized, near-healed weal on my right side just above the belt line. Then I slipped those same fingers around to my back and gingerly checked the spot where the bullet had come out.

“Damn Irby Teal for a good shot, anyhow,” I muttered. “Guess if the evil bastard had been any better with a pistol I'd be dead, buried, and nothing but a gob of rot just like him, his brother, Boston, and their stupid friends.”

Satisfied that the matching welts of angry flesh had not somehow miraculously vanished during the previous night's tussle with evasive sleep, I grunted my disapproval at the slowness of their healing and shuddered. Figured I might as well resign myself to the fecklessness of Irby Teal's questionable aim and just try to forget about the angry-looking wound. Fat chance.

I hobbled across my sultry bedchamber. The shadow-filled room was ever so slowly, but very certainly, growing brighter with the unhurried rising of the sun.

Stopping at the nightstand, I snatched the ewer from its matching bowl. Poured lukewarm water into one hand and sucked it across dry lips, like a wary animal drinking from a tiny pond. Slapped some of the liquid onto my face and neck. Sure as hell felt good. I rattled the jug back into place, then lurched for the room's open door.

“Always darkest just before the dawn,” I muttered and stared into the framed dimness of coming sunup outside.

One hand pressed against my knotted spine, I paused in the room's entryway. The broad porch of our rented, dog-run ranch house lay at my feet. I cocked an inquisitive ear and twisted my head to get better focused on the question that plagued my sleep-fogged mind.

A hundred yards away, in the trees near the river, frogs quarreled. Whip-poor-wills called back and forth to one another. Off to the north, near a barely silhouetted, rock-strewn hill, a solitary coyote yipped. Doves, surprised by something unseen, fluttered up in a flurry of racket just a few feet from the front steps and clattered their way to raucous safety. Crickets chirped and buzzed in every direction.

“Mite noisy this morning. But it's better than living up north around Fort Worth. Have to put up with the constant racket from all the damned locusts,” I said to the fast-approaching light. “God Almighty, but I do hate their infernal buzzing.”