Deserter (27 page)

There was another problem chewing at Sinclair: Mott hadn't been seen in a few hours. The windows of the buildings facing the street had long since been shattered by gunfire, and the faces of the gunmen could be occasionally seen behind the frames. No one had seen Mott.
Best bet is that the son of a bitch is lying low in the hotel. There's no way he'd run—his men would scatter without a leader. Scum like them would flee like scalded cats if they didn't have someone to tell them what to do and how to do it. There are lots of windows in that hotel—maybe he's moving around from room to room and keeping his head down when he isn't shooting. But no matter what, he's not going to walk away from this town if I have anything to do with it.

Sinclair glanced at the half-empty case of dynamite surrounded by boxes and cases of ammunition in the center of the wagon. The explosive sticks were a quick answer—but a stupid and counterproductive one. The fire started early in the day when Jake had dynamited the sheriff's office went out when it reached an alley and couldn't jump the gap to the next structure, but use of dynamite now in the saloons, hotel, or other buildings could level Fairplay—leaving dead farmers and clerks who'd died for a town that had burned to the ground.

Through the afternoon the exchanges of gunfire had slowed, steadied, become an almost monotonous background of sounds. Jake had fired the last of his .54-caliber cartridges and his Sharps was now as useless as teats on a hay rake. The outlaw he'd targeted with his final round through the big gun hung out of a second-story window of the hotel, arms limp and motionless, blood draining down the gray clapboard in a crimson stream from the shattered clump of hair and bone that had once been his head.

Sinclair looked off to the west. Twilight clouds had gathered and a vagrant breeze had progressively become a stiff wind, creating whirling dust devils in the loose grit of Main Street. Daylight was dying rapidly and that fact worried Jake. In full dark the battle would have an entirely different structure. Mott's men would no longer be pinned inside buildings—they'd be free to move about the unlighted streets. The thick wooden protection of the wagons rose only four feet or so from the freighter floors. In the dark, the outlaws could fire downward from the rooftops, and the results of that would be devastating. Muzzle flashes made good targets,
but they were useless if the outlaw fired and ducked behind a parapet or threw himself to the side.

Jake's eyes again followed the railroad tracks to the point where the distance merged the parallel rails of steel together into a single line. He breathed a long sigh of relief at what he saw there. Even against the darkening sky, the white smoke of the locomotive, worried and chased about by the wind, was visible.

A barrage from the saloon and hotel brought Sinclair's attention back to the battle. The bursts of white light from the muzzles of the outlaws' guns were distinct now, sharp-edged against the rapidly falling night. Jake pumped a few shots out of the port with Trott's rifle, not really sure of his targets or the results of his bullets, aiming only at the flashes.

The burgeoning darkness seemed to energize the outlaws. Firing that had become sporadic was now steady and insistent. Slugs poured into all three wagons, and some rounds found the ports. A gray-bearded older man toward the front of the wagon slumped to the floor, his right eye socket pumping gushets of blood. “Looks like a damn pasture fulla fireflies out there,” the rifleman next to Sinclair observed. “They got us by the eggs for true if we don't take the battle to them sons-a-bitches, Jake. We gotta get outta these crates an' attack.”

“Not yet,” Sinclair said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “We'll attack—but not yet.”

The eerie, lonely sound of the train whistle rolled through the town as if fleeing from the single sun-bright headlamp of the locomotive as it chugged toward Fairplay. “Here we go,” Jake said quietly, almost to himself. Then he shouted, “Mason—run to the other
wagons and tell them to be ready to attack when they hear a stick of dynamite go off. I want half the men from each freighter on each side of the street. Hurry now—you'll be safe in this light. But haul ass!” Trott scrambled over the rear gate and was gone. Sinclair crab-walked to the dynamite case and grabbed a single stick. He cut the fuse with his sheath knife, leaving it barely an inch long.

