Last Lawman (9781101611456) (24 page)

Red Ryan smiled delightedly at the leader of the Vultures. “So, chew that up a little finer for us, Boss.”

“Red, how would you and Doc like to ride back and fetch that old lawman for me?” Clell slid his bowie knife from his belt sheath, flicked his thumb across the razor-sharp blade. “Might be time to show the lawbringin’ bastard how much of an old fool he really is—thinkin’ he can bring down the Vultures alone. Insultin’ us like that. Maybe relievin’ him of both his whore and his topknot, and sendin’ his scalp back to ole Henry Brackett along with the whore’s head, would finally convincine him it’s time for ole Spurr to go,
and that the Vultures ain’t no bunch to be trifled with such as that!”

Red Ryan and Doc Plowright chuckled and shook their heads, always fascinated by their indominatable leader’s refreshing ideas.

“But don’t you kill him—understand?” Clell said, jerking the bowie’s hooked point up beneath Plowright’s chin. Gritting his teeth angrily, he added, “No, don’t you dare kill him. I don’t want him dead. I want him brought to me alive, so I can carve him up myself—understand?”

Both men said they did.

Then they ran down the ridge, swung up onto their horses, and galloped back in the direction from which they’d come.

Red Ryan gigged his big claybank up the narrow canyon’s sloping north ridge. Doc Plowright followed close behind, both men glancing down canyon toward where they’d seen through a screen of willows the two riders crossing over from the stream’s south side to the north.

Spurr and the woman riding with him.

Since they were following the Vultures, they’d likely pass along the bottom of the north ridge in about five, maybe ten minutes, judging by how far away they’d been when Ryan had last seen them, and by how fast they were riding. They were only walking their horses. Spurr had had his head canted toward the ground, keeping an eye on the Vultures’ hoofprints.

Ryan’s broad, sunburned cheeks above the bleached red beard rose in a self-assured smile. He could just see him and Plowright taking down the old badge toter, riding him tied to his saddle up to Stanhope and the others, who’d elected to ride on as it was getting late in the day and they wanted to reach the abandoned ranch shack before
sundown—just one of many hideouts they used when they were running roughshod over this stretch of Wyoming. A well-hidden place in a canyon just west of here, about twenty miles from the next town along the trail, South Pass City.

Near the top of the ridge, a limestone finger of rock jutted from a wagon-sized escarpment that was aproned with scree. The scree appeared fairly firm, with a game path angling through it, and the two Vultures followed the faint, narrow trail up and around behind the finger. Both men dismounted, led their horses back into the cover of several boulders, tied the horses to scrub cedars, and slid their Winchesters from their saddle boots.

Ryan stepped out from the boulders to the blocky chunk of sandstone, edged a look around the right side of it toward the canyon floor. The stream ran down the middle of the canyon, sheathed in sage and willows. It didn’t run as fast here as it had farther upstream, where Ryan and Plowright had left the other Vultures. And it was a little wider and shallower, stippled with rocks around which it licked up white froth.

Ryan gently levered a shell into his Winchester. Plowright flanked him, holding his own rifle high across his chest in his thick, beringed hands.

Ryan glanced toward another large chunk of rock jutting from the slope about thirty yards ahead and also aproned with scree. He glanced at Plowright. “Doc, head on over yonder. If I miss the old dog from here, you’ll get another shot at him from over there.”

“I thought we wasn’t supposed to kill him.”

“I don’t intend to kill him,” Ryan said. “Just wing him, get him off his horse. Hurry, now, goddamnit, before he shows!”

“I don’t take orders from you, Red. I don’t believe your name is either Clell or Stanhope, but seein’ how I see you got a point on this one, and I’m a big enough man to say so, I’ll do your bidding.” Plowright offered a bitter smile. “This
time. But you’ll be buyin’ me a beer and a whore in South Pass City.”

“The hell I will,” said Ryan, his own eyes shining with acrimony. “I don’t owe a goddamn thing to no Missouri fool with shit between his ears. Now, git, Doc, before you make me mad.” He edged his rifle barrel slightly toward Plowright’s chest.

Doc looked at the rifle, licked his lips, and flared his nostrils. “This ain’t over, Red.”

“For now it is.”

Plowright tugged on the brim of his filthy hat, from which thick, tangled brown hair tumbled over his torn coat collar, and walked away, crouching down to keep out of view from the canyon. Ryan gave a caustic chuff. Nothing quite like bedeviling that heel-squattin’ Missouri trash. Ryan himself hailed from Kansas, though he’d hightailed it when he was only twelve. If he’d been going to pull on teats the rest of his life, it sure wouldn’t be cows’ teats! He pressed a shoulder against the sandstone, peered out around the side of it and into the canyon.

He could hear the creek chiming over the rocks, the rising and falling sigh of the breeze, and a distant crow cawing. That was all. The only movement was the breeze-brushed willows and the occasional lifting of dust along the trail, well churned by prospectors’ wagons.

He looked straight across the slope. Plowright was just now moving out from behind a hump of rock and dropping to one knee behind the boulder that Ryan had directed him to. Plowright glanced at Ryan, made a lewd gesture, then turned his head to stare down into the canyon.

Ryan grinned, then jerked his head back suddenly behind the large chunk of sandstone when he heard the clomping of horse hooves. Snapping his rifle to his shoulder, he dropped to a knee and aimed down into the canyon.

The thuds of the shod hooves grew louder. A horse appeared, trotting along the trail. Ryan gritted his teeth and
tightened his finger on the Winchester’s trigger, then slackened it. The horse had no rider. Its reins were tied to its saddle horn, the stirrups bouncing freely.