The train whistle sounded its mournful note again as it approached the town, slowing, brakes screaming in a metal-against-metal screech. “Looks like the boys intercepted the train just like we planned,” the man next to Jake shouted, voice jubilant. “Hot damn!”

Sinclair watched the locomotive and the three cattle cars it hauled disappear behind the buildings across from him. He checked the load in his Colt and jacked a round into Mason Trott's rifle. He took several lucifers from his pocket, clenched them in his teeth, heads facing out, clutched the stick of dynamite, and hefted himself over the rear gate and out of the wagon. His boys laid down a volley as Jake moved to the center of the street, snapped a Lucifer to flame with his thumbnail, and touched the fire to the fuse. He pitched the dynamite within a heartbeat of lighting the fuse, its trail of sparks going straight up rather than arcing toward the buildings. The explosion ripped a hole in the darkness, a jagged, searing, white-hot gap above the street. The report was more of a tearing scream than the thunderous boom of dynamite in an enclosed space. Before the blast had the time to echo, the heavy thudding of shotguns from behind the buildings began, the firing of the twelve-gauges the Night Riders from the train carried melding with the rifle and now
pistol fire of their partners from the wagons. Inside the saloon, the hotel, and several other buildings, there was sudden chaos. Outlaws screamed, cursed, firing wildly at the new invaders as the men from the wagons swarmed in through blasted-to-hell doors, front and display window frames, the glass shattered long ago in the early part of the Night Riders' attack that morning.

A hard grin set on Sinclair's face as he charged toward the hotel. There was, he knew, a turning point in every battle—a good or bad order, a quick but telling charge, or a devastating swing in strategy. This rough but effective pincers movement was that tide-turning moment. The double-ought buck from the shotguns tore into the outlaws, spinning, hurling, flinging their bleeding bodies about in macabre, jerky dances of death as lead poured into them from both front and back.

Jake stopped outside the front door of the hotel, peering across the street to the fight there. Night Riders were moving in on the clusters of outlaws firing hard, heedless of return fire. An attack yell that sounded very much like the Confederate war cry that Union soldiers had learned to fear went up from the Night Riders as they began to taste success, as Mott's men began to falter, to turn tail and run.

Sinclair, firing his rifle from his waist, levering in round after round, shoved his way into the hotel, stumbling for a moment over a collapsed beam, pushing past overturned chairs and tables of the lobby to the stairway to the second floor. The hammer of the rifle snapped sharply against the receiver, out of ammunition. Jake tossed it aside and continued up the stairs yelling, “Mott! Where are you? I'm coming after you, Mott!”

Pistol in hand, Sinclair threw himself out and down as he reached the landing, skidding over the polished wood floor, putting two slugs into the chest of the outlaw he knew would be waiting from him. Jake gained his feet, snatched up the dying outlaw's rifle as he passed him, and followed the corridor from the landing. There was a window at the end and a figure was most of the way through it, ready to jump to the low roof over the depot entrance behind the building. Jake fired the rifle and the outlaw jerked as the bullet struck his chest and then toppled over the window frame and slammed into the roof below. He dropped a second panicked outlaw as the man fumbled with a Colt, trying to jam cartridges in it, spilling more of them on the floor from his trembling fingers than he slid into the cylinder.

There were two doors—two rooms—on either side of the corridor that led to the window. Mott was in one of them—he had to be. He hadn't been on the first floor and he'd been seen shooting from the second-story windows.

“Mott—come out and face me like a man!”

Jake stood against the wall to the side of the first door he came to, preparing to slam his rifle butt against the door handle. The light was dying very rapidly now; in a few moments it'd be too damned dark to see a thing. Mott's voice from the end room startled Jake.

“You're doing this all wrong, gunman! I'll give you half the town. We can run it together. I've got the men, the guns—I've got the whole damned town scared shitless! The two of us can . . .”

“You got nothing, Mott. Nothing. Your boys—the
ones that're still standing—are running like the scared rats they are. It's all over, Mott.”

“Don't be a goddamn fool! There's everything we need here. We can—”

“I'd rather kill you myself, Mott, but my men would like to see you hang just like you strung up Billy Galvin. Take your choice, outlaw.”

There was what seemed like a long silence from the end room. The fight downstairs continued, the booming of the shotguns and the crack of pistol and rifle fire slightly muffled by the flooring.

“I'm faster than you are, gunman—and better than you'll ever be. I'm offering you a chance to live. You'd best take it.” The voice was hard, without a taint of fear.

“Come on out and we'll see about that.”

“I'll kill you dead, gunman.”

“You going to hide in that room or you going to step out here and take care of things, Mott?”

“No matter what, you ain't gonna hang me. You gotta know that. I'll draw against you, gunman. And while you're bleeding out I'll go through that window and move on. There's lots of other towns for me.”

“Let's do it, Mott. No more talking.” Sinclair's voice was tight, controlled.

The corridor had fallen into almost complete darkness, although the ambient light outside would silhouette Mott's form if he left the room. Jake tossed the rifle aside and rested his right hand a pair of inches above the grips of his Colt.

“I'm comin' out slow to face you. Then I'll kill you.”

Sinclair didn't respond. The room door creaked loudly and he could hear Mott's boots scrape the
floor. The door stopped for a moment and then the hinges squeaked again. Jake moved his right foot back a few inches, settling himself, breathing deeply. The door stopped again. He could hear Mott's slightly raspy breath, fast and shallow. It would be now, Sinclair knew.

He was right. The door crashed open and Mott dove out low, pistol already firing, slugs hissing past Jake's body as he drew and in the same motion threw himself to his left. The smallest bit of time before his shoulder slammed into the wall he fired at the mass of Mott's body, absorbed the impact with the wall with his shoulder, and fired twice again. The sound of gut punches told Sinclar all three of his bullets had found their mark. He moved forward, pistol extended in front of him, not completely certain how badly Mott was hit.

The outlaw's pistol was on the floor a few inches from his hand. Mott was stretched his full length. The blood gushing from the middle of his chest looked black in the dim light. Lower on his body a dark stain was spreading quickly at about belt level. Mott's voice was a gurgling whisper. “You son of a bitch,” he rasped.

Sinclair looked down at the outlaw for a moment. “You still going to kill me?” he asked quietly.

He thumbed back the hammer and put a bullet into Mott's right eye.

The scene in the street was a grim one as Sinclair walked toward the store with the Sharps he'd retrieved from the wagon. Men loaded their dead neighbors into one of the freighters, their movements ghostlike and quiet in the light of the many lamps and lanterns that'd been lit. Jake moved through the front door of
Moe Terpin's mercantile—the door hanging from a hinge, penetrated in a dozen places by ragged bullet holes—and found his way to the rear of the store by the flickering illumination of the lanterns outside. His boots scuffed over broken glass, penny candy—licorice strips, cinnamon bears, peppermint sticks that all sent their individual scents up to him—to the back office. He placed the Sharps on Moe's desk, nudging aside a ledger, an ink pot, and a handful of invoices, flyers, and bills with the rifle's barrel. After a moment he turned away and left the mercantile.

Two Night Riders were helping Lou Galvin into a buggy with a pair of outlaw horses standing in the traces. Jake strode to the older man.

“You're looking fair to middling, Lou,” he said.

Galvin managed a smile. “You did good for us, Jake,” he said. “When we get back to my place the boys will want to drink with you, thank you.”

Sinclair nodded.

Lou grunted in pain and held Sinclair's eyes. He sighed. “You won't be there, will you.” It was a declaration, not a question.

“No.”

“I didn't think so. We won't forget you, son.”

Jake nodded again. “Nor I you.”

There were lots of outlaw horses behind the still-smoldering sheriff's office and jail. Jake selected a tall buckskin gelding.

When he got to Galvin's ranch it didn't take him more than a few minutes to shag the buckskin on his way and to saddle Mare. She was ready to run.

So was Jake Sinclair.