Just as Ryan’s heart kicked up nervously, “Hold it,” sounded from close behind him. A gravelly, raspy voice pitched low.

Ryan froze though his heart went wild, beating erratically.

The man behind him kept his voice down as he said, “You call out, Red, and I’ll blow your head off.”

Ryan looked across the slope toward where Plowright knelt, aiming his own rifle down into the canyon but staring toward Ryan. He was too far away for Ryan to see the expression on Doc’s face, but he knew the man was wondering about the riderless horse—the horse whose rider was now somewhere behind Ryan himself, likely not more than ten or fifteen feet away.

“Shrug, Red.”

“Huh?”

“You heard me,” said the man behind Ryan. “Shrug to your friend over there. Do it now, or I’ll blast you into little bits—won’t be enough left to send home in a croaker sack.”

Ryan stretched his arms out and hiked his shoulders. He hoped Plowright would see the tense look on his face, but his partner merely turned to stare down into the canyon, then straightened and moved around to the other side of the boulder. Ryan could hear his boots clacking on the slide rock.

“Move back toward me, Red,” said the man behind him.

Ryan sighed, considered making a try with his rifle.

“This your day to die, Red?” asked the man behind him, as though it were a serious question.

Ryan stepped back behind the boulder, then turned around to see Spurr Morgan on one knee atop a flat-topped boulder, about five feet behind and above Ryan’s own cover and out of sight from Plowright. Ryan’s and Doc’s horses
milled in the shade of the rocks beyond Morgan, switching their tails and twitching their ears.

Spurr stared down the barrel of his old-model Winchester, narrowing his aiming eye so that Ryan could see the blue of the orb just over the rifle’s fore and rear sights. The lawman’s bearded face was as weathered as an old, abandoned barn, but the eyes looked alert, calmly menacing. A stubby mole grew out of one of his grizzled brows.

Ryan felt the heavy weight of a fool descend on him like a blacksmith’s anvil. He’d let the geezer get the drop on him by using the oldest trick in the West. How had the old lawbringer seen him and Plowright climb the ridge from that far away?

“Seen your dust, Red,” Spurr explained, reading the would-be bushwhacker’s mind. He chuckled. “These peepers still got some seein’ left in ’em. Now, why don’t you go ahead and ease the hammer down on that rifle and lean it against the base of my rock here.”

Ryan sighed again, more raggedly this time, as he saw the cold stare the old man was giving him down the barrel of his cocked Winchester. If Red Ryan couldn’t figure a way out of this, he was done. The thought was as raw as the chafing from a new pair of denims on a long, hot ride through rough terrain. Maybe Doc could do something, once he figured how the old lawman was playing them. If he ever did, that was.

Ryan set the rifle aside.

“Now them pistols.”

Ryan held his hands shoulder high, fingers curled toward the palms. “Why should I, Spurr? You got the drop on me, but I might could snap off a shot before I give up the ghost.”

“You might could,” Spurr agreed, not blinking as he stared down his rifle barrel. “But prob’ly not. You’ll just die, Red. Back to the dirt from whence you come.”

“Hell, I’m dead, anyway.”

“Who are you—god?”

“Ah, Christ!”

Ryan winced as he turned his head to stare back in the direction of Plowright. But he couldn’t see his partner from this angle behind the large chunk of sandstone. Spurr had him. The thought of dying right now, right here, was a hard, cold rock in his belly. Before he knew what he was doing, he was sliding his three pistols from their sheaths and tossing them into the brush growing up around the base of Spurr’s boulder.

“You old mossyhorn,” Ryan said with supreme frustration. “Ain’t you ever heard of retirin’?”

“Retire? Hell, Red, retirin’s just a sad, slow way to die.” Spurr rose to a crouch, glanced toward Plowright, then, keeping his rifle aimed on Ryan, sat down and dropped his legs over the edge of the boulder. He took his rifle in one hand and pushed himself off the rock, dropping straight down to the ground in front of Ryan, bending his knees and cursing with the impact.

Ryan jerked forward, intending to take advantange of the lawman being off balance for a second.

“Uh-uh,” Spurr said, jerking his rifle back up and clasping his left hand around the walnut forestock. “Eyes still got some seein’ left, the old legs still got some jump in ’em. Step back if you don’t want an extra belly button.”

“What about Doc?”

“That’s Plowright over there? Well, hell, I reckon I’m gonna have to go over and say howdy-do shortly.” Spurr recognized all the Vultures from their wanted dodgers, much in circulation over the past five or six years. “Wouldn’t be polite not to.” He kept back just out of quick-lunging range of Ryan, his Winchester aimed straight out from his right side at the big redhead’s rounded belly. “Where’s the rest of your gang headed?”

Ryan smiled without mirth, shaking his head. “Can’t tell you that, Spurr.”

“Where’s your hideout, Red?”

“Now, I sure as hell can’t tell you
that.
”

“Why not?”

“If you don’t kill me, Stanhope will.
Slower.
”

“To hell with ya, then.” Spurr lurched forward and before Ryan could do more than widen his eyes in shock, smashed his rifle barrel across the big killer’s left temple, bending his hat brim down over his forehead.

Ryan’s chin dropped and his knees buckled. He fell hard at Spurr’s feet, out like a blown lamp.

A rifle barked three times in quick succession. The reverberations batted back and forth between the canyon ridges. Spurr lurched forward, stepped over Ryan, and peered down the steep, talus-slick slope to see Doc Plowright crouched about halfway down the ridge, aiming a rifle into the canyon and back along the trail a ways, in the direction from which Spurr had sent Cochise.

Keeping his cheek pressed against his rifle’s stock, Plowright shouted, “Come on out of there, Spurr, or the woman dies!